Leslie Leyland Fields - The Wonder Years: 40 Women Over 40 on Aging, Faith, Beauty, and Strength

The Wonder Years: 40 Women over 40 on Aging, Faith, Beauty, and Strength

2018 by Leslie Leyland Fields

Published by Kregel Publications, a division of Kregel Inc., 2450 Oak Industrial Dr. NE, Grand Rapids, MI 49505.

Published in association with the literary agency of WordServe Literary Group, Ltd., www.wordserveliterary.com.

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All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are from the Holy Bible, New International Version, NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations marked ESV are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked GW are from GODS WORD, a copyrighted work of Gods Word to the Nations. Quotations are used by permission. Copyright 1995 by Gods Word to the Nations. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked MSG are from The Message. Copyright 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

Scripture quotations marked NEB are from the New English Bible, copyright Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press 1961, 1970. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NLT are from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright 1996, 2004, 2007, 2013, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked PHILLIPS are from The New Testament in Modern English by J.B. Phillips, copyright 1960, 1972 by J.B. Phillips. Administered by The Archbishops Council of the Church of England. Used by permission.

ISBN 978-0-8254-4522-4

Printed in the United States of America

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I am looking into the mirror. Not the mirror, mirror on the wall, which kindly tells me whatever I want by a quick dim and flick of the light switch, but the far scarier one: the mirror in my hand that magnifies my face by a factor of ten. Under this painful scrutiny, I skip over my pores and crows-feet and go right for the brows. I count a record number of grays. With jaw set I pluck them ruthlessly, realizing Ill soon be browless at this rate. What then? I have no idea. Thankfully, the mirror is minute enough to keep me from cataloging all the other marks of age upon my body. Today, its just the brows.

Tomorrow it might be something else, especially if I have given in to my secret online obsession with celebrity slideshows. Particularly the Where Are They Now? slides, documenting actors unforgiveable lapses into middle and old age. How dare our movie icons age like that? The disgust is palpable. Those galleries are usually linked to celebrities trying to escape the ignominy of aging, who end up instead in the next slideshow: The Worst Plastic Surgeries Ever.

Who wants to age, really? We fight it in so many ways, some of which are downright silly. Recently I saw an enticing online headline that had gone viral: The Hairstyle That Will Get a 38-Year-Old Carded.

I clicked on it, of course. There she was: a woman obviously in her late thirties, peering goofily from behind long, blunt bangs once popular among tweens and teens. At least they werent pigtails! But this obsession is hardly new. Remember Twiggy, the seventeen-year-old supermodel-waif from the sixties, who suddenly made mature women everywhere long to look eleven years old?

Are we so youth-obsessed that we long to be children again? Perhaps. Who wouldnt love another chance at childhood, to do it right and thorough with the proper joy next time? But maybe all this is more than the universal human hunt for the fountain of youth and innocence. Maybe its something more modest, more possible. Maybe we older women just want to be seen again.

In 2013, Salon ran a provocative article by Tira Harpaz with the headline Women over 50 Are Invisible. The essay made significant waves among women over fifty but was, predictably, ignored by others. The authors thesis was simply this: If you want to make a person invisible, just put her in the shoes of an over-fifty woman and abracadabra, watch her disappear. Harpaz, herself in her late fifties, described aging and its accompanying invisibility as a kind of fading away into irrelevance, including a loss of attractiveness and sex appeal, the end of fertility, a glimpse of a slow, lingering decline.

I will not entirely deny this. And, I am told, even women just over forty begin to feel it. One Sunday after church, I was talking to a friend about this book, which began as The Happy over Fifty Womens Guide to the Best Half of Our Lives. She said, Oh no. I need this book. Im forty-three and Im feeling it already. Invisible. Not young anymore. People look right through me now. I stared at her, not looking through her, but remembering myself at that age. She was right. When I hit forty, I noticed it as well, though I assumed I was erased from the roster of those who matter because I often had a river of children streaming behind me. Motherhood does indeed usher us out of the rooms of power and status, but age accomplishes this far more effectively. So this book opened further, wider.

You will not hear a litany of laments here, however, nor even many complaints. Not even from Win Couchman in her essay, The Grace to Be Diminished, where she describes finally giving up her car keys and her independence. Most of us are too busy for complaints. The day I plucked my gray brows, I climbed a mountain here in Kodiak. I started up the trail slowly, admiring the spruce trees arrowed to the sun, the peregrine falcons and bald eagles kiting the vast sky over the ocean. I reached the summit an hour later, panting but legs muscled and strong. Just a few miles to the east, close enough for me to touch, it felt, stood the Three Sisters, three steep, trenched peaks. I see them often, but standing there that day, I saw them anew, admiring their stolid immovability. How many raging Alaska storms had they survived? I knew it was those very storms, and time itself, that had adorned those slopes with their majestic patterns of erosion.

Im not crazy about erosion on my own face, but I thought about women ahead of me, women I admire who are two and three decades older than I: Doris with her glowing red hair and killer figure. Luci with two new books coming out this year; Vera who still teaches dance classes; Kay, still speaking around the world. I thought of Iris Apfel draped in turquoise or orange with layers of massive jewelry lighting her tiny figure. When she attended Paris Fashion Week, she was treated like a combination of a rock star and Queen Elizabeth. She is drop-dead gorgeous. And she is ninety-four. And not least among them, Merle with her servants heart and generosity to all.