“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I found a long gray hair growing out of my chin that appeared overnight.
—CLAIRE
There’s an old Charles Schwab commercial I love where a clearly jaded sales manager is telling his team to go out and sell some patently crappy stocks. After he mentions the courtside playoff tickets for the rep who manages to unload the most, he ends his pep talk with, “Let’s put some lipstick on this pig.” It’s a great visual and now something I think about a lot, especially when I happen to be putting on lipstick. I’ll study myself in the mirror afterward and think, Is this better now? Or was it better before? I think it was better before. In fact, after employing a dozen or more methodical application methods based on the aforementioned anti-aging makeup commandments, more often than not I’m positive this pig looked better without any lipstick at all.
The key seems to be to start with a better-looking pig. (And please know that I am not calling anyone but myself a pig in what’s become an admittedly fucked-up analogy here.) Barring plastic surgery—which I am not currently considering for a host of financial, emotional, practical, and irrational reasons I will detail later that include but are not limited to death and winding up looking like Carrot Top—I’m left with two alternatives: convince the rest of the planet to stop going under the knife so we can be wrinkly and splotchy and patently past our primes together (and let’s just face it right now that that’s never going to happen), or figure out what I can do now—on the sly, for very little money, and with no risk of death or my husband finding out—to look as young and perky as I possibly can. Fine, there’s a third option: I could just say screw it and stop wearing makeup or even making an effort, but I’m way too shallow for that, so we’re back to the two.
Since it’s cheap and I’ve never heard of anyone exfoliating themselves to death, I’ve started scrubbing my skin daily ever since the president of the American Academy of Dermatology said to me in a magazine interview, “I can tell the minute a patient walks into my office whether or not she exfoliates. The ones who do typically look ten years younger than their age.” Ten years, you guys. That’s your face-lift right there! So now I dutifully scour my face until it is bright red every single night. Sometimes my extra-super-gentle moisturizer stings when I put it on afterward, so I am pretty sure this means I’m doing a great job.
I’ve also tried to stop being sucked in by shiny magazine ads for fancy face creams with headlines like “Proven to Reduce Wrinkles up to 89%,” because like you I am smart, and I recognize that the “up to” in there means “anything less than,” which includes zero. Plus we all know that any product you can buy over-the-counter doesn’t do squat, because if it did, we would all look like Megan Fox. Think about it. So no more crap. I wash with $10-a-gallon Cetaphil and a rough washcloth, moisturize with coconut oil, and squirrel away the money I’m not spending on overpriced promises for the day they open that drive-through, painless, incision-free, super-affordable, no-downtime face-lift center.
(What the hell do you mean nobody is working on that yet? If you’re a scientist, would you kindly gather your smarty-pants friends together and get on that? The clock is ticking over here. The Mars rover can wait.)
A while ago I read that although side sleeping generally is recommended for postural alignment purposes, sleeping on your back is the secret if you want smoother skin.* In fact, the American Academy of Dermatology insists that people like me who enjoy lying belly down and smushing their faces into a pillow night after night will pay for it with permanent, lasting lines. (They liken the effects to what a shirt that’s been folded in the bottom of your dresser drawer for weeks or years looks like when you pull it out. Even after you wear it for several hours, if you don’t iron it, those folds never really smooth out.) But I’m a stomach sleeper, always have been. I try to assume the preferred pose; really, I do. And I usually can handle about thirty seconds of staring at the ceiling before I have to flip to my favored facedown position. Supposedly silk or satin pillowcases can help because they allow skin to slip right over the surface rather being forced into folds, but who wants to be sliding all over their bed all night? Plus I love my Egyptian cotton pillowcases, and also that shiny, silky shit is just a little too Hugh Hefner for me.
If you’re like me and refuse to drape your bed in porno film fabric, there’s an exhaustive menu of “minimally invasive” remedies that promise to help mitigate these pesky signs of aging. They’ve got lasers and peels and pulsed lights and sonic lifts and cell freezing and radiofrequency therapies and a battery of injectables you can squeeze into just about any groove or contour you’ve got. Most of these things can be done on your lunch hour, and you can go right back to work, and the biggest risk is that somebody might think you snuck in a quick power nap because you look so goddamned refreshed.
