BMG

My morning routine is to shower, get ready for the day and figure out what I’m going to wear.  Even though I work out of my house, yes I still think is today a business casual day or it today more dressy.  Once I’m ready, I make an awesome cup of tea, sit on my back patio and read.  It could be Donald Maas, Eckhart Tolle or like this morning, it’s catching up on my More magazine subscription. 

The magazine celebrates women over forty.  I also think twenty and thirty something women should read it.  Why?  Because it inspires and builds you up.  It doesn’t give you a false image to look up to and it celebrates exactly who your are.  It’s ashame that it takes twenty years for women to realize this.  Unfortunately, I’m with everyone on when the light bulbs went off.

Articles in the magazine inspired today’s blog.  I remember when I was about twenty or twenty-one (the age where you think you’ve experienced everything and know it all), I asked my mother (who is exactly twenty years older then me) a very (looking back in hindsight) stupid question.  I asked her, how did it feel to have half your life over?

Stunned silence and she looked at me and said, “Well I still feel like I’m in my twenties.”  Pay backs are a bitch.  I’m now forty-five and half my life is over.

But what a life!  I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.  At forty-five, I love myself both physically and mentally.  It’s been a rough journey to get here, but a worthwhile one.  I’ve overcome an extremely dysfunctional childhood, a betrayal in a marriage where I thought I would be married forever, and a few more tragedies.  I don’t want to dwell on the past, because this article will then become about those tragedies and it’s not. I give thanks for the past, but no more energy then a passing thought.

This article is about life.  It’s about the power of a woman.  It’s about celebrating who you are and all your flaws at any age.  I want to grow old gracefully and have the best life I can.  I love the crinkles around my eyes, my flabby arms, and every flaw I have and yeah I have lots of them. 

I look back at pictures of when I was twenty and wonder why I thought I was fat.  Now I no longer think about weight.  In the last couple of months, when my friends talk about losing weight I just smile and empathize with them.  But I don’t criticize myself anymore.  I know when I’m sixty; I’ll look back and think, “Wow I look great.”  So now I enjoy pictures below the chest, eating, taking walks with no goals in mind except being healthy.

Mentally, I think like I’m in my twenties.  Sometimes when I buy clothes I have to remind myself that I can’t buy that twenty something shirt.  An example is I should not have bought that playboy beef eater.  Yes, I had a moment and now I have to find a twenty something to give it to.  I laughed about it, but didn’t give myself any negative messages.

I love that every day, wake up with a smile and thank God for my life and the journey I’ve taken to get here.  In the shower I give myself affirmations, instead of saying my arm flab is horrible.  I think, wow I’m the luckiest person in the world. 

I think that is the key to growing old gracefully is laughing with your friends, loving your family, never think you don’t have enough time (remember, when you die you’re not going to say, boy wish I spent that extra hour at work), find your true spiritual self, experiment erotically, take risks, never let others affect you, look forward to menopause, see the world and love everyday of getting older.  I do!!!! 

Isabella

“Beauty can’t amuse you, but brainwork-reading, writing, thinking-can.”  –Helen Gurley Brown

Share This