ODE TO LETTING GO

I felt some kind of way about that unrelenting blizzard of women’s magazine articles and books raving about “reinvention” at the turn of the century. The woman in her 50s who left corporate America, whipped up jams and jellies at her kitchen table, and now glows as a successful entrepreneur employing hundreds. The woman who raised her children behind a picket fence, but now spends her days in a Manhattan loft making exquisite pottery. The litigator who gives into her passion for dogs at age 60 and now is the #1 dog trainer in the country. You know, the “Eat Pray Love” woman of reinvention. Right away, it annoyed me that I’d never seen any headline exhorting men to “reinvent” themselves. A woman who wasn’t “reinventing” herself was surely living an uninspired, unexamined life and was hardly worth talking with at a dinner party. I heard the exhortations as having a heavy bass note of disapproval, of judgement, of criticism — that same bass note that sounds in the heads of many women condemning themselves for being too fat, too thin, too short, too tall, too loud, too quiet.

The subtext of this turn of the century “reinvention” culture was the same sort of disapproval as that phrase of my Mother’s generation of Black women for a woman who “just let herself go”. Those Spring Tea-pouring members of the Altar Guild at our Episcopal Church who dressed carefully each Sunday — meaning, among other things, constricted by a full girdle so that NOTHING moved — and would lower their voices to say rather mournfully that the previously lovely member of the club who gained more weight than socially acceptable, showed up with less than a full face of make-up, her “outfit” not quite right, her hair not perfectly coifed had “let herself go”. A woman had to embrace all the restrictions, constrictions, social expectations of every sort. Letting herself “go” made a woman pathetic, an object of both judgment and pity.

Now that I’m on the other side of 70, I hear “let herself go” as a call to liberation. First. The woman herself has the power. It is she who decides. She is the actor, not the one to whom something is done. Second. The woman herself “lets herself” — gives herself permission. Third. The woman gives herself permission to “go”. “GO!” She gives herself permission to be free of the premier rules of social expectations — the rules regulating how she looks. And, having thrown those regulations out the window, she becomes a dangerous woman. Who knows what she might do next? So, to all of us who discovered during 2020 the joy of “Day Pajamas”, who haven’t put on a full-face of makeup since March, who have dispensed with the weekly manicure and miraculously survived, who have used this COVID Time to get to know one’s self better and to nurture yourself — I hope 2021 is the year you truly let yourself go. As my friend Ruth O’Dell would exhort us — “Emerge!”