I have always looked young for my age. And up until the last
five years or so, I have always hated that fact. As a kid, I was so eager to BE
older, and the fact that I didn't look even as old as I was was an endless
irritation. As a teenager, I made the typical teenage mistake of believing that
looking OLDER was the same as looking COOLER, or at least more sophisticated.
And sophistication is one thing that I have never been able to even approach,
either in appearance or personality. I gave up on that one soon enough, though
it took a lot longer to quit being wistful about it. Even as an adult, I wanted
to look my age because I felt I was finally beginning to earn my maturity.
Somehow I thought I would earn more respect if I could at least lay claim to
the years I had lived—visually, anyway.
But the last five years put an end to that, of course,
because I was at the age, short as it is, when a woman can be both fully adult
and not on her way out in terms of the way people interact with her. Face it;
there is an age when women become wallpaper: people's eyes begin to pass over
her. So for a few years, there, I was happy to look younger than I am.
But this year it's over. There is no doubt now that I am Middle Aged.
First it was the gray. (That, really, began in college, but
it got really bad the last five years or so.) Thank goodness there is dye for
that, though, or I would have been hitting this wall quite a while ago. I toy
with the idea of going natural sometimes—I've seen a few handsome women pull it
off, particularly in
Berkeley,
where the women wear their hair in neat, mod bobs, seeming to relish the distinguished
silver. But it requires a very trim figure, fantastic designer clothes, and a
deep commitment to make-up in order to pull it off. And there are an awful lot
of women who go gray who, well, don't pull it off. And I admit to being
influenced greatly by peer pressure. In
Pocatello,
things might be different, but here in
South Jordan
there are exactly two women in my ward who are naturally gray. That's a hard
audience to play to.
Then, in the past year, the Middle-Aged Spread hit. The
thighs. The saddle bags. The grandma-belly. And no recent pregnancy to blame it
on. I began exercising for an hour a day instead of the 30 minutes I was doing
before, and nothing came off. I can get a little of it to go away if I diet
unreasonably and continuously . . . but, seriously, NOT WORTH IT. What is the
point of living as long as I have if I can't have a peanut-butter egg once in a
while?
OK, so, steer away from the skinny jeans (not dignified
enough anyway, right?), begin to wear more skirts and skirted tops, smile a
lot. Do yoga in the privacy of my own home. I can deal with the spread.
Then there are the little physical things that come to make
their homes in my body and seem to think it's a permanent move. The stiff hip
joint. The tail-bone pain. The shoulder that just doesn't quite rotate like it
used to, the digestion that has begun to assert its preferences tyrannically.
All of these have been relatively easy to accept because of the bigger Illness
that I've struggled with the past few years that Seems To Be Waning
Significantly. I will never stop rejoicing about that, so a few little creaks
and whines are liveable.
And now we are approaching the area that I am finding it
difficult to make peace with: The Sag.
Now, I don't mind the sag in my body, in general, all that
much. (See "Middle-Aged Spread," above.) We'll skip over that in the
very way that people's eyes skip over saggy middle-aged people in general. It's
the facial sag that I'm having a problem with. Bad is the area around my eyes,
because I find my face aching at the end of the day from trying to keep my skin
from sliding off my skull by sheer eye-brow strength. I'm now discovering why
so many old people have those horizontal wrinkles on their foreheads. It's
because they, like me, are trying to peer out from under their saggy upper
eyelids by arching their eyebrows all day. I can stand in front of the mirror
and lift my entire face up my skull by sliding my forehead up with my fingers.
"Face lift" begins to take on meaning, begins to be tempting . . .
surely it's not just vanity if I am aiding my field of vision, right?
Dr. hubby assures me that, if it gets bad enough, the
insurance will even pay for a little eyelid surgery because it "interferes
with vision." I'm thinking I might could justify that one . . .
But the thing I hate most, my nemesis, is the WATTLE.
Now, I've always had a little wattle. (I prefer the more kind
term, "weak chin.") And I've always hated it. And a tiny little bit
of chipmunk in the lower cheeks. But there is no denying it these days: I have
a full-blown, hideous wattle and JOWLS. These are not things I can hide with
makeup. These are not things for which there is a helpful haircut. (Let's see.
Now that my hair is long, I can pull it together under my chin. Could I put a
scrunchy there? A tiny, Jack Sparrow-like braid? No?) Not even heavy-duty
turtle-necks will help. It is there, like a tumor, like an extra limb, like a
parasite, sucking away any dignity or claim to looking young that I had left.
It Will Not Be Denied.
And it eats at my mind, telling me that plastic surgery can't
be all that evil . . .
The solution to all this is, of course, to learn what old
age is designed to teach us all: that our bodies don't matter, that God wants
us to look out at others and love them for their spirits and not worry what
they are thinking about us, that love brings more joy and more power than
glamour, that nothing matters except that we are right with God and our fellow
man.
Yeah, yeah. But I could be more right without my wattle. I'm
just saying.
