Wednesday's wisdom....

Work with what ya got.....

           


          Anyone else remember these instruments of torture?

Soft curls, falling round your face was the look most young girls sported when I was growing up.  Which was fine, except I hadn't been blessed with curly hair.  Mine was straight as an arrow.  In order to overcome this, my mother spent hours putting pin clips, bobby pins and rollers in my hair.  Then there were the perms.  I can still remember the smell that would permeate the bathroom, the lotion sliding down my neck, the stinging sensation on my scalp.  Sleep was nearly impossible with these bits of metal, sponge or plastic, held tightly in place with netting. And I still ended up with straight hair!

Fast forward to the high school years and thankfully,  fashion dictators made an abrupt turn around and straight hair was the going style.  Phew!  Now the girls with naturally curly hair were the ones having to endure hours with brushes, hair dryers, rollers and irons.  Not curling irons at first - those came later.  Irons - like the ones you use to take the creases out of your shirts.  I had two friends with waist length hair who literally laid their long tresses on the ironing board and ironed it!  Risky, yes.  One was quite successful, the other often arrived at school with a few shortened strands due to bad timing.

Over the years I have sported countless hair styles.  Some were a result of a look I might have seen in a magazine and some were rash decisions in which I told the stylist to "cut it all off."  Recently, perhaps in an attempt to push off my impending thrust into another decade in age, I've been letting my hair grow longer again.

And the other day, I paused, looked in the mirror and thought, "Hey, I remember you."  The face looking back at me felt so familiar.  She actually looked like the young woman I once was. And it was so nice to see her again.  (Though that was probably more a result of not having my glasses on than the length of my hair.)

I'm finding I feel more like "me" when my hair is longer, center part, hanging down to my shoulders.  Or when I pull it all back into a pony tail, a style I often wore in grammar school or dance class.  And whether that is the "in" style at the moment or not doesn't matter.  It's how I feel when I look in the mirror that counts.

I think I 'll keep those glasses off for the time being when looking in the mirror.  Nice to still imagine I look young, though my aching bones tell me I'm not.