Can a friend tell a friend she doesn’t like her hair?  makeup?  shoes? outfit?  Some might say, “Who are we to judge?”  My response, “We’re women, and we all have an opinion about how other women look!”

After reading hundreds of fashion magazines and watching countless celebrities walk down the red carpet, we judge other women’s appearance all the time. Who wear’s this dress better?  Brittany, Nicole, Kate?  We comment and critique appearance all the time, but it seems to be okay only if it’s a stranger or a celebrity or someone we’re “gossiping” about, not someone we care about.

As a psychologist, what I find most fascinating is that I can tell my friends something I don’t like about their husbands, their jobs, their kids, or the way they handle splitting a restaurant bill, but I can’t tell those same women to lose the black hair dye, stop over-bleaching their hair because it looks like straw, or change foundations because the one they use makes them look like they’re wearing spackle.

How do I tell a dear friend that her bulky unplucked eyebrows look like a forehead moustache, or tell another friend that her thick gray mane that she thinks makes her look like a feminist, actually makes her look like she’s ready to go out Trick or Treating.

So, what’s a beauty critic to do? Just ask my sister, which is why she reviews products and not the way women look?

My recommendation is to be open to feedback. Talk to your friends whose beauty sense and compassion you trust and ask them “What do you really think?”  Then listen openly, undefensively.  You don’t have to take anyone’s advice.  You can do whatever you want.  But, most importantly, know that if a friend doesn’t like something about the way you look, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.  Quite the contrary, I believe loving friends tell each other what they think.  And always remember, that whatever you might do, hair grows back, roots grow out and makeup washes away.

Last week, a woman I know told me that she was really worried about getting her annual mammogram. I asked if she had any risk factors such as family history. She said, “No, but with so many women getting diagnosed these days, she said, I guess my risk factor is being a woman.”

Even though more women die of heart disease, it is breast cancer we seek out. Breast cancer is the only cancer we’re supposed to look for with dedicated regularity. We’re supposed to have a built in search and destroy protocol for our breasts. Every month we’re supposed to examine our breasts. Hey! It’s time to look for cancer. Let’s look for a lump. Who needs that in their lives? After all, our breasts are meant to be about life. But they’re now also about fear. And many of us live with the fear no matter what side of breast cancer we’re on.

But early detection, which we all know, is the key to survival, means looking for cancer. Now that’s scary but it’s also hopeful, because we can do something about it. All of us diagnose, live with the threat of recurrence or metastases, even if we have an excellent prognosis. An excellent prognosis is still a prognosis, which isn’t a good thing. We don’t know if we’re in the 5% or 95%; the 80% or 20%. Living with odds is so bizarre. And ultimately, irrelevant for any single person, because, as one woman said to me, for any individual it’s binary: you get cancer again or you don’t, my personal odds are 50/50. So, we remain vigilant for signs and symptoms.

And there will be things that trigger your fears for the rest of your life. It’s normal. You feel good, you feel great, you’re three years past treatment, you feel healthy and cured. Then you get a backache that you can’t explain and the terror hits like a tornado. Surviving breast cancer leaves you with a fear that the ordinary can become a life threat. We find again a resting place in hope until the next time and then go on with our lives.

As creatures of hope, we are capable of wondrous imagination and extraordinary creativity. It’s the foundation of our magnificence, of our ability to create beauty and art, the Sistine Chapel, the statue of David, Hamlet, La Boheme. It makes us the little Energizer Battery Bunnies of life. We keep going and going. It is the foundation of the vision and genius that enables us to discover penicillin, to map the human genome, and to develop Taxol.

This ability, however, creates some dilemmas. It also leads to our fantasy of control over cause and effect. For example, in our culture, medicine and science rest on assumptions about our ability to determine cause and effect, the ability to predict and control, knowing all along what we learned in Pysch 101, correlation isn’t causation. Now don’t I sound like a party pooper. But …. two things happening at the same time, most likely mean absolutely nothing.

Despite all the evidence around us that things just happen, we approach bad things by trying to find causality. Although on one hand, this offers a palliative hope of control, on the other hand, it often causes a lot of needless stress and self blame. We want to believe that eating enough broccoli can prevent cancer. That if someone else gets a recurrence, it’s because they weren’t exercising as much as they should have, as much as we are.

I caused my cancer; we believe. It will come back if I do… whatever. It won’t come back if I do…whatever else. We all make up our own whatever’s. At sometime after diagnosis, most women come up with their personal theory about why they got cancer. It was because…those whatever’s. But the truth is, we don’t know why one woman gets breast cancer, and why one woman doesn’t. We just don’t know.

One woman told me she was shocked to find out that a friend had a recurrence. She vehemently asserted that her friend had eaten a completely macrobiotic diet, exercised daily, did yoga and still…cancer. When I got diagnosed, my step son said to me with indignant shock, but you’re the healthiest person I know. I was one of those people that could check off every item on that list of what you should do to be healthy and ward off disease. I was doing all the right things and I still got cancer.

