Beautiful

My mom passed away when she was 65, 11 years ago this past March. In all of the years she was alive she never once colored her hair. She used to say that she earned every one of those grey hairs and she wasn't gonna cover them up. By the end of her life, her hair was entirely silver. She had crow's feet around her eyes and laugh lines around her mouth. She was a bit on the heavy side. And I thought she was warm and fuzzy and smushy, like a momma should be. I thought she was beautiful.

I've been looking around lately and sometimes I feel a bit overwhelmed by the "let me look like a teenager until I am 90 and let me be as skinny as a corpse until I am one" marketing spiel. My mailbox has been inundated with ads from Oil of Olay, Avon, etc. and they are trying to tell me that the only way I could possibly be happy in this life is if my face is baby bottom smooth and my hair is 3 shades of rich, luxurious non-grey color. According to them I must look like this every day until the day the world ends and I must never gain more than 5 pounds and that must be during "that time of the month" and they've got something that will help me with that too.

I must drink energy drinks and watch "Sex and the City" and read Oprah magazine and take my children on "play dates" to be a content and fulfilled woman in this go get 'em world of today. I gotta be a MODERN woman.

Bull.......

What I MUST do is this: accept myself for who I am, make sure that I am as healthy as I can be, and make sure that my character speaks more to people than my looks.

What I MUST do is make sure that my kids know how to pray, that they know how to treat people with respect, and that they know their mom is always there for them.

What I must do is be able to look in the mirror every day, beyond the few grey hairs and the couple of crows feet and see someone that I really like, not necessarily someone with perfectly arched eyebrows who is still swollen from the latest botox injection.

I'm sorry, but I just can't be bothered to look the way some CEO in some office somewhere thinks I should. I have a real life here and somedays I kinda resent that CEO (and his cohorts) for making other people think that we should all follow the same cookie cutter standard of beauty. Instead of helping to pay his rent, I can be putting that money aside for my kids. You know, the ones who think I'm beautiful anyway.

A lot of women out there look like models......and a lot more look like mommas.

I look like a momma.

And no matter what I look like I know that God loves me, my husband loves me and so do my kids.

Now THAT's beautiful.

Peace alllllll..............................