Waste of Time

Earlier this evening I was writing to a friend who had sent me a link to a website featuring photos of and writing by women who have had children. The idea is that the site can serve as a forum for women to talk about how childbearing changes their bodies and their body images, and to promote self-acceptance. My friend had asked me and a few other friends what we thought about the site, and I wrote back, saying I had found it interesting and was, as a mother of girls, very concerned about protecting them from all the ways society chips away at healthy body image, creating, instead, generation after generation of women who are never satisfied with the way they look. I said that I wanted my girls to know the importance of healthy, strong bodies and to always feel good about the bodies they inhabited. 

Then, a couple of hours later, as I was lying on the couch, I found myself thinking about the hair rollers. For years, when I was a teenager and beyond, I used to curl my hair. I used to get body waves, which is a hair salon way of saying a light perm, I think, and I owned an arsenal of curling irons, hot rollers, foam rollers, blow dryers and more. As I lay on the couch, I started trying to calculate how many hours over the years had been spent trying to cajole my straight, fine hair into some semblance of the flowing waves I so desperately wanted. The short answer is: many. A longer answer is: way too many. What a colossal waste of time.

And then I started to think of some of the other ways I had found to not be doing other, exciting, productive, enriching or just enjoyable activities in my teen years and twenties. The exercise bike in my bedroom. The frozen yogurt and diet coke. The make-up counters. The shopping. 

I maintain that I was, for a young women, at the very low end of the appearance-preoccupied scale, but still! To contemplate the wasted time, time spent primping and micro-focusing, time spent deciding my head looked strange if I wore a ponytail, my legs looked funny if I wore flat shoes, my skin looked blotchy if I didn't wear cover-up. 

At thirty-nine, still straight-haired, freckle-faced and disdainful of both frozen yogurt and exercise bikes, which I used to use as tools of self-improvement, I want that time back, every single last minute of it. Why did it take so long to learn that no, I would not be happier if my legs were longer, prettier if my hair were curlier, more fulfilled if I could just find the right clothes to wear out on a Saturday night. 

So I would revise my email to my friend if I hadn't already sent it. I still feel what I wrote to her to be true. But it is not fair to me, or to my girls, to be so blase about it, to write as though I were the vanity-free person I like to think of myself as, the high-minded mind over matter, brain over body, gym-shunner, diet-mocker, above-it-all fantasy me.

The truth is, in between times, in the shadows and wrinkles of those years, I wasted an awful lot of time. I don't want my girls to waste it too.