stretch marks, sexy mamas and stylishlessness

I am almost 40 years old. Well, in a couple of years I will be. And I have to say that I am really glad about that strangely enough. I am relieved that my 20s are over, I spent so much of the early years completely lost and trying to figure out who I was and just ran and ran and ran, my late 20’s were all about trying to figure out how to be a Mom and Kristin too. And my early 30’s were my least favorite years completely stuck in a toxic place. Now I feel that I have finally come into being a woman and feel stronger for it. I am told that I don’t look my age. perhaps it is the tattoos. In Brooklyn it is more likely to find mothers of young children in her late thirties who have chosen to do the career thing first so that isn’t it. I guess I just don’t sport the “I am trying to look like I am 20″ look. I really hate that. Why can’t a woman accept the changes that happen and embrace them and be proud of them? Why don’t we spend all of this money trying to enhance our look as an older person, but instead try and revert back to the time when you felt your most youthful and attractive and never quite get there and look like you are trying too hard in the process? I am not saying that I don’t modify my appearance, I color my hair and wear make-up and paint my nails. And I don’t think there is anything wrong with trying to look good at any age…say for example wearing jeans that flare at the bottom and heels to make you look taller and less heavy in the middle. That is not what I mean. I guess I mean that there is never anyone that says that they like being older and feel sexier or more powerful for it. So I would like to say that this is the case for me. Looking at young models on the runway make me (want to buy them a sandwich) think of my daughter and wonder if she will dress like that when she is their age soon, not look at myself and wish I could be them. Seeing girls that are college age like the gaggle of girls who live in the apartment below me make me feel glad that I made it through that time alive. I just never feel that I wish I was younger.
Many people ask about my having babies at an older age wondering if it is harder now. I think honestly that this is probably the best time to have children. I have more energy now than I did when Ruby was born, I am definitely healthier. Back then I had come off the road after 7 years and had drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney, had a big cup of stress every morning as a workaholic working myself to the ground and was nutrient and sleep deprived pretty much the whole time. Now I actually eat well and get as much sleep as anyone with 8 month old twins possibly could. Its interesting to think that I will be approaching 60 when they are going off or thinking of going off to college. Somehow I think this is just right. Thats when I will have another 5 – 10 years of doing whatever I am doing before I retire and then I can finally drive my 18 wheeler around the country and get a handle like I always said I would (Large Marge or Twin Piston Kristin or something like that). I once was certified to be a motorcycle safety instructor (don’t ask) and when I took the course, I learned of a 65 year old woman who had never been on a motorcycle before. She took the course and then went right out and bought herself a Honda Goldwing (touring bike) and went across the country sending postcards back to the Motorcycle Safety School along the way. I want to be just like her… embarrassing my kids well into their 30’s.
It helps that I have a very handsome husband who is 8 years younger that tells me I am beautiful every day. He loves the changes that having the babies has done to my body and thinks watching this evolve is very sexy. I wish more men felt this way. Not about me specifically, but about women and maturity. I wish that men in society found it sexy to put on weight when you are pregnant. I can’t tell you how many times people came up to me and said “Wow, you look great! You are so skinny!” I hated this. You should compliment a woman for gaining weight (within a healthy limit) as the baby needs you to eat! I was always disappointed when this comment came from women especially, and most of the time it did. All of the breastfeeding advocates that say it is dangerous for babies health and nutrition for breastfeeding not to be the social norm should be up in arms about this mentality too. Being on any kind of diet (too sick to eat doesn’t count) when you are pregnant is completely stupid, and I have overheard people saying that they were, educated women who should know better. Pregnant women walk around feeling huge and unattractive and should be feeling proud and beautiful and like the sexiest women on earth.
