I have become my mother?

o.k. o.k. every once in a while i am going to have to post the mind wanderings of my 40 something squirrel friends... because when we are all in the same boat... and the same storm is coming our way.... you have to weather it together... here are excerpts from letters to each other about finding our mothers in the mirror staring back....

Kary Gaskill wrote:
O.K. girls what in the Sam Hill is going on with all of us... today over lunch with Hubs i say what is going on with me... Yesterday i have.... HAVE.. to go into Highschool.... oops i mean Gresham with Heather because she has begged me to take her clothes shopping because her size B cup bra is getting to small and her jeans are too short and her tops are squeezing her making her boobs show even more for her 11 year old body.... and so i get dressed up... you know try wearing something in fashion instead of my Anne Shirley School Marm dresses with clogs... my personal feel good favorite!!!! and i pulled my hair into soft french braids with whips of soft curls intentionally framing my face... laiden with fresh makeup... come on its 3:00 p.m. i NEVER freshan my make-up... ever.... so off we go....

so i say to Heather, Where do you wnat to go... OLd Navy? great lets go, they have some great ( hootchie mamma) clothes.. i promise myself not to be snide with the fashions and make daughter roll her eyes and think me more of an old fashioned Pioneer woman than she already thinks i am.
so I , feeling pretty and sprite... go into Teen Beat 101.. a.k.a Old Navy where the old feel older and look like weathered seaman.... now i know why they call it Old Navy.. for that sagging skin crowd of over 40. Heather looks over everything.. i see many many ass crack jeans ( Kelly you are a goddess to me for bravery and whimsey of trying these, i on the other hand do not have an ass crack i have an ass canyon.... butt cleavage) ass crack shorts... ass crack everything.. including ass crack ass crack..... so Thank God!!! Heather says. these are really not my style mom.. they are get this......... INAPPROPRIATE!!!! ( i love that girl)

We Hurry off to Koehls.... Heather and i go shopping there... humm more ass cracks on a hanger... and wait they are even more expensive... and i am feeling.. like well coal instead of Koehl.... and the size 1 lady helping us.. who has to shop in the girls section because after her 3 kids she still cant fill out a pair of "missy's" jeans and after all, after 40 somthing she thought she would be able to move past a size 1...... i quickly threw up a little in my own mouth..... and invisioned my self recieving a gastoric bypass..... and i could lend " Jennifer" my 100 plus pounds to place on her already anorexic firm body size 1.....
Heather found a couple things we had them rung up and we were outta there...
needless to say our shopping experience did not stop there... oh no,,,,, it lingered.. it seeped its way into my psyc.......into the shallows and gallows of my personhood... here is what i learned about myself
Gresham is Full of Pretty people now... i mean this is what i told Hubs... i did not have the following...
1. The Tan!
2. The expensive Hair weave.. my Gawd my hair was its natural honey blonde color with some ashe blonde from winter still in it. how dare i?
3. I was not wearing the expensive "Active Exersise" suite, with matching footwear,
4. my hair did not resemble a shieke soccar Mom with a French Manicure.
5. I WAS NOT HOLDING A GALLON OF BELOVED FOO FOO COFFEE IN HAND
6. I was not wearing all Clinique facial goo.... and cover-ups
7. My eyelashes were my very own. no entensions were used.
8. my freshly shaven legs under my peasant skirt were no ,match for the freshly perfumed and wax jobs of those around me.. did i mention the milky white color?
9. Heahter asked me if i was "embarrased to carry "THAT" purse"..... my purse.
10. i did not ANY bumper sticker on my trailblazer that said my kid was an honorstudent at blah blah school.. or I was a Taxi.. or that any of my children were in any sport activity.. or no one in my family had gone to mauie and brought back stickers for the car proving it.....

