Gwyneth Paltrow considers her future after she turns 50.
On her Goop site and Instagram, Paltrow posted fresh pictures of herself in a swimsuit as she approached her 50th birthday on September 27. In the pictures, she can be seen joyfully leaping into the air while donning a grey triangle bikini on a green field.
The businesswoman thought about the significance of her impending milestone in the related blog post published on Goop’s website. She recalls celebrating her parents’ 50th birthdays, Bruce Paltrow and Blythe Danner.
“I am struck by how, for both of my parents, 50 seemed like a reckoning. For my mother, it was a culmination of the wonderous, the highs, the loves, the art. For my father, a culmination of sorrows,” she wrote.
She also talked about embracing the bodily changes that aging brings us organically.
My body, a map of the evidence of all the days, is less timeless. A collection of marks and irregularities dog-ear the chapters,” Paltrow wrote. “Scarred from oven burns, a finger smashed in a window long ago, the birth of a child. Silver hair and fine lines. The sun has left her celestial fingerprints all over me, as if she soaked a brush in dark-taupe watercolor, flecking it over my skin. And while I do what I can to strive for good health and longevity, to stave off weakening muscles and receding bone, I have a mantra I insert into those reckless thoughts that try to derail me: I accept. I accept the marks and the loosening skin, the wrinkles. I accept my body and let go of the need to be perfect, look perfect, defy gravity, defy logic, defy humanity. I accept my humanity.”
Paltrow pondered how her kids, Moses, 16, and Apple, 18, whom she had with her ex-husband Chris Martin, could look back on the occasion of her 50th birthday.
“I think of my children, now old enough to remember this ‘big’ birthday of mine into their adulthoods,” she said.
“Perhaps their memory of it will be neither that I was solely elated, nor grieving the things I lost or did not bring to fruition. I hope they can feel me feel all the things and hold in the complexity of that notion. They know I am both good through and through, yet sometimes not. That my feelings of regret and my mistakes can act as scaffolding for what I build from now on. That they are the greatest accomplishment of my life.”