If you are one of my Facebook Friends, you know that at least once a month, I make mention of the whisker that sprouts from my chin.
I get a lot of empathy via my Friends’ comments, plus tips for carrying tweezers in the car. Tips on the best brand of tweezers (Tweezerman). The pros and cons of laser therapy.
From my older Friends, I get comments like, “Ha! Just you wait!” Which sounds a little ominous, but I think it’s just another form of empathy. Preemptive empathy.
I don’t know why I’m so obsessed with the chin whisker. Perhaps because I didn’t know I’d be getting one (or five or twenty–Ha! Just you wait!). Or that I’d get the old lady throat. The lumpy hips. That my head hair would relocate on the southern part of my face. Little snowbird whiskers.
Yes, I expected wrinkles. I did not expect mass migration.
Just yesterday morning, my friend, Rapunzel, called. 8:42 a.m. “OK,” she said. “I know you are getting the kids to school, but I have to tell you something.” Rapunzel paused. “My eyebrows are migrating to my upper lip.”
We laughed and talked about our migrating facial hair, and then we hung up to carry on with our day. I love that girlfriends call me and tell me about their mustaches.
But since that call, I’ve been wondering why our hair and various other body parts migrate as we age. Why! Migrations usually ensure the health and survival of a species. Creatures and nomadic tribes migrate to follow better weather, fresher water, more abundant sources of food.
So what about my migrating hair follicles and southward-moving body parts? How do a droopy arse and chin whiskers ensure a woman’s survival?
In 2010, Husbandio’s company awarded him a sales prize–a ten-day, five-star trip to Africa–for him and one guest. He chose me!
In addition to hot air ballooning over the Serengeti, to snorkeling in the Indian Ocean, to seeing baboons piggyback their bare-bottomed babies,
(I almost grabbed that little guy and packed him in my suitcase.)
we got to witness thousands and thousands of wildebeest in the middle of The Great Migration.
Scientists don’t know what triggers the massive, annual migration. Scientists know only that a few wildebeest, the trendsetters, the ones who would have known that 80s fashion would return in 2013, lead the charge. These prescient few raise their noses to the wind, catch the whiff of something, and post, “Wagons roll!” as their Facebook status.
(Behold, ye of many chin whiskers!)
Eight million hooves etch dusty ruts into the Serengeti. And when they run, spooked by big cats or mangy hyenas, the vibrations of their hoofbeats rattle the earth’s inner core. It is loud, it is powerful, it is beautiful, this great migration.
My body’s own migration is the opposite of beautiful and powerful. Those chin whiskers are tenacious and sharp. The sagging skin looking like a wrinkled plastic Safeway bag. The southward migration of breasts and butts and throat skin makes me wonder, where is that girl? What happened to her?
As I try to remember her–me!–that young-bodied girl, I twiddle my neck waddle. I catch a glimpse of my tush and wonder if someone has, by chance, invented a derriere brassiere.
But thoughts like that make me wonder why I think them. And what would I tell Sweetie about why mama wears a butt bra and is having her waddle tucked?
Instead, maybe I should embrace my body’s migration.
Maybe I should see that our hair and arses migrate not because of gravity or survival but because we are supposed to learn that the appearance of our bodies doesn’t matter very much. Not in the scope of things. That indeed, as my favorite book states, all really is vanity.
Maybe as we age, we’re supposed to learn that we should care for our bodies, but not obsess over their appearance. Instead, maybe we should obsess over what matters: loving each other.
Heck, maybe we’re designed to keep moving in some sort of migration, not so much geographical movement, but movement from one life stage to another.
I see it happening in my life, and in other women in their forties and fifties and sixties and upward. Our bodies are changing, yes, but so too are our senses of self. We no longer care quite so much about perfection and being well-behaved. We care about laughter and connection and making a mark. We stop caring so much about the size and style of our jeans and instead care about the size of our hearts, the style of our personality.
That’s how we are designed. So that we aging women can lift our whiskery chins, hoping to catch a whiff of something that tells us, Yes. Now is the time. Move and survive. Move and there will be a better life. Move and you will have more of what you need to thrive, more of what sustains you.
We are not meant to stay in one place. We are not meant to stay the same. We are not meant to look the same. There is beauty and power in the migration, in the movement of our lives.
That beauty and power is seen in the tracks formed by the hard hooves of the wildebeest.
Young bodies are a kind of beautiful, but the beauty of an etched-faced woman whose body has migrated south? Nothing is as beautiful as a woman who says, “I used to be there. Now I am here.”
Your turn. How are you migrating? In what ways are you striving to find fresh water and greener prairie grasses? How do you cope with the physical migration of your body, from firm to soft, from taut to saggy, from smooth to whiskery? Please share. Whisker plucking tips are also welcome.
Baby baboon butt compliments of my camera.
Wildebeest paths compliments of Flickr’s Ganesh raghunathan.
Wrinkle paths compliments of Flickr’s Emilia Tjernström.
inside-out underpants 