Indeed i was back in high school... i was shopping with my daughter while the Susie Durbins of High School quietly moved about me.... and like the words of Elenor Roosevelt... i said to myself... i cannot allow others to make me feel inferior without my consent...." well somewhere along the way i must of consented.... cause i thought to myself... that was the hardest thing i have experienced in a while.... Estacada is really my town.. where my weight... my hair, my eyelashes and manicure do not weigh heavily on who i am... my investment to my community and my heart are what speaks to those around me and for God's sakes i am never moving.


girls... we are getting older and we know we are not the girls of our youth.. but we are the women of today.... and dammit we are damn good at it...

i love you and have to go put on my clogs and plant Heathers pumpkins with her... and get my corn in the ground.... i love you dearly
Jalet wanna go to North Carolina with me?
kg

KELLY SAYS:
It's only a little after 8a, and I'm already depressed. Know why? Not only did I watch my youngest slip into the driver's seat of the Volvo and head off to school under her father's watchful eye (she just got her permit yesterday), I spent about five minutes taking and discarding the most horrifying pictures of myself I've ever seen. WHEN did I get so f*ing old? I was not paying attention! I want a do-over!
Of course this sad event dictates my actions over the next few hours. Will I be doing the dishes or the grocery shopping? Heavens no. Will I be taking my car to the vet for shots? Yes, I said car. Absolutely not. Will I be working on art projects or creative writing of any kind? Raca. No, I will be curling and ratting and twisting my locks into various and sundry configurations, after which I will slab on the face-cement ala Joan Crawford, both in a desperate attempt to roll back at least a couple years. I'll then find the blackest corner of the darkest room in the house - either that or direct sunlight - okay, or diffused light might be better - and try again. It's utterly debilitating, this picture thing, and now that I think about it I'm afraid all that poking and prodding I have planned will be for naught. I prefer to live in a pretty in pink, cotton candy world of castles and mirrors that baldly lie anyway, and that's best found in the cockles of my mind. So, I'm going back to bed.
But first, I bestow on thee and thine long life and purses perpetually filled with goodies of gold. I grant thee peace and dung heaps burgeoning with fine, fat piglets. And I kiss thee each, though not one of thee be a toad. xo


JALET SAYS:Kelly my love,now the rescuer in me wants to smack your translucent beautiful cheek and shake some Godly woman sense into you. I want to awake the befogged daze and the crazed woman who looks blindly past the notoriously complex God pulchritudinous inspired reflection you are. I want to take those beetleheaded words of the enemy and strap them to the lies that have crept into your befooled spirit and launch them right back to hell where they slithered up from.
The other part of me wants to hold you and find all the similarities we have and say them outloud and curse them. The lines in my neck and eyes, the loose skin under my seatbelt that rests like slumped pudding on a bundt cake called my lap, the wirey hair that neither curls or cooperates into smooth youthful locks of golden red sheen, the ones I never thought I'd have on my chin, the flat and wide butt that used to fill out my jeans the way that made my husband oogle seems to be the sign board for 'over 40 and had 3 kids', the eyelid that used to be flirtatious is now puffed. The illusion of age my sanguine mind resists the reality of photos scares my thougtht life. Oh charm is deceitful and beauty is vague but a woman who fears the Lord shall be praised - I don't know if I really want to be praised so much as I want to recognize myself in a photograph. I want it to reflect the secure woman I think I have become. I want it to look like the the woman I am happy to have emerged lifes battles as �and look like I did at 32. I am starting to see my mother and Grandmother in the photos I stare hard at when no one is looking with critical and even embarrassment in my assement. My husband is a professional photographer. For God's sake, can't he make me look on the outside like the rushing woman I feel like on the inside? Especially when I trowel on my make up to cover the experience now showing on my face. Yet other times I feel like I have plastered on so much that I look insecure and so wipe it away exposing myself and not being all that secure with mask it removes. I am not an insecure woman about my looks. I just don't look the way I feel and that is the travisty of experience borne of lifes reshaping. So Kelly, the pink veil is only a coping tool, not insecurity. I have noticed on grey days that I run the lyrics to Rod Stewarts 'Maggie'through my mind when I choose the spot at the kitchen table for morning coffee. I admit I don't want 'the Morning sun to really show my age'. All that to say that I am enjoying becoming a little more of the woman of Proverbs 31 day by day, year by year, and I am blessed that my husband keeps me feeling like the woman and bride in Song of Soloman. SO count it all joy and try to mark this time in you life with the memory of where you struggle now so that you can laugh about it with your 40 something daughter going through the same unexpected awakenings on day. I love you Kelly. You are still the cutest girl I ever wanted to look like when I grow up I still want to hang out with you as a three-some with my sister because dang it� WE ARE SO COOL.