Then my unconscious said to the cancer, I’ll show you. So, I proceeded to take control of giving up control and I stopped exercising, drank a lot of wine, ate a lot of brownies and gained twenty-five pounds. I kept getting on the scale. You know how they’re weighing you all the time during treatment. I’d say, cancer’s really fattening.

Now I’m trying to find some balance between knowing what I can control and what I can’t and how I want to live and establish quality of life for myself within that uncertainty. Finding some balance. You know what I realized? Fat or thin, I’m still gonna die. It’s not good news. It’s not bad news. It’s not even news. It just is. And it doesn’t matter what the definition of is, is. So what matters is how I live, day by day, moment by moment, mammogram by mammogram, martini by martini, laughing, loving, and at times even feeling like I will live forever.

I want to earn a Growing-Old-Well badge.  It will take its place of honor next to the Sewing badge on my ancient Girl Scout uniform.  Currently, I’m working on my Feeling-Beautiful-Without-A-Face-Lift badge (though I have had my eyes lifted so I can see, as it was going, my upper lid was becoming a blindfold).

I think of all those badges I sought when I was young, now attained or irrelevant.  Fourteen, first kiss; sixteen, go steady; nineteen have sex but don’t get pregnant, twenty-one, figure out how to have great sex, (I’m still working on that one), get into and out of college, first job, first husband.  Today, health and stability rank at the top of my to-accomplish list.

I want to protect my breasts and colon from cancer and my arteries from heart disease.  I get a thrill from a good cholesterol reading and happiness from aches and pains that respond to Advil.  I love taking vacations and returning home to my family, my friends, my dog and Peet’s coffee.

I get a kick out of seeing a good movie, reading a good novel, and working up a good sweat in aerobics class.  Notice the operative middle way goal of goodness.  Aging has softened my drive for the peaks.  In my fifties, good is the great of my thirties.  Who has the energy for great anyway?  The gym is ten minutes away, CSI is on Wednesday nights, Chinese take-out Fridays. Life is good.

However, there is one great pleasure I pursue unabashedly, the company of my women friends.  These friendships are a stretch of sandy beach on an island where the trade winds are a tender caress and it doesn’t matter how I look in a bathing suit.

Now in our fifties as we sip martinis, we know dark things swimming beneath those blue seas, will soon to surface. Remember the ominous theme music from Jaws: da Dah da Dah… da Dah da Dah. That’s the sound of our mortality and our youth. We all hear it, a distant hum. Sometimes we listen to it. Sometimes we laugh over it. Sadly, it never really goes away because we know too much.

Looking at the lovely faces of my girlfriends, I see a new reason for wanting to live a long life. I want to be part of our collective old age. We are the women who demonstrated, rebelled, experimented. We had casual sex before it was casual. It was just daring and fun. We saw movies when they were films. We suffered the disillusions of Viet Nam and assassinations of our heroes. We demanded more than one path for women, and often we had groin pulls from trying to walk two trails at the same time.

It’s time again to break old molds and build new ones. We are the first generation of women where the fifty decade is astonishingly young and we might measure our future life span as no other generation has before us. Moreover, we do not intend to hide our lives away, alone in a condo in Miami, playing cards in the afternoons. We are about to change what it means to be older women.

The possibility of years stretched out before me feels like summers when I was a child. I remember the last day of school, the clang of emptied lockers, the confetti of discarded papers, the smell of sunlight and dust. Most intensely, though, I remember the enchantment of being on the verge, the heady abandon of stepping off into summer. This was the fourth grade equivalence of anticipating a love affair.

However, as do love affairs, summers end. The difference for us is that our past-middle-aged summer doesn’t end with going back to school in the fall. It just ends.

Beautiful young men call me ma’am. Now there has to be some compensation for that, doesn’t there. Time again to be pathfinders and explorers. Remember our aches and pains still respond to Advil. And whatever else happens, I have every intention of earning my growing old well badge.

I was trying on clothes at Nordstrom yesterday. I looked over my shoulder into the mirror at the panty line wildly distorting the seat of the slacks, when I noticed an ad taped to the dressing room wall.

Does trying on bathing suits make you anxious and depressed?  (What a question!) Do you feel all bathing suits are designed for preteens?  After trying on bathing suits do you feel you need to go to the gym and work out for hours? If you answered, “yes,” to any of these questions, (the ad continued) you need to come in on May 15 to meet Jeanette, our bathing suit fitting expert.” I thought, if you answered, “No,” to any of those questions, you are a man and you’re in the wrong dressing room.

I dread buying a bathing suit, it is the worst part of summer or a vacation.  For most of us over twenty-two, our thighs are dimpling somewhere between nervous anticipation and abject terror.  We are among the world’s most educated and emancipated women, yet bathing suits bring us to our knees.  This isn’t good.

What can we do about this?  Not much actually.  Society won’t let us rest.  The standards serve as constant reminders that our bodies are unattractive.  We feel ashamed and unappealing.  The question is how to handle those feelings?  Here’s some ideas for dealing with the ever-present nagging comparisons and negative self-evaluations.

First and foremost, tell yourself you have better things to do.  Tell yourself your body works.
Then tell yourself I’m too smart and self-aware to be shackled by body image.
Let’s cut our anxiety and lead with our strengths.  Think of the power you would feel if you, the burden lifted if you could look at your thighs and say, Hello girls!  You serve me well. You’re sturdy.  You take me where I want to go.  I no longer want you to take me down the runway to be crowned Miss America.  I no longer want you to give me the credentials to be a movie star or a super model.  You are not the lead line on my resume.

Next point: beautiful thighs don’t make you happy.  Ask any person with beautiful thighs.  “Hello, I notice you have killer thighs.  What do you talk to your therapist about?” Hollywood is filled with beautiful thighs and miserable people with their pain splashed across tabloids and People magazine.

As a young psychologist, I remember seeing a very beautiful woman patient.  I was confused.  Here she was the standard against which all women measure themselves and she was unhappy.  It violated all my beliefs about beauty making you happy.  Then there are all those rich unhappy people, but that’s another story.
What is the goal?  What should we make time for?  What do I have to offer as a human being, as a woman?  Well, for one thing I can make people laugh.  I can help heal people’s emotional wounds. I can share laughter with my friends. I can make my home beautiful.  I make my husband happy. I take good care of my children.  The list goes on.
My thighs are neither an asset nor a detriment in any of these endeavors.  What makes me feel worthwhile are my skills and my compassion.  What make me happy are my health and the health of the people I love.  When I sit in my garden with my dog reading a good novel, my thighs are irrelevant to the peace I experience.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I wouldn’t want to have the standard of beauty our culture exults.  It’s just that chasing it forever doesn’t really give anyone what is really of value. What a waste of my wisdom to keep trying to achieve what I think it will give me, which it probably won’t.  Let’s refocus.  Let’s reach for something else.  Let’s stop reading “Seven Ways to Shape Up for Summer.”  Life is way too short for that.

Quick, let’s cradle our faces in our hands and gently pull back the skin at the bottom of our jaws towards our ears and see who we once were.  You know you do that.  We all do.  Who are we seeing when we stretch our jowls back through time?  To a time when we never thought to push the skin forward for a secret glimpse of who we were to become.

 At first, I see the smoothed gentle skin of my younger face.  Then, I see the me behind my eyes.  The me that Freud referred to as self.  Not the anatomy is destiny, me. It is when I let my jaw down, so to speak, that I look at the older, stranger me I am becoming.  My soul seems to age in dog years, while my body catapults forward in people time.  It really is okay, though.  I know there are options such as Restylane, Botox, and face lifts, but that is a step in the direction of Cher and Joan Rivers I’m not willing to take just yet.

I remember seeing my first serious wrinkle.  I was looking into a rearview mirror to put sunscreen on my face right before a five-mile run. Yes, I know.  You wouldn’t believe that by looking at me now.  But then, I was thirty years old and I noticed, for the first time, on the right side of my mouth a crease, a deep crease, an etched crease, a crease that seemed big enough to need its own tube of sunscreen. 

It surprised me.  “Wow,” I remember thinking, “when did that happen?”  But it was a singularity, a oner.  I didn’t get the foreshadowing.  So, I went for my run while my one-wrinkle face had begun an agenda all its own.

We do indeed focus on our aging skin.  And we all know we have better things to think about.  We all know this attention is existentially foolish.  We all know it’s self-indulgent vanity.  We feel a bit ashamed and a bit shallow.  There are far more important issues.

It’s petty, of course, this preoccupation with our post-menopausal, estrogen-deprived, sun-damaged skin.  Very un-Zen-like.  It’s so hard, however, to watch our beauty leak out through the sieve of time, to watch it sustain the relentless erosion of youth with peaceful detachment, especially when we live in a culture dominated by the priceless commodities of beauty and youth.

Phew, I’m out of breath just writing that last sentence.  And I probably just lost another few skin cells.

Young people, however, really are beautiful. And they’re all around us. We have to watch them for the rest of our lives.  And there will be more and more of them and fewer and fewer of us for the rest of our lives.  It’s like watching your best friend walking around with your ex-boyfriend, who dropped you.  You want him back.  You want to touch him.  You know it’s not fair.

Jaw up.  Jaw down. Yet, I am mainly content and at peace with my saggy skin.  My soft, fluid skin.  My moveable feast of flesh.  And while I know there is blight in the world that makes my facial woes truly insignificant, I’m having dinner tonight in my safe and quiet home with my dog and my husband, not in that order, knowing full-well that wrinkles are a luxury.