I was recently discussing with a friend our increasing invisibility as we age. He has noticed how in the cafe he frequents that he’s not welcomed with the same enthusiasm the younger customers receive. Their youth reflects the demographic of the baristas and, old enough to be their grandpa, connecting with them feels clunky. For me, when I decided to stop colouring my hair with henna, I felt a shift. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what it was but I noticed it. I remember catching sight of my reflection as I passed a window and seeing myself not as the young thing I thought I was and reeling a little. Yikes, I’ve skipped a generation and turned into my grandmother! I’ve still got young children and I observed someone hesitate as they tried to decide what relation I was to the child with me. Could I be grandma, aunty, surely not mother!
The decision to present myself as an ‘older woman’ with a head of grey hair didn’t only impact how I was perceived out there in the big bad world, it also brought to the surface all the tensions in my marriage. My husband could not tolerate the change and he made his grievance known every day over the two years it took me to muster the courage to finally abandon the marriage altogether. ‘You look ugly’ became a daily retort. He recoiled when I lent into kiss him, ‘Ugh, it’s like kissing my mother!’ He bought expensive hair dyes in a bid to make me change my mind. He argued that I could pass for being much younger if only I kept up the toil of touching up the roots. I owed it to him he insisted. He hadn’t married a woman who looks as I do now. It was grotesque. I took an extended holiday abroad to get a reprieve from the daily onslaught. When he arrived to see the children after a few weeks of separation, he was shocked to see I was still half half, grey at the roots and red at the ends. It was hideous; he threatened to smash a plate and leave.
He would not hear my perspective, that the constant drudgery of managing the colouring routine made me feel old. When I was younger I could add henna for the sheer pleasure of its auburn hues, now it was a monotony of increasingly harsh orange as my hair whitened beneath the muddy application. I had decided that I wanted to have done with the whole growing out rigmarole by the time I crossed the threshold into my fifties. It turned out to be several years of transition that was also a journey of deep transformation.
I felt trapped in the marriage for lots of reasons; I had spent years trying to turn it around into something of lasting value but by the time I’d arrived at the daily insults I knew it was over but I didn’t know how to get out. While I figured out how to extract myself, I made the decision to use his vitriol to my advantage. Instead of letting it crush me, I recognised the necessity to find within myself my own beauty. If I depended on him for love and adoration, I was certainly doomed. I felt the responsibility for my daughters too as their father didn’t hold back from regaling them with the many ways I’d failed the marriage by letting my appearance slip. He was a Zen master and with every lash of his tongue, I discovered a new facet of beauty within myself. This was a revelatory experience – I had never considered myself beautiful and to begin to feel myself to be so as I was noticeably ageing was a gift that made the harshness and disappointment of the marriage worth it.
I live in a very remote place so I’m not often amongst strangers but I began to notice something very strange. Whenever I went to the mainland someone would comment on my appearance. At a talk by a spiritual master, a thirty something professional pianist, hesitates, “I don’t mean to be inappropriate, but I want to tell you what a beautiful woman you are”. An old lady with a shock of uncombed orange hair wheeling her stash of plastic bags past the bus stop, gives me an unnerving stare and with a cheeky laugh appraises my appearance, “you are a very beautiful woman!”. The lady in the shop of Indian treasures where I purchase an image of Hanuman, observes how my silver hair complements my eyes and makes me seem ageless, the man with the gold tooth calls down the street how much he loves my scarf, the woman hurrying past me as I await my train stops to say, “you look beautiful, I love the way you are dressed!”. It has become so regular I can count on it. Whenever I am away from home, someone will comment in a lovely way on my beauty. I receive it with gratitude and thank everyone who reveals to me how what is within, is reflected without.
As I’ve thought about the conversation with my friend, I notice that there are situations in which I do feel invisible, but I think that what ageing has brought me is the opportunity to decide on my own beauty and as I inhabit the world feeling beautiful, those who can, see it. To everyone else, I am happy to be invisible!
What’s your experience of ageing? Have the losses that accompany age turned out to be gifts after all? Comment below, I’d love to hear how it is for you.