But back to aging, I really wish we all weren’t so afraid of it. I guess many people who profit off of this fear would be unhappy if this mass mentality changed. Is it that then? Marketing and media that feeds this fear and glorifies youth and being thin? I am not a fat person saying this out of anger either. I am tall and thin and pretty much the same as I looked before I had the twins with a bit more skin at my belly, my navel ring is now gone (after 15 years) thanks to it getting infected because it stretched so far and knocked so many times by the ultrasound hand piece, and now that I am weaning, I am back to my old 34B deflated breasts (that do return with lots of loving care in time) like I had after breastfeeding Ruby. And most of my hair is about 2 inches because it all fell out. Oh, and a bone at my sternum sticks out from the pressure outward, it re-set back like that after the relaxin was gone. All of this I am somehow proud of. I have always been proud of my stretch marks, and changes that being a mother has done to my body. I don’t struggle with weight like many people I read out there do, and for that I can’t really know what it is like to feel bigger than you feel comfortable feeling on the long term, but I did walk around with 65 lbs extra on me before the babies were born and people stopping and saying “oh, my god” when they looked at me. So I have empathy for it. But unfortunately that baby weight is not looked at as the lines softening beautifully and our bodies gracefully taking on the roll as mother and trusting that we need this extra bit of size to do the job of feeding and protecting our children. So whenever people tell me that I look great and don’t look like I had twins, I feel sad that it implies that people who do look like they had babies look bad for it. So I always kinda shrug it off.
Sadly I read about so many blogs and commenters talk about the end of ones libido and sex life after having had a baby. A lot of this I feel is from a birth experience that for whatever reason was traumatizing to the psyche and the body (and this is another long post in itself). I know that hormones have a lot to do with it and I am convinced that breastfeeding is the biggest partner deflector ever. The hormones released at breastfeeding make you loose your sex drive, and I think this is to allow natural child spacing and that primally we may have needed to protect our young from everyone including our partners. As sexist as this may sound, I think once upon a time it was necessary for the woman not to be anything but focused on keeping the baby alive, and now in a relationship it doesn’t make a lot of sense and is cause for a lot of misunderstanding. For me, having discovered what sex really was in my late 30’s I also discovered that the best sex in the world was one where I didn’t have to separate my mother self to be sexy. In fact I found it to be more enjoyable when I welcomed that as an empowering part of being a woman and felt sexier for it. I really wish I read about more woman who felt that way. I read over at Girls Gone Child a great post about this and the comments were fascinating, so many women felt shut down after childbirth. I wish I could tell them that their libido will return, just trust that it will and enjoy what you can for the moment. It will not be the same, but it may end up being better. I know a lot of it is physical and indeed some women have real physical problems afterwards, but for some it is a combination of hormones and trauma and a social mindset that doesn’t view a woman’s body as beautiful after childbirth as it should.
I recently bought a scanner and have been going through all of my old photos and making j-pegs out of them and saving them to disk to keep in a lock-box for Ruby to have someday. Presently I am going through the photos of the time right before she was born. I have a fresh tattoo of my dog on the inside of my arm and the rest of it is the pale Scottish blue it is or was. My face looks so young even though at that time I had been around the world and around the block a few times having had moved out on my own 10 years prior. At the time, I felt older than I looked and the next 10 years would then age me quicker than any abuse I had inflicted on myself prior. So now I may have some gray scraggles of hair poking out, lines on my face where they weren’t before and skin a bit sun-damaged and eyes with more wrinkles around them. But yesterday my husband took my face in his hands and said, “You know, you don’t look your age.” and gave me a kiss. I think it has more to do with how I feel inside than what I actually look like. I still wear my 15 year old boots and jeans and a t-shirt, my hair pulled up in a non-hairstyle pony-tail. But at least I don’t look like I am trying to reverse time. Yes my fashion sense may have stood still but I would rather look back on old photographs of myself this way than cringing at the style I am trying to have. I care as much about that stuff as I care about a Coach handbag which is not at all. One day we will look back on them as we do mulletts and Gloria Vanderbilts. And when I am 70 something, ill probably look the same, hair grayer, boots re-soled and a t-shirt so thin you can see through it. And hopefully feeling like I have wisdom and beauty as an older person would if they were proud to have made it that far gracefully. And ill be sure to get a bumpersticker for my 18 wheeler that says “Sexy Grandma” to embarrass my kids.