It's not easy making the move from middle-aged mom to marvelous maven.
There's the hair.
Do I keep it long and natural like "Two More Bottles of Wine" folk rocker Emmylou Harris? Or go perky and stylish a la film star Annette Bening's buzz cut?
There's the face and head.
Which I have vowed to never cut into, nor inject with Botox. Which means: Must make peace with neck. Must make peace with neck.
There is, as much as anything, the wardrobe, which has me wavering between "What Middle-Aged Women Should Never Wear" and skinny jeans with multi-strapped shoes that look like a jail cell for the feet.
I wore a pair for half an hour the other night and ended up with sciatica.
We moms make fashion statements a few times during our tenure, beginning with T-shirts coated in spit-up. We emerge and re-emerge, our style and choice of clothing evolving with the demands of our lives. And then comes aging, which throws everything off again.
I, for one, am ever interested in trying new things without looking like a vegan at a rodeo, and there are a variety of role models out there to lead me. In a celluloid world, there may be too many. In the small Midwestern town where I live, not so much. I have to go to the big city to find a multiplicity of live options, like Washington, D.C., where I am visiting my son. Here, at a Starbucks on Connecticut Avenue, I come upon a woman who appears to be my age. She is average height and weight with a cute, curled-around-her-ears cut. She is wearing a fresh cotton dress and black Converse sneakers. She is making super nice to the baristas who all seem to know and connect with her.
"I like your style," I say to her while awaiting my passion tea. "I'm trying to define mine."
She takes a step back to size me up.
"The hair is looking good. I like your skirt and leggings. But those glasses..." she says, pointing to my small plastic frames and pulling a pair from the purse slung across her chest. "You should go for something like this."
With all due respect to oversized frames, and turquoise is one of my favorite colors, the donning of this rather garish accessory demotes my new Starbucks buddy from role model to clown.
Which is what happens to all my role models.
I want to be uniquely vogue, not Pee Wee Hermann.
I want to have a societally palatable style that's all my own, not stick out like Jane Fonda at a Donald Trump rally. Which is not easy to pull off, especially at my age. I remember the time my sister and I came upon an Indie (young) concert at a music festival in New Orleans. We were sure we were Indie, too. Only, their Indie was cut-offs, tank tops, and flowers in their hair. My sister, meanwhile, had on a floppy hat that looked more like Minnie Pearl than Courtney Love. I wore a sombrero the size of a double-large platter of nachos.
"We look like a couple of middle-aged tulips in a field of wistful dandelion fluffs," I said, just before we turned on our Keen sandals and hightailed it out of there.
Oprah says we can be whoever we want to be in our middle and golden years. We can be elegant or artsy, act-our-age or cutting-edge. We can be Chrissie Hynde or Helen Mirren; thank God for the latter. As long as Helen is alive, someone is proving that beauty, style, and grace are possible in the decades ahead.
We can be whoever we want to be, and yet there is an art to maintaining and reinventing ourselves at "our age" without caving to either ageism or laughable teeny-bop. I'm self-actualized enough to know I can wear purple, but I don't want people to cackle when they see me coming. There is a fine line here, suggesting a tour of duty at the therapist rather than Talbot's _ and major opportunities for trial and error.
The other day, knowing my daughter was coming over with her 20-something friends, and that they wanted to see me and spend time with me, too, I put on a black cotton romper I picked up at an Old Navy in New Orleans. I threw my hair into pigtails and was standing at the door to greet them when they showed up. I don't know whether it was the postage-stamp size of the shorts; the height of the pigtails; or the look on my face that said "Let's party!" but they all looked horrified.
Back to the drawing board.
