29 Is a Prime Number

I know that this is ridiculous, but 29 sounds a lot older than 28. And yet, my 29th birthday passed happily enough. Scott and I figured out how to hop a minibus and visit Palanga, the equivalent, it turns out, of a runty Eastern European Cedar Point. I was disappointed to find out that the rides were only for children; however, I was thankful that I realized this before embarrassing myself with the broken Lithuanian dialogue I’d been planning:

“How much game? Want one, please.”

For the dinner portion of my Lithuanian birthday, we decided to sample some more traditional Lithuanian food. At the restaurant, after two warm half cups of Lithuanian-style Coca Cola (no ice and no refills), I had my first cepelinai, which is a strangely translucent potato dumpling shaped like a UFO, stuffed with meat and orbiting the plate in a mystery cream sauce. It tastes quite good until it lands in the very bottom of your stomach like a boulder and makes it difficult to walk. Scott also ate another traditional edible boulder: a deep fried pancake stuffed, you guessed it, with meat.

After much groaning and belly rubbing, we dragged ourselves out of our seats and down the Palanga boardwalk to the Baltic Sea, where we walked out on the pier and then barefoot across the sand, all the while thinking wistful thoughts about age and eternity appropriate to the sea and the day.

Of course, there was really only one thought circling around and around my head: “I am 29. I am 29.” Now, I know that 29 is not old, and I know that many of you are going to read this and say “Michelle, honestly, wait until you at least have kids and age spots before you wax eloquent on aging.” That’s probably good advice, but I’m going to go ahead anyway.

In the United States, I’ve always been conscious of how much the culture worships the appearance of youth at the expense of reality and of how a woman is not considered truly successful unless she is also hot, regardless of her age. I’ve known women who’ve spent the best years of their lives in front of department store mirrors, cursing their tiniest flaws and all the while thinking of new, painful ways to punish themselves into a more socially acceptable shape.

But in the U.S., there is also the I-don’t-give-a-damn-so-you-can-shove-it constituent, the women who just let their hair go gray when it goes gray, who do not curse their bodies for growing slightly softer and rounder with age, who wear comfortable shoes even though they may not be the cutest style, who think a lot more about whether their buying practices are supporting child labor than whether the pieces are the most modern or the most flattering.

I have always admired these women, women like my mother who approach life with a healthy balance of stylish sense and graceful acceptance. Women who embody Anne Lammott’s longing to, as they age, earn a face of kindness and integrity. This is the kind of woman I want to be, and, up until recently, I had plenty of role models for that.

But if the superficial forces are still alive and well in the US of A, they’ve totally taken over the women of Lithuania.

I walk to and from the university each day, and each day I feel as though I am wearing a giant cardboard placard that reads: “I, Michelle Webster-Hein, have given up.” Mostly this has to do with my shoes. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to traverse 35 minutes to and fro in my cute teaching flats, so each morning I stab my vanity within an inch of its life by donning my beat-up sneakers over my tights and making the trek. One day last week I was wearing a pair of striped capris. With tennis-shoes.

“I look like a clown,” I told Scott as I gazed into the full-length mirror that morning. I was hoping that he would contradict me. He responded by humming the carnival tune and dancing around like a drunken marionette.

But it’s not just the shoes. It’s the whole damn thing: the make-up, the perfectly-styled hair, the matching handbags. The overwhelming number of stick-thin women who seriously look like they just stepped out of a Vogue advertisement. It makes me feel like I used to in high school shuffling back and forth between classes in my marching band sweatshirt. Only here it’s worse because here no one else even considered joining marching band.

I shared my observations with a friend who is slightly older and much wiser than me. She told me about her own Feminist-Marxist interpretation as to why Lithuanian women dress the way they do. Basically, they don’t have as many opportunities here as they do on our side of the pond, so they have to boost their “assets”. Fair enough. Another friend of mine claimed that they dress that way because, due to alcoholism and lack of male role models, the pickings are slim, and, as a result, the competition is high. Another valid point.

So why should this make me angry? Can’t I just chalk it up to cultural/personal differences and let it go?

Not yet, not until I say this and remind myself that I believe it: Society’s ideals of beauty keep women down. They keep us down because they are always asking of us the impossible, the impossible into which, to make others happy, we end up pouring so much of our precious time and our precious resources, all, ultimately, to no avail.

And, though sometimes I feel these young years slipping past too quickly, though sometimes I want with all of my heart to be that grand and ageless turner of heads, I will not be a part of it. I will seek true beauty, and the rest I will let go.

So now I am 29, a number divisible by nothing save one and itself. A number that makes no neat set of rows. A number that only fits into something as wild and wide and yielding as the sea around my fingers and the sand around my feet.