I ams who I ams

So I was listening to NPR on the drive home from Madison a couple of days ago. They were doing a snippet on the new shishi coffee bar going in to a couple of hundred McDs in the northeast US. They aired a snippet of the commercial, which was supposed to mock Starbucks and coffee bars as something for elitist people. It went like this:

Woman 1: Did you hear McDs is serving lattes, mochas, espresso, capps..
Woman 2: That, that, that is .... GREAT. We can go there and start wearing lipstick and heels again, we don't have to listen to jazz, we can start reading trashy gossip magazines again.......

Once I picked my jaw up off the floor at the overbearingly divisive "us v them" mentality of the commercial, I started thinking.

Am I not supposed to go in to coffee bars wearing lipstick and heels? It would never have occurred to me there was a dress code or rules for people who frequent coffee bars or any other establishment.

To probably misquote a cartoon character of my youth, I ams who I ams.

In the last few years, I have become much more comfortable in my own skin, more at peace with who I am, that I was in my teens and twenties. My lack of confidence and ability to be myself made many of the experiences I had in those years something akin to torture.

Now I have enough peace to be someone who reads Mother Earth News, Gourmet, Midwest Living and People magazines. I have painted toes peeping out of my pink heeled slides which may wear with a fru-fru skirt to an organic event. I will sling my baby and breast feed him even at art center events where the average attendee is 68 and conservative. I embrace my lipstick and eye liner while vegetable gardening.

I like the improving me. I look forward to the woman I will be in another 20 years as I become even more comfortable with me. I make the prediction now that I won't dye my hair as it changes color, and I will probably switch to brighter lip sticks to contrast the hair. The heels will probably still be on my feet, but I will likely pay for the pedicure if bending down to paint them myself becomes harder. I will probably still like jazz, and I will probably have worked my way up to straight espresso.

What will you be in twenty years?