on screen and off

I find the experience of watching network television programs strange as I contemplate it back through the years. As I age, I identify with the people, women in particular, who are my age acting out their lives on screen. When I was younger I identified with the younger people, and now that I'm middle age, there are the middle age actresses, impossibly beautiful and having the same questions, thoughts and struggles that I am, only I'm not an actress and life isn't a tv show. Sometimes it's even worse seeing women who are so completely everything we think we ought to be having the same problems. I see middle age women being bested by their younger daughters, cheated on, unappreciated, clinging to the fraying threads of their youth and beauty, struggling massively to find significance in a job, a marriage, a new relationship, something, anything that tells them they still matter, they are still desireable, the fight to try to stay young is still worth it, or not.

And I thought to myself, here I am. I do have significance in my life. My 16 year old is watching this program with me and tells me she is on purpose spending time with mom. I don't feel she is my competition. I believe she is the best of me in a brand-new package, so lovely and so alive. I ditched a Bible study where there are other women, accepting and faithful, ready to be there for me if I need them, or not, so I felt comfortable ditching it. They would understand. I took a nap because I'm old and I was tired after a day of working. I had some extra pizza, but not the whole box. That's good. My hair is still dark and I still look like the funny person I always have, just a little funnier. Really, I know what I like and what I want, I'm good with wearing the clothes and size I need for my size. It's ridiculous to pretend any more. I make good choices and I take care of myself.

I'm married but I still dream about men, and they still find me intelligent and attractive. I think I've stopped playing the what if game and find the mild flirtations exhausting anymore. I want men friends. I like them. They are exciting and they keep me young. Oddly enough it seems the less I try the more they come around. But I realized something because of one, one that seemed if I were single and were younger, this might be something truly incredible...it already is because it led me to see my true muse is art. Every beauty, every attraction, all the things I want, everything inside of me is made to create. Life changes, people come and go, the wrinkles never stop, the dark turns to grey, and I long more and more to put it down on paper. I was given a gift, a wonderful and unique gift, and the more I cherish it, the greater I know it is. I used to dream of fame, of the tv life. I could live without that, but not without the hunger to record life in gesture and line-suddenly it's right to love beauty, but the kind that my charcoal creates. It is my world.