I’ve spent hours online marveling at the before-and-after photos promoting every nonsurgical anti-aging treatment there is, but the problem I have with them is twofold: The first issue I have is that they’re all temporary. I’ve endured the sensation of burning rubber bands smacking my face and lived for ten days looking like a leper to rid myself of some unattractive sun damage. I danced on my coffee table when the dark spots finally fell off and left a swath of pristine, unmarred skin in their wake. Then I wept hot, angry tears when those damned spots made a triumphant return just a few months later. I’ve injected a potentially deadly neurotoxin into my facial muscles and enjoyed seeing the skin above my brows turn as smooth as a river at dawn for three whole months before my face resumed its former ability to express emotion.* I still do it on occasion, but to have a year-round line-free forehead would cost more than a grand a year (and possibly my marriage; see below), so if you see me sporting particularly thick bangs, you’ll know why.
The second problem I have with these treatments is my husband. See, he is 110 percent against all of them. He thinks I’m “beautiful the way I am,” a statement I am inclined to believe because I’m the one who buys his reading glasses in ever-increasing strengths, so I am almost positive he can barely even see me anymore. And while I know he’s not the boss of me and I bring in my fair share of our family’s income, I long ago gladly turned over our collective financial management to him, which means he gets to put the kibosh on spending he deems unnecessary. He swears he’s anti-anti-aging simply because I don’t need it, but I know it’s because he’s super-conservative and thinks it’s far more important to pay our mortgage and put aside a few bucks for the kids’ college educations and to set it up so that we might not have to work until the day we drop dead at our desks than to have a hotter, younger-looking wife. So I’ve acquiesced. I’ve also made it patently clear that if we find ourselves on the receiving end of a financial windfall, he’s taking the kids to Disney Land on his own, because I’m checking into the nearest medispa for at least three weeks.
Until that day, I will keep doing what I’m doing, which is mostly exfoliating and waiting.
CHAPTER 2
I Feel Bad about My Knees
After the getting-closer-to-death bit and having to learn all new makeup rules, the third worst part about aging is watching your body fall apart before your very eyes. (I figured we’d get the vanity crap over with early in this book, and then we can get to other fun stuff like figuring out how we’re going to pay for our funerals and the likelihood remote possibility that we all drink too much.) It seems like every single day I notice something—a bump, a mole, an extra chin, a three-inch hair growing out of my ear—that I am almost positive wasn’t there yesterday. Then I feel bad because I didn’t think to appreciate the thing’s not being there when I was lucky enough not to be saddled with it.
Seriously, I know we’re all enlightened these days and we’re supposed to love and embrace our imperfections, which I would be happy to do if it weren’t totally impossible. Did you read Nora Ephron’s swan song, I Feel Bad about My Neck? I did, as so
on as it hit the shelves. With all due respect to the memory of the funniest woman ever to write a fake orgasm scene, when I read that title, I looked at my own reflection and thought, Really? Just your neck? What about your flabby arms? Your saggy, shapeless ass? Your spider veiny ankles? Your midsection that resembles a deflated balloon lying atop a pile of dead snakes? Your mushy, squishy muffin top? That area that you used to refer to as your décolletage that now looks like some sort of seagoing traffic map, with a cluster of creeks all flowing southward into one big river that dams up between your south-facing post-baby boobs? The back fat that spills over your bra strap, even if you’re at your lifetime-lowest weight? Good Lord, your feet?* (I don’t know about yours, but mine are a mess. Bunions, bone spurs, fallen arches, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, cracked heels, hammer toes—you name it, I’ve got it. My feet might be the reason those particular body parts are referred to as “dogs.” In fact, my awesome and loving but also brutally honest uncle Jack insists I should not be allowed to wear flip-flops in public.) And that was eight years ago. If I had to pick a single body part to bemoan and then write a book about it today, we’d be here a long time.
