12/10/2025
The Beauty Age
(A private remembering, a public resurrection)
It was January 2016.
I was pregnant after my first IVF cycle.
I felt on top of the world.
I was 40.
Two beautiful boys.
A Paris apartment in the 7ème with a view of Les Invalides.
My own fashion line, TARA Paris, preparing for its second runway show.
Elegant Femme, a multi seven figure global brand.
An office in the 16ème, on Avenue de New York, where I could see the Eiffel Tower from my desk. I used to stand on that balcony, sip espresso, and watch the light hit the Seine as I planned what was next.
And still, beneath all that beauty, I was aching.
I longed to soften.
To breathe again.
To feel God move inside me.
The baby was part of that longing.
A boy. Healthy heartbeat. Strong numbers.
It was a rainy afternoon in Paris, the kind of steady drizzle that turns the city to watercolor.
We were supposed to take the boys to the movies.
I felt a twinge, nothing unusual. Then the blood came.
The taxi ride to the American Hospital was quiet. The trees along the boulevard blurred into grey. I pressed my hand to my stomach, whispering please stay.
We had already seen his heartbeat.
Already imagined him in summer. I had a room reserved at the hospital, the one where I dreamed of holding him for the first time.
In the hospital room they checked my levels. High. Normal.
My husband squeezed my hand.
And then it happened.
Without warning, without reason.
I felt the weight shift in my body, he’s coming, I said.
I pulled down my jeans and delivered him into my hands.
Tiny. Perfect. Whole.
Every detail visible.
My husband stood in shock, tears streaming, repeating…
“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry.”ml
I didn’t stop it. I didn’t swallow it.
I let the sobs come from somewhere ancient.
They took him away.
The bleeding continued.
When we got home, the boys asked, are we still pregnant.
I sat on the cold blue tiles of our Paris kitchen, the ones that never quite came clean, and sobbed.
I called my parents, my sister. I said the words, but I couldn’t make them real.
I was furious with myself for being so broken.
Hadn’t I already proven I could survive?
Hadn’t I already buried my firstborn son?
Didn’t I teach women how to find beauty in the pain.
And yet, this was different.
This loss was surgical. It cut through my identity.
Two months later I stood backstage at my second Paris Fashion Week show.
I wore dark Parisian grey, one of the new designs.
I had imagined the fabric falling over a small round belly.
Instead, it hung against a hollow space.
The lights flashed. The crowd applauded.
But something was missing, not in the clothes, but in me.
The press wasn’t as enthusiastic as they had been for my first show, and for the first time, I didn’t care.
The next morning I sat on that same balcony in the 16ème.
Espresso in hand.
Eiffel Tower glinting in the winter light.
And I knew Paris had given me everything it could at that time.
We left.
Five months through Greece, Italy, Thailand.
I rested for the first time in years.
We arrived in North Carolina on the exact due date of that baby boy.
And then the next nine years became a slow, sacred unfolding.
The woman who once ran Paris began to walk beaches.
The empire builder became a mother of grown sons.
The CEO became a seeker.
I woke to the sound of waves instead of alarms.
Traded silk heels for sand under my feet.
I wrote. I prayed. I bled through four more IVF cycles.
I watched sunsets instead of strategies.
I stopped chasing clients and started listening for God.
I made soup. Packed lunches. Cried quietly in parked cars after soccer practice.
I watched my husband become stronger, safer, surer.
I watched myself unravel into something more honest.
In the slowness I began to hear the whisper I had silenced for years.
“You don’t need to rebuild. You just need to remember.”
And I did.
Word by word.
Wave by wave.
When our youngest left for college in Nice, my husband and I followed the call of the sea.
We bought a sailboat and learned to live by wind, by current, by trust.
I recorded The Soul of Beauty as we crossed the Ionian Sea, my voice floating over water that had held empires and miracles alike.
Out here, I learned what devotion really means.
I let him lead.
I let God lead.
I let the feminine receive.
And in that surrender, something returned, a new union, a new devotion, a new kind of creation.
Now, as I close the decade of my 40s, I see it all clearly.
Every ending, every ache, every season of stillness was stitching me back to truth.
The women I speak to now, they know this ache.
They have built the empire, raised the family, reached the height, and yet, somewhere in the quiet, they long to be held.
Not managed. Not coached. Honored. Seen.
This is not about ambition anymore.
It is about union.
The union of the masculine and feminine.
Of creation and rest.
Of beauty and God.
This is The Beauty Age.
Where we lead from pleasure, presence, and prayer.
Where success feels like silk and devotion feels like desire.
Where creation is no longer proof of worth,it is the expression of a woman finally at peace with her own beauty and truth.
She built everything she wanted.
And now, she feels her soul alive inside it.
