Third Thursday Thoughts: True Beauty (at any age!)

I’m delighted to be partnering with Hearts at Home once again and pondering a newThird Thursday Thought.  And speaking of thoughts, don’t just read mine. Be sure to join the blog hop and meet all kinds of gifted writers and mommies who have put words to their musings today. While you’re hopping, stop by the Hearts at Home website and be encouraged by this amazing organization that seeks “to encourage, equip, and educate every mom in every season of motherhood using Christian values to strengthen families.” 

 Next month, I’ll attend my twenty-year high school class reunion (with my handsome high-school sweetheart at my side).  I’m sure we’ll retell some old stories, laugh about a handful of memories and wonder where time has gone. We may marvel at the way life has unfolded and muse about how life has changed since graduation day. And though the external changes will be the most obvious in our thinning hair and rounding bodies, the internal changes are the transformations that will be worth celebrating.

One of my greatest post-teenage transformations had to do with how I viewed beauty. My own beauty, to be exact.  As a teenager, I spent hours in front of the mirror striving to look just right.  I belabored over what outfit to wear, sought new hairstyles constantly, and secretly wished I’d just go to sleep one night and wake up in a new body. Like most teenagers, my vision of beauty stemmed from the covers of Teen Magazine. Unarguably, I never measured up to the airbrushed models.

If I could go back in time and tell my lanky-legged, curve-less teenage self one thing, I’d tell her that true beauty  is tied to your soul, not your style. And if she would listen to a near-forty-year-old like me, I would share with my insecure teenage self the same secret that a wise woman once told me when I was just a young mommy still searching for that perfect hairstyle…

(Some of my readers have heard this sage advice before, but I couldn’t resist sharing it again. Hope you don’t mind!)

 When my husband was in medical school and our budget involved endless cans of tuna and peanut butter, I drove by a high-end spa each week on my trek to the grocery store. Since the only manicure I’d ever received was on my wedding day, I knew very little about what went on beyond the walls of that beauty shop. But sometimes as I passed by in my spit-up-stained sweatpants and baseball-cap-covered hair, I dreamed of beauty treatments that erased the black circles of sleep-deprivation and manicures that excavated sandbox residue from trench-digging fingernails. I imagined a hairstyle that would make my plain face turn heads and a secret product that would change the lines of my stick-straight figure.