Just for fun, let’s start with cellulite. According to experts,* upward of 95 percent of women have it, and I am one of them. (Except, inexplicably, when I am naked in the fitting room at Anthropologie. I don’t know if it’s the lighting or the slight tilt they give to the mirrors, or maybe they’re pumping extra oxygen under the doors and I’m unwittingly stoned whenever I am in there, but honest to God I look like an airbrushed teenager in those fitting rooms. For obvious reasons, I am in there a lot.) I had a chance to get rid of my cottage cheese, too—not only would it have been free, but I actually would have gotten paid—but I turned it down.
Allow me to explain. As a freelance writer, I have written hundreds of beauty articles for women’s magazines over the years. When you do this for a living, cosmetics companies ship you truckloads of stuff to sample and review. Then if you write about it, the magazine pays you for your “research” and writing. The products are a nice perk, no doubt. If I lined up all of my free eyeliners end to end, they’d stretch from my house to the nearest Target (which, for the record, is thirty long miles away). Anyway, for a story on cellulite I was sent several thousand dollars worth of fancy skin-smoothing creams. I am not exaggerating. For weeks my office was a maze of boxes brimming with lotions and potions specially developed for every imperfect body part I own. One company even gifted me my very own endermologie machine—a $2,000 vacuum-like gizmo with a wand you simply “rubbed over any trouble spots” (as if there were but one or two!) a few times a week. Can you imagine? Smooth, dimple-free skin was within my grasp for the first time in my adult life. I couldn’t wait to get started.
I religiously vacuumed myself and applied these very expensive but free-to-me creams to my body, ready to watch those nasty dimples disappear. By “religiously” I mean I did this every single day. For three whole days.
Then I just sort of gave up.
Let me reiterate right here that I have cellulite. It’s not life threatening or anything, but I hate it and I wish I didn’t have it, and because of it I’m one of those gals who tucks her towel around her lower half to walk four feet from her lounge chair to the pool’s edge. But I made little more than a half-assed attempt to fix it, even when a purported fix literally was dropped into my lap. Was it because I secretly didn’t mind my lumpy, bumpy body? I can confidently and emphatically say no. Was the expected effort too great? I’ll remind you that all I had to do was vacuum myself and then rub a little pleasantly scented lotion onto my various pock-marked body parts on a quasi-regular basis. Was it because I secretly didn’t think these magic bullets would work? Maybe. But I had them and other people bought them and they cost a flipping fortune and surely they couldn’t hurt, so you’d think I’d at least give it a wholehearted whirl.
But I didn’t. I’d like to think that it’s because I have reached a wise, mature, and enlightened point in my life where I realize that I am more than the mere sum or state of my body parts. I’ve faced the realities of aging and embraced the truth that my body is here to transport me from one enjoyable activity to the next, not to serve as some specimen of impossible perfection or a hunk of meat to be alternately ogled or envied. I’ve learned to respect my physical form for what it does—houses and protects my vital organs, provides a handy hat rest, and makes impossibly beautiful babies—and not what it looks like. I’ve gazed at my naked self in the mirror and smiled at the woefully, wonderfully imperfect shape staring back at me, this vessel I was given to carry my soul and my memories from cradle to grave, and thanked my body for being such a kind and intrepid steward.
You didn’t actually buy a word of that, did you?
I said I’d like to think that’s why I didn’t use those stupid products. But since that’s a bunch of bullshit, I’ll tell you the truth: I was too damned lazy. Yes, I couldn’t be bothered to apply a combination of sucking and smearing in exchange for a twenty-year-old’s ass.
I know. I make me sick, too.
In my defense, I’ve never been the layaway type. When I want something, I want it now. I am the reason—well, not personally but people like me—that cosmetic surgery is an eleventy-trillion-dollar-a-year industry in the United States Sure, we could run to Hawaii and back (metaphorically, obviously) to lose our belly blubber. Or we could just ask a nice surgeon to make a discreet abdominal incision, jam his barbaric but effective cannula through it, and suck out that bothersome fat. That way we can be skinny by next Friday, which frankly seems an awfully long time away, but we suppose we can endure the wait.
