in spite of my unfortunate chin

A month  or so  ago I was in Austin, Texas with my daughter and her friends, getting ready to run the Austin 1/2 marathon, which has become a tradition and a time to eat queso, drink many margaritas,  and go to chicken shit bingo.  We stayed at an Air BNB place that was nice, had great pillows and was, as usual, way better than a hotel.  Using my older, somewhat displaced bladder and frequent middle of the night urgencies as an excuse, I got the bedroom with the attached bathroom....and the memory foam pillows.

I did appreciate the proximity of the bathroom.  All the memory foam pillows did for me was to allow me to remember my dreams or at least one of them.  And it was about my chin, of all things.  

I was at an airport and a woman came up to me and said, "Go talk to that man over there.  He can read faces". 

I wandered over to a stony faced guy with piercing, emotionless, blue eyes.  He had a chiseled, assassin looking face (yeah I have watched too many spy shows).  He grabbed my face and his hands and turned it from side to side, while staring at me with those murderous blue eyes.  Then he said, "You have a very unfortunate chin.  Nothing can be done about it".    He walked away, leaving me wondering what it all meant.  I mean, once I was told I had nice armpits, but never had my chin been insulted in such a way.

I don't usually remember my dreams unless I am lucky enough to sleep through the night.  But this one stuck with me.   When I woke up, I went into that attached bathroom and checked out my so called unfortunate chin.  Was it a little furry?  Wrinkled? Maybe.  There was the usual moles and divots and laugh lines.   But I would not call it unfortunate.  It was just a chin, that had always lived underneath and in the comfortable shade of my mostly stiff upper and lower lip.  I have a mole on the right just below my bottom lip.  How come the assassin did not notice that?

Maybe this dream was meant to call attention to how stupid it is for me and other aging  (or not) women to perseverate on parts of them that are no longer perfect - and probably never were meant to be - except for my once perfect ass which I have written about elsewhere.  Maybe we are all perfect and the way we should be with our above the knee wrinkles and our extra abdominal skin, stretched by childbirth stomachs.

Why do we feel the need to get fake eyebrows and google "best plastic surgeons in Salt Lake City" and "mini tummy tucks".  We are what we are.  We don't need to compete with 20 year olds.   Everyone gets old and you can't tuck in everything and you can't keep running away from it.  You can, however keep running as long as your knees hold up.

Our time would be better spent learning to love ourselves and striving to be better people in the ways that we can control.  What really matters is what we think of ourselves   Women of every age are beautiful in ways they rarely appreciate.  And eventually we all get baggy knee skin, saggy bottoms and tummies and wrinkles.   We earn them.

So let's not listen to the voices in our heads that say things like:

"You are too old"
"You can't wear that anymore"
"You should not run any  more marathons"
"You are too fat, too skinny or too_________(you fill in the blank).

Let's just be.  It is not our chins or any other part of us that should be labeled as "unfortunate".  What is unfortunate is that we don't realize we are enough.  Just as we are.