Is Anybody Else Hot?

Illustration: The Magazine of Yoga

Observations of a Fifty Something Housewife

BY MAGAZINE COLUMNIST MORA HECHT

Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent.
~ Eleanor Roosevelt

I am experiencing a crisis of faith. Not of the religious kind, but of myself.

Although I am more confident in my own skin than in my thirties and forties I still have issues. Like, where did that hair come from? Will I finish my column on time? Am I too short? And so I wonder, are women hardwired this way, or are we influenced by subliminal messages from our past?

True Story

My mother, carefully bringing our Rambler station wagon to a stop, announced, “Girls, Mrs. Karo is out front, hold those Lord & Taylor garment bags high.”

Obediently my sister and I paraded our purchases across the front yard, zigzagging like lunatics between the trees, bringing a smile to my mother’s face as broad as a Cheshire cat! When I was seven we moved from our warm close knit community to this larger house in a new city; worlds apart from the familiar home we left behind.

I am almost certain Mrs. Karo paid little attention to the spectacle occurring in our front yard. But, this momentarily brought my mother comfort in a neighborhood of women, with silver services on full window display, and their exclusive garden club lunches, who did not welcome her with open arms.

What Would Julia Roberts Do?

So, recently my husband and I spent a day walking in Palm Beach. We strolled in and out of the shops, through via’s, admiring the windows, when we stopped in a women’s clothing boutique full of tunics and long flowing skirts.

Two sales women were standing by the door, talking in hushed whispers. I looked through the racks, took out a few selections, and feeling like my head was being bored through with two pairs of eyes, I carefully put them back.

No greeting. No, “May I help you?” just the once over women with “superiority complexes” dispense with such annoying proficiency. I relayed this story to my daughter who sympathetically responded, “Oh, you’re having a ‘Pretty Woman’ moment!” That was it!

I so wanted to run back into that store, all Julia Roberts like and tell those saleswomen, “Big mistake. Huge. Huge. Mistake!”

So, I asked my husband, “Do you ever walk into a room and feel inferior?” His response, “Sure sometimes I feel uncomfortable, but then I say to myself, thirty minutes, tops and I’m outta here! But, I don’t take it personally that the other people in the room are full of themselves. You, take it personally!”

Of bumblebees and fearless self assurance

Of course, I know this to be true. I just need to be reminded every now and again. If we could only reconnect to our younger selves, when we believed without question in who we were; because we were enough.

Like the time I thought I could fly and I ran into our neighbors brick wall (OK, maybe that’s not the best example.) Or, when as five year olds we dream of being a dancer, veterinarian, a fireman, or a ship boat captain, without permission or validation. Or, in junior high, after losing a considerable amount of weight, classmates who generally ignored me suddenly invited me to join their little soirees. I lost weight, not my mind. I sat invisibly behind them for almost two years in study hall. I declined, with fearless self-assurance.

The successful, motivational business woman, May Kay Ash said, “Aerodynamically, the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know it so it goes on flying anyway.” So, when these moments come, as I know they will, when I allow my insecurities to seep into my subconscious, subverting my once happy and confident self, I will think of the bumblebee and do, because, deep down, I know I can.

Read Mora all month long, blogging with her pearls on, at Is Anybody Else Hot?

© 2011, The Magazine of Yoga, LLC.