Motherless Aging

Both of my mothers are gone — my adoptive mother and my biological mother — and I feel a heaviness in the loss of what could have been an opportunity for connection over hearing their stories of aging and how they navigated the changes I’m now going through.

For some reason today I’m feeling insecure about my hair. And my face. I know, ridiculous to say out loud. But if you’re living this, you know exactly what I mean - the hair just doesn’t do what it used to. And the makeup tricks I’ve relied on for decades have quietly stopped working.

That’s the part nobody tells you about this particular season of life. Not just that things change — but that you might arrive at the changing without a guide. Without a mother to ring and say, “this thing is happening to my skin/hair/body, did this happen to you?”

Some of us may never have had a Mom like that, giving advice, or some of us may have had too much of it - a mother who taught us every trick on how to be ‘pretty’ in the particular way of our particular family — either way, it’s possible we are all in the same place standing in front of a mirror discovering that none of it applies anymore. The foundation shade is wrong or has begun to cake in the lines of our faces. The blush placement that always worked doesn’t. The hair that was thick and flaming and always caught attention is now thinning and fading.

And underneath all of that is something older and quieter than vanity. It’s the feeling of standing at the edge of unfamiliar terrain without a map. Without a hand to hold. Without anyone who has been here before you and can say: this is normal, this is survivable, this is actually — though you cannot see it yet — the beginning of something.

I’ve been sitting with two words today, turning them over like stones: self-doubt and insecurity. The particular flavour of them that comes with watching your own face change and suddenly needing to look up Youtube tutorials for ‘best make-up for aging skin’.

And here is what I’m slowly learning, on this day, in front of this mirror. Self-doubt and insecurity are not truth. They are information.

They are telling me that something is ending. And endings — even the ones that arrive quietly, in the bathroom mirror on a Sunday morning — are almost always also an invitation.

The question I haven’t answered yet is: an invitation to what?

I’m going to sit with that. I’m going to write toward it. And I suspect — because this is the nature of this particular journey — that the answer will not arrive all at once, but slowly, in pieces, the way light comes through the forest canopy.

Not all at once. But just enough.