“Well, we’re not old,” I said, a thirteen on your one-to-ten defensiveness scale. Old is a relative term of course, but I think it’s safe to define it as “twenty or more years older than you are when being asked to define it.”
“No, we’re midlife,” my bitch of a sister informed me cavalierly. I am forty-five, and Laurie is forty-seven. Were we past our best-by dates already? And if we were, when had that happened?
“Mom’s midlife,” I contended.
“No, Mom’s old. We’re midlife,” Laurie insisted.
“Well, your vagina is older than mine,” I spat.
Was it hot in there or was it just me?
I did not like that word, midlife. For one thing, it sounded like midwife, which immediately conjured images of childbirth, a process I found more than a little traumatizing. Plus it sort of implied that I was halfway to the grave, which surely couldn’t be the case. The roadmap of lines on my face and my possibly withered vagina notwithstanding (I never did check*), I didn’t feel one bit different than I did when I was twenty-five and staying up all night dancing on bar stools. Well, maybe a tad less energetic. And probably a little more impatient. And I guess slightly more edgy. And definitely more confident. And a lot more squishy and “I don’t give a shit.” But other than those things, exactly the same.
The other issue I was having was that everyone knows midlife isn’t a noun; it’s an adjective—created to modify a single word: crisis. “Midlife crisis,” we whisper when we hear our friend Gina is having a fling with her gardener or Eve’s getting an eye lift. We’re half jealous (we want free hedge trims and perky eyes, too, damn it!), half relieved that we’re not the ones experiencing what some might consider the equivalent of a grown-up temper tantrum.
I was almost definitely positive that I wasn’t having any sort of crisis, but just to be sure, I Googled it. On the UK’s Daily Telegraph website I found a handy list of “signs you’re having a midlife crisis,” and for the record, inspecting your vagina for signs of listlessness was not on the list. Here are a few items that were (note that some may be paraphrased because Brits love using fancy spelling for words like realise that my spellcheck feature does not like):
Wishing for a simpler life. [Stares at unread stack of Real Simple magazines in horror.]
Looking up old flames on Facebook. Crap.
Compulsively reminiscing about your childhood. But catching fireflies and riding a bike without a helmet, you guys! That shit was awesome.
Obsessively comparing your appearance with your peers. Define “obsessively” please, Telegraph.
Discovering your hangovers are worse and last longer than they used to. Not if you keep drinking!
Revisiting vacation spots you went to as a child. But I already know how to get there!
Googling medical symptoms. Do young people not do this???
Tooling around town on a fancy new bike. Whew! Dodged a bullet there.
Taking up a new hobby. Does searching online for plastic surgery before-and-after pictures count, do you suppose?
Finding yourself easily distracted. Wait, what was I saying?
After I determined that at least by UK standards I had several of the symptoms of a classic midlife crisis, I proceeded to do something I generally try to avoid: I did some math. If I lived to be ninety, I would be squarely in the middle of my life. Even if I lived to ninety-five, I’d fall in the range. I’d pretty much have to reach a hundred and ten to even remotely be considered young by relative standards.
I’m not going to lie to you, my odds of living to a hundred and ten are slim. I grew up on a steady diet of Kraft macaroni and cheese and cream cheese and jelly on Wonder Bread sandwiches. When I wasn’t cramming my piehole with such healthy, gourmet delights, I was very busy secondhand chain-smoking four packs of unfiltered Kool cigarettes a day. I did this religiously for the first eighteen years of my life, indulging on airplanes, in the car, and right at the kitchen table. Sometimes during dinner. I partied my ass off before, during, and after college.* I consume far more Chardonnay and cheeseburgers than the Surgeon General recommends, and I can count on one hand how many “good night’s sleep” I get in a year. In other words, I’d be one lucky fucker if I were only halfway to the finish line here.
I probably don’t need to point out that midlife isn’t what it used to be, either. When my parents were my age, they were just kicking back and starting to enjoy the fruits of a lifetime of labor. They were empty nesters on the verge of retirement. They had fat bank accounts, their house was paid off, and their biggest annual stressor was deciding whether to take a beach vacation or a ski vacation or both. They owned a lake house and several boats, and had already put two kids through college. (Neither of them came from money, by the way, and Dad was a high school dropout. They just started young, busted their humps, and finished young.) My mom had a round tummy and droopy boobs and a furrow between her eyes but so did all of her friends, so none of them worried or even thought about these things much. Mom took ceramics classes and made homemade ice cream, and Dad spent long hours sanding the teak on his boats. They had free time pouring out of their ears. They may have been fulfilled or they may not have been, but they certainly weren’t buying books on the subject or attending happiness seminars or wondering if their junk was young and fetching enough. If they felt any angst about being in this halfway place, they drowned it in whiskey tonics and went blindly about the business of life.
Compare their forties to, say, mine. I’ve just secured a fabulous new thirty-year loan that I hope (but occasionally doubt) I will live to see paid off. Most days I work from five a.m. to eight p.m., taking breaks to shop for healthy, organic, locally sourced groceries that can be prepared in fifteen minutes or less, squeeze in the occasional workout, organize the overabundance of crap that never stops parading into my house, wash endless loads of laundry, enjoy an occasional shag, and shuffle my kids to volleyball games and gymnastics classes and tennis practice and hip-hop performances—all while managing to check my email and text messages approximately every thirteen seconds. I take crappy writing assignments I don’t want to so I can send my kids to summer camps—and not the chichi sleep-away kind, either; I’m talking regular old day camps. When my husband and I talk about retirement, it’s almost always in the context of a “what we’d do if we won the lottery” conversation and hardly ever rooted in anything resembling reality. I watch my peers getting chemical peels and hair extensions and lip injections and tummy tucks, and I silently beg them to just fucking stop so that the playing field might be a little more level. I stand in the mirror a lot and do this thing where I tug my facial skin up and out toward my temples, and I smirk at the unlined but clownish facsimile of my younger self staring back at me. I still wear very short skirts with very high heels, but I do this knowing that it’s not entirely appropriate. Fortunately, I don’t give a shit.
I guess getting older does have its benefits.
CHAPTER 1
Aging Gracefully and Other Things I Know Nothing About
You can tell a lot about a woman by peering into her medicine cabinet. Unlatch that door, and you’ll know immediately, for instance, if she is prone to cold sores or wears contact lenses or has trouble falling asleep. You’ll recognize right away if she occasionally gets gas, pops allergy pills, or battles athlete’s foot or yeast infections. And you can discern, with little uncertainty, just how desperate she is to stop the relentless march of time—the one that’s hell-bent on leaving muddy footprints across her face before beelining straight down to her ankles.
If a burglar broke into my house, he’d be a fool to ignore my medicine cabinet. There’s probably several hundred dollars’ worth of lotions and potions in there, and each and every one is emblazoned with the word ANTI-AGING or something synonymous. I’ve got products that promise to plump, refine, resurface, tighten, and tone; creams designed to minimize pores and dry up
“adult acne” and fade age spots and, if all of those fail, hide the lot of them. The wrinkle fighters take up two deep shelves on their own. My shampoo and conditioner don’t just fight age, they defy it, people; even my toothpaