Really Being Real

By MaryAlford-Carman

It's all over the news: Woman gives her eight-year-old Botox. I can't fathom it. I question whatever happened to growing older gracefully and now here's a new dilemma. Let's have our eight-year-olds look like infants…ever look at a newborn? The last time I checked they were pretty wrinkled. What's next? Giving Botox in utero? What on earth has happened to our society? We have an obesity percentage that beats all in our nation, and yet the media and magazines force size zero models down our throats. Cher looks like she's in her late thirties, Madonna has the arms of a twenty something swimmer, and Demi Moore, well, she's just hot (dang it). But do the rest of us have what the celebrities have to maintain that kind of figure and face? What's wrong with being real?

In Forty-fied, an essay in www.4gaby.com by Rachel McClary, the age of 40 is compared to Eeyore with his stuffing falling out. I can only speak for myself, but my forties rocked, and nothing fell out. People couldn't guess my age and I could flat out keep up with my very energetic daughter. At the mere age of forty-eight, our son Jack was born (unexpected and totally fantastic). At fifty, I may be a little slower, but I keep my children alive, fed, and on time to all their events. (Their social calendar is fuller than mine.) All of this is without the help of a personal trainer and a boat load of Botox. Would I like to turn back the clock when I see the new wrinkles appear? You betcha, but not at the risk of my health.

Having something done to make you feel better is fine with me. Lift it, tuck it, smooth it or hike it up, but don't expect me to believe for one moment that an eight-year-old child has the mental capacity to make a decision to have Botox injected into her face. The mom in question was asked why she did this to her child, and her response was that it would benefit her child in beauty contests and that many were doing it. I heard my Daddy's voice at that point saying, "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you?" Yes, everyone seems to be "doing it" with Botox, face-lifts, and implants, but what is the reasoning? I don't want to look like everyone else; I want to look like me. When I smile, I want to actually smile, not merely wonder if I am. What is the message we're sending to our children? What happened to unique? What happened to being real? I'd really like to know.

Love Never Fails

By Sheilah Zimpel

I can't talk about my own Mom who just passed right now, but here's an old bit I'd written about Nana.

“I just had to smoke a cigarette and wear a hat,” the song says. It happened that way for me. When I was still a kid with delusions of grandeur, I wanted to be Katherine Hepburn or Lauren Bacall. I admired their style, grace, and especially their witty banter with the guys. Much later I realized my grandmother, Nana Buckley, was more my style. She was a farmer, not a stay-at-home mother, a businesswoman. She had her own business desk, which impressed me a lot more than a trunk full of old wedding dresses did. I didn’t want to play dress up--I wanted to write checks. She had a big notebook-sized checkbook with “Buckley Farms, Inc.” embossed in bold letters on the front. She had “help,” not cleaning women or yard boys, but farmhands. In her desk drawer was a pack of True 100s. I never saw her smoke, and I probably smoked more of them than she did. She drank Manhattans, another thing I never saw, when she played bridge with the girls. She was a devout Catholic.

She fed us generous helpings of red meat from a chest freezer on the back porch, from a cow that had been slaughtered and packaged by hand around the dinner table. Homemade donuts dipped in the sugar bowl, rolls, cookies, rhubarb, and berries. Milk from the barn that left a ring around the glass. Born in 1905, she did not disintegrate into old age. She had too much to do. Her husband died young, and she had six children to raise and a dairy farm to run. She outlived her husband, five brothers, sister, and two sons. Two of her boys went to Cornell (veterinarian and engineer), and one to Vietnam; the girls became what they could then: a teacher, a nurse (my Mom), and a dental hygienist. Nana sold a cow to send Mom to nursing school.

At her death at 87, many years ago, my Mom said Nana raised her eyes to heaven and smiled. That’s the way true ladies die in the movies, so it was fitting she did so too. When I read Corinthians 1:13 at her funeral mass in 1992, I think I finally realized what about Nana was bigger than life—I’d thought it was her faith, wisdom, altruism—but without all those things she wouldn’t have been the powerful presence she was. It was her love. I had misplaced my affections on movie icons who were eloquent, sassy, and confident, but Corinthians said everything ceases without love. I vowed to put away childish things.

Some of those tall tales our parents told us are true. They did everything with nothing, but love.

