She Laughed Away the Gray

Ginny looked in the mirror. Another gray hair. Actually, another ten of them, she thought, plucking them out one by one.

She stared in the mirror, then scowled. Where had the twenty-year-old woman gone? She still felt her, inside this fifty-year-old body.

She pulled at the skin underneath her eyes. Hmm. Should I get a face-lift, get my lips pulled back to my ears? Or should I do this thing naturally?

I just don’t know, she thought. Guess I’ll wait and see. 

The phone rang. It was her daughter.

“Mom, please come over and hang out with me. Please. Please. Please,” her daughter begged. Lately that’s all she seemed to want.

“No, honey. You need to have your own life now. I need to have mine.”

They talked for a long time. Finally Ginny hung up the phone and laughed. It wasn’t always this way. When her daughter moved out, their relationship had been impossibly tense. They barely talked, and when they did, it was strained. It had taken her a while to catch on to what was taking place.

She was going through the syndrome called empty nest. 

“I felt hurt, rejected, angry, and confused,” Ginny said. “I couldn’t figure out what was going on. For all of her life, I had been the most important person in the world to this little girl. She was my life, too. Suddenly she barely had time to talk to me. I wasn’t important to her, not at all, anymore.

“I was secretly jealous of all her new friends. They were getting all the love she once gave to me.

“I had tried to be the best mom I could. All she did was push me away and point out all the things I had done wrong. One day I realized what was going on. She was establishing her identity separate from me. This pushing away of me was what she needed to do. The harder I tried to cling to her, the more she pushed. It was really tough. It hurt a lot. But I had to let her go.”

Ginny stopped waiting for her baby to come home. Instead, she took some of that love and learned to baby herself. She took trips, went places, and did things she could never before even imagine.

“Guess what?” Ginny said. “My baby came back. But when she did, she was a grown woman and I had a new life. I miss our times as a family, when she lived at home and was a little girl. They were difficult times a lot of the time. Maybe the best times of my life. But this time is good, too. We love each other as much or more than we ever did now. It’s not better or worse, just different.

“It’s the next part of both of our lives.”

So now you’re getting older.

What are you going to do? Tummy tuck? Eye lift? Maybe a bottle of hair dye? Or go the natural way and laugh away the gray?

Guess what?

That’s your choice, too.

From the book: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter

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