30 Things Every Woman Should Have and Should Know by the Time She's 30 by Pamela Redmond Satran

Author:Pamela Redmond Satran
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hachette Books

FIONA MAAZEL, thirty-seven, is the author of the novel Last Last Chance. She is a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree, recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and winner of the Bard Prize for Fiction in 2009. Her new novel, Woke Up Lonely, is forthcoming.

What 30 means to me

BY PADMA LAKSHMI

BEING GRATEFUL FOR LIFE’S GIFTS

At thirty-six, after years of living with severe, sometimes debilitating menstrual pain, I was finally diagnosed with endometriosis—a disorder in which uterine tissue grows outside the uterus, becoming trapped in the body. I was told my case was so severe I’d never be able to have a child naturally. It was heartbreaking. As my doctor was preparing me for much-needed surgery, he said, “Don’t worry, we’re going to go in laparoscopically, so the scars will be really small. I’m very sensitive to minimizing them for women because I know how it is.”

I said, “Oh, no, I’m grateful for my scars.”

But that hasn’t always been the case.

I was in a terrible car accident as a teenager. I was fourteen years old and on my way back with my parents from a Hindu temple in Malibu. We flew off the freeway and forty feet down an embankment. We hit a tree dead-on—it stopped our fall before crashing into the roof. When they tore the car open with the Jaws of Life and found us, my arm was across my mother’s chest and had taken most of the impact of the tree. She still broke five ribs and her sternum and had a cardiac contusion, but she survived.

Amazingly, we all did. I fractured my hip, and my arm was operated on. I healed well but was left with a long scar. It was half an inch wide and seven inches long.

When I first got that scar, I was self-conscious about it. I perfected a casual pose that hid it under my left hand and thumb when my arms were crossed. I saw it as something to be embarrassed about and wore long white gloves to the prom. When I became a model, I got even better at camouflaging it, with long sleeves, makeup, and chemical dermabrasion. Then a miraculous thing happened. I was called for a photo shoot with the great photographer Helmut Newton. When I arrived, I found that one of my closest friends had been booked as the makeup artist. When he saw that I had nearly eradicated the scar with dermabrasion, he gasped, “What have you done? Why have you erased part of it? You’ve ruined its beauty!” And he set to work touching up the scar, adding wine-colored lipstick to the lightened areas.

After that, I began to feel differently about my scar. It was a symbol of my survival, after all, and my mother’s, too. As I evolved into my thirties, I even became thankful for it—this reminder that life is unpredictable and fragile. It has taught me so much about perspective: When times get tough, I always try to say, “It could have been worse.

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