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

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Eat Southern, Pray Often, Love Unconditionally - Lessons of a Grandma

Grandma Playing her Harmonica

My very first essay for 4gaby was about my grandmother ("Ironing for Eternity"). Today would have been my grandmother's 101st birthday. She passed away in June of 2008 at 98 years old. An extraordinarily long life lived in an ordinary way. She did not have much education outside of the Bible which she could quote and use against you quite quickly (though never in the mean way that so many do today). She never held a job of great importance, she worked in a textile mill. Grandma kept a spotless house and she cooked wonderful basic Southern meals. Grandma truly believed no good food was ever made that did not use grease, fatback or lard (personally I think she's right). She sewed, and crocheted beautiful items which her daughter (my Momma) despised because they were handmade and Momma wanted store bought stuff which would show they had money...but they didn't have money so she had to wear what her Momma (Grandma) made for her. Grandma dipped snuff, and played her harmonica, and she truly took life as it came to her. She lost her daddy when she was very young, her husband in his sixties, she lost one of her three children to cancer, and she had very little of material value. But she had an indomitable spirit and an ability to love unconditionally. Her lessons are ones that have stayed with me. I keep a clean house, I love to work with my hands, and we attend church regularly. Every holiday meal comes complete with grease, and I don't expect perfection in love. I do these things because I gain peace through doing them...just as she always said I would. I try to take life as it comes to me...but I don't dip snuff (though I do wonder what medicinal properties that stuff has. I mean really, she lived to 98 and had all her faculties right to the end.) I'm too tone deaf to have ever taken up the harmonica, and I think she was very relieved when I married a man who could sing on key.

There is a wonderful book called "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert. I truly enjoyed this book - her reflections, and her sense of humor all expressed while she worked on making sense of her life. But isn't it interesting that so many of us spend so much time trying to figure out life while the women who have come before us just knew how to live it without stressing over it.


It's nice of the world to think they should pause for a day to recognize Mothers. But the reality is that we pause our entire lives to recognize the world. As Mary wrote in her essay, "The Second Sunday of May and Always", we spend our time loving, nurturing, teaching, and sharing and it's not even just our own children that we do that with...it can be the child down the street, the friend our own age, the elderly stranger that we stop to help. We learn from other women how to be a mother. We mourn their loss, and celebrate their lives, and we pause for one day a year. But perhaps we should each pause each day and recognize the goodness in ourselves. Women are the soul and the heart of the universe. We should celebrate ourselves. Don't we all have women who have shown us the way?

I Escape, But Only On Thursdays…

As a hard working, trying to juggle everything mum, I look forward to my Thursday nights out with my girlfriend. It's a vigil, a sanity check, and a keep in the real world affirmation. This precious time is like drinking mellow wine. We sit and write, gossip, laugh, and cry – we are back to being girls again. What a feeling!

As a stay at home mum, wife of a serial world traveler, and thrown into home schooling due to an anxiety disorder that struck my daughter like a speeding car, my temporary escape is key to my survival as Dawn.

As we pass through the different stages of our lives, I can't help feeling that part of me is disappearing. Some days when I look in the mirror, the image looking back at me is still the same old me, but I feel as if I am looking at a stranger.

Perhaps, it is because I am a stranger. A stranger to my former self. Yes, I have grown, matured, and learned life lessons, but life itself along with marriage and kids can overtake you like an alien. Invading your very soul. I love my family, but honestly, sometimes I long for solitude. To do things and make decisions based solely and selfishly for me.

As a partner and/or parent, whether you are male or female, we make compensations. We agree to meet in the middle, we compromise, we give in, and we make decisions for the best together. However, the young girl lost in me sometimes wants to rebel.

Is that so wrong? I don't think so.

Even my husband agrees, that in marriage, we do lose a little of ourselves. We are in danger of becoming the mirror image of our spouses if we submit to it. I can never forget an old English TV sitcom where the married couple wears identical knitted sweaters, their identity becoming one or reading "Eat, Pray, Love," where the author describes the time a person told her that in relationships she takes on the look of her partner. A reality that happens to some that is scary to say the least. You may argue that in marriage being synonymous is a good thing and, yes it is, but as a synergy not a coup.

So you see, my safe escape every Thursday allows me to visit with my old self and say hello to her. It allows me to enjoy the feeling of liberation and then return to my family, happy and content. We all need a little escape, so go ahead allow yourself, it is magnificent!

The Fairytale, The Terrorist, and The Reality.

By Dawn Tolson and Mary Alford-Carman

 

As a group of four unique individuals, two Grits, a Brit and a Yank, we've shared a maelstrom of events within the past seven days. We've seen the highs of jubilation, the depths of evil, and the reality of loss.

During the Royal Wedding we watched in awe as a fairytale unfolded. A prince took a commoner for a wife and made her his princess in a manner unsurpassed by the United Kingdom. The beginning of a life together celebrated by a nation and shared by the world; it was stunning. In the span of 48 hours the media blitz began again with the death of a terrorist. Celebrations of a sort ensued, albeit at the other end of the spectrum. The worlds most wanted man was finally eliminated, bringing to an end an almost ten year search for justice.

But what does that mean to us? The reality is that most of us will never walk within the walls of Buckingham Palace (unless we've purchased a ticket), and while we may never experience personally the tragedy of terrorism, we are all aware that we could be one airplane flight away from the horror. The great leveler for all of us is loss.

No matter who you are or where you are, you will grieve the loss of a loved one. Within these past seven days, one of our own lost her Mom to Alzheimer's. For some of us, this has been a reminder of what has already been lost and for others, a mirror into what is yet to come.

The events of the world go on around us, and they always will, but for the moment, we pause in the reality of loss.