some say I am aging gracefully, but it’s an internal process too, and it’s not often graceful.

I once remember someone referring to being in your forties as middle-aged. While it may be true that my life is at least half over, if not more (my twenties were extreme, and may perhaps contribute to an earlier death), the future still seems bright (except when it feels bleak).

I am a parent – and I waited until my late thirties to become one.

I hope to grow older, to watch my daughter learn to navigate the world – but at the same time, what I leave her with makes me not mind so much if I wind up missing some of her milestones. By the time it’s time for her generation to truly take over what I and a long stream of ancestors are leaving her with, she may need me to be on a higher plane.

Externally things are reflected in the appearance of new wrinkles. As is typical with people of my make-up, I think more than I smile. I received my “11’s” first. They are faint but more apparent as time passes, but I now have some also very faint crows lines, and a new laugh line, too. 

And there is absolutely no grace whatsoever coming in with my gray, which in all its wildness is poking out of my big brown sausage curls with aplomb. There is no product on earth that will tame these fuckers, who are seemingly appearing thru new pores, and they are tenacious. I dare not take a brush to these curls, or care for the time and effort involved in straightening my hair. The technique in caring for them is in leaving them mildly dirty at all times, periodically piling in the waxy conditioner and running my fingers through, always amazed and amused by the amount that’s shed with what appears to be no change in thickness of what remains. I am in complete assurance that there is no product in existence which would make them behave, and so on more humid days when I’m too lazy for anything more than a bun I must embrace my mid-day halo of silvery gray hair, rebelling against the slightly more ordered behavior of its curly sisters. What was once a uniform wildness is now the mushroom-like emergence of the crone, erupting from the ground with magic and force.

No, I’m not sure that this is a graceful process at all. I’m okay with it though.