Beauty

Lately, I've begun to ask myself two questions.  What is Beauty?  What does it mean to be a woman? As I age, the definition of beauty expands.  The misguided definition of my youth just doesn't hold up anymore.  Because with age comes wrinkles and sun spots and more scars.  So, perfect skin can't be beauty...because I know for a fact that young people certainly do not have the market cornered on beautiful.  There are people in their 90's who are the very essence of beauty.

But I've begun to realize lately that I have inadvertently bought into society's definiton of beauty.  The one that we are constantly bombarded with in ads and on tv.  One that only has to do with the surface and oftentimes has very much to do with some serious plastic surgery.  And it really infuriates me that I've just willingly and unconsciously allowed society to define for me what beauty is and, ultimately, what worth is.

I perceive womanhood to be loosely defined as people who bear children, have breasts, and have a uterus (or some combination of these things).  I never realized this was my definition until I suddenly found myself feeling outside of and separate from the Woman Group.  One of the most painful parts of our fertility struggles for me has always been feeling like birthing children is a right of passage that women go through that I have been unable to experience and take part in.  So I'm left out of the club.  It leaves me wondering if that makes me less of a woman somehow.  The current definition that I've been working under is clearly incomplete if not totally incorrect. 

I have 2 scars on my upper chest and one on my back now from making bad decisions about sun exposure my whole life.  I have scars on my abdomen from two surgeries - one for my gallbladder and the other for Endometriosis.  I have wrinkles.  Does this make me less beautiful?  If I never bear children or if I lose one or both breasts or my uterus one day, does this make me less of a woman or, worse, not a woman at all?  Clearly, it cannot be so.  So that means that what I have believed all of my life about what it means to be beautiful and to be a woman is completely wrong.

It is hard to have my vanity challenged.  And it is hard to realize how vain I really am.  I never knew it until I started piling on the scars and suddenly felt less beautiful - and I cried.  My vanity took me completely by surprise.

For the past year or two I have been putting scar cream on the surgery scars on my abdomen, and they are fading.  On Friday I found out that my Endometriosis is back, so in the next 6 months to a year I will likely have four new scars where the old, fading ones are.  And then again a few years after that.  Again and again - until I die or God heals me.  The irony of my scar cream applications is not lost on me after finding out this news.

So it seems like as good a time as any to begin asking myself what beauty really is.  And asking God, the one who created all that is beautiful.  It's easy to see beauty in the old woman, full of grace and life in her heart.  It's easy to see womanhood in a friend who has been unable to birth children or who has chosen not to.  It's not so easy to see these things in myself.  And there's something very, very wrong with that.

I know that God created me to be a woman, and he knew that I would have Endometriosis.  And I know that he wants me to live my life fully me - a beautiful woman.  So I have to believe that he has his own perfect definition of what it means to be a woman, and that it is completely different from my own.  I'd like to one day have the same definition as he does.

I don't have answers today.  Just questions.  I take comfort in the fact that at least now I am asking the questions.  This means that I'm at least challenging the status quo that I've just allowed to inform my life until now.  At least it means that I'm no longer a slave to our culture and our media.  Well, I'm still a slave, but at least I'm questioning the ok-ness of said slavery.

And that's a start.  Baby steps.  We've gotta celebrate the small victories.