They say that you age gradually. It’s a lie. From my experience, you go to bed one night looking like you have looked for the past 20 years, then you wake up the next morning and there's a brown spot on your face you know wasn’t there yesterday. A week later you wake up and there's a deep crease in your forehead between your eyebrows that, until now, you’d only seen on your Aunty Mary. And, by-the-way, I'm pretty sure I know where that came from. I can be sitting thinking about nothing much, or even something pleasant, and someone will walk in the room and ask 'What's the matter?' and when I say that I don't know what they mean I am told I looked angry or upset, that I was frowning. Well, I guess that's just my face in repose.
I always believed that age spots and wrinkles would appear first as sort of a ghostly image of what was to come. That I would look in the mirror (the magnification side mind you) and if I looked hard enough I would see the faint hair-width of a crease that had started to form somewhere and I would know that I had about five years to go before it would become a full blown wrinkle. That the age spots would first make themselves known as a slight discoloration of a few cells and I would think, ‘oh-oh, that will be an age spot in a couple of years’. That way I could get used to the idea of it or maybe even nip it in the bud before it blossomed into it’s full blown glory. But no. I go to bed looking one way and when I stumble into the bathroom the next morning and peer in the mirror the shock of what is peering back knocks the last vestiges of sleep fuzz from my brain and a cold reality takes it’s place. I am aging. And fast.
I am going to turn 50 this month. Fifty. Half a century. I can’t wrap my head around it even though I have felt the weight of this birthday coming for the past 5 years. And I have been dreading it. The roots of this dread go back to something I discovered many years ago.
I used to buy Glamour Magazine every month back when I was 18 till I was about 27, at which time, with one child on my hip, another permanently wrapped around my right leg, and yet a third playing Lego on the kitchen table, I gave up on the notion of ever becoming Glamorous and quit buying it. Every issue had a page towards the back that featured an aging celebrity in 5 or 6 headshots, one for every decade of their lives from becoming famous to the present day. What always struck me, and this was the case for all although the time they featured Cary Grant is the one that is burned into my memory, is that in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s they looked pretty much the same. The hairstyles of the women changed but the faces hadn’t changed much at all. Even in their 50’s they were still looking pretty good. But O MY GOSH, the difference between the one in their 50’s and the one in their 60’s was nothing short of a complete shock. It was like all the aging they should have been doing gradually over the decades hit all at once in that 10 year span. The hair had greyed (or gone completely white in the case of Cary Grant), the face was a mass of liver spots and wrinkles, there were bags under the eyes and bags over the eyes….. it shocked me celebrity after celebrity, month after month. And it burned an awareness into my very soul that beauty ends somewhere in your 50’s.
So now I face turning 50 with the absolute knowledge that I am about to live the last few years where I have of any chance of looking good. That the gradual aging I thought I would do in the past two decades will hit all at once in this decade to come. And what’s worse, I seem to have a bit of a head start. I am overweight. I have skin tags sprouting up everywhere like mushrooms in the wild. I have been waging a battle with age spots on my face for a year now (thanks to endless sun tanning sessions in my foolish youth) with trips to the dermatologist where she blasts them with nitrogen. Some wrinkles have shown up, especially on my neck and chest in the most puzzling of formations until I realized they are from sleeping on my side. Now that is what I call the epitome of injustice. I can understand getting wrinkles from doing something you can control, like frowning too much. But from how I sleep? That’s just cruel.
I know I am going to look back in a decade when I face turning 60 and kick myself for not taking steps to give myself a good head start, like losing weight and using expensive face cream night and day. Today I did something I used to watch my mother do. I placed my forefingers on my cheekbones and my thumbs on my jaw and gently pushed the skin towards my hairline. It took 20 years off. So I guess there has been some drag and sag up to now but, trust me, it's nothing compared to that which is to come.
There just might be a facelift in my future. For sure there is Botox ahead; to erase that crease between my eyebrows and freeze my forehead into a bland look of disinterest. No more shall they ask 'what's the matter', but rather - 'are you listening to a word I am saying?' To which I will reply, 'Sure I am. I am just not getting any wrinkles over it!'
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