If we are so inclined (and can find ten to eighty grand lying around, which, believe me, I have tried without success), we can fix our every last flaw, and relatively quickly. We can have our floppy tummies tucked, our thinning hair transplanted, our wispy lips and sinking eye sockets and hollow cheeks plumped with fillers (so round and youthful!). If our breasts and butts are as high and firm as ripe, hanging fruit, we can lay down for smoother, rounder, plumper earlobes. (I shit you not.) We can have our knees lifted, for fuck’s sake, another procedure I heard about (thanks Demi Moore!) that left me staring southward with the sad realization that I probably wasn’t looking hard enough to find body parts to loathe.
And while I don’t even hate to admit that I would do it all if I bled time and money—all of it!*—did you ever stop to think about how totally and irrefutably insane the whole thing is? Of course you didn’t, because everybody does it, and for the most part they look really good, too. (Except Donatella Versace, La Toya Jackson, Priscilla Presley, Melanie Griffith, Joan Van Ark, Janice Dickinson, and Mickey Rourke, all of whom can be immediately negated with a single full-body shot of fifty-one-year-old Demi.) But imagine for a moment that there’s an undiscovered civilization out there on the former-planet Pluto, and young Plutonians are studying modern-day Earthlings in all of their narcissistic glory.
“Ewwwwww, no freaking way,” screams Elborg. Elborg is a thirteen-year-old Plutonian sitting in her Universal Studies class, twirling her antennae and learning about faraway customs, like Easter and Hanukkah and face-lifts. “They cut the front of their heads open, snip away the extra skin, pull the rest of it really tight, and then sew it back together! And they think this makes them more attractive! Even though their faces all look the same and don’t match the rest of their bodies so they have to wear turtlenecks for the rest of ever! And get this: Sometimes humans die from the sleeping medicine, and they know this is a possibility, but they do it anyway! Wow, Earthlings are wacked. But a giant bunny who brings you chocolate and eight days of presents would be pretty cool.”
I don’t want anyone to cut my face open, ever. First of all, what if I died on the table, then everyone would know that I was vain and selfish, and I wouldn’t even be alive to defend myself. (And by “defend myself” I mean “blame everyone I know who did it before me a
nd made me feel old and ugly in comparison.”) Plus—and this part can bring me to tears, and I’m not even considering going under the knife—I’m a mom. I have young, innocent daughters who love me and think I’m beautiful and depend on me to drive them to volleyball and explain things like how tampons work that their father can’t or at least probably shouldn’t. I want them to love themselves at their age and mine, pimples and droopy knees and all. I want to meet their future husbands and hold their unborn babies and guilt them into picking me over their someday in-laws to spend holidays with, and it would be a shame to miss out on all of that just because my stomach skin looks like I stole it from a Shar-Pei and I’m getting a little jowly.
As a media professional, I hate it that people are always blaming the body-dissatisfaction epidemic on the unrealistic images presented in magazines and movies. Listen, it’s not the media’s fault. The media is just the delivery system. Blaming them (us) would be like blaming the hot dog if the ketchup was bad. The problem is obviously Hollywood, where people clearly have way more money than sense, and already gorgeous gals do shit like undergo ten plastic surgery procedures in a single day and apparently nearly die but still blab to People magazine that it was “totally worth it.”
Yes, Heidi Montag, I’m talking about you.
To quote every person on Twitter all day every day, WTF? In the People piece, Montag asks, “Who is anyone to judge me?” (She also goes on to confess that she “was an ugly duckling before” and adds that she’s “really excited for the world to see the new me, the real me,” two comments that make me want to punch her in the surgically perfect nose.) To answer her rather glib question: I judge you, honey. And I have every right to, because you—with your implant-enhanced peach of an ass and your tiny liposucked waist and your complete lack of nasolabial folds and your ridiculously perky boobs the size of my head—are raising the bar so impossibly high, at the tender age of twenty-seven, that the rest of us pretty much want to throw in the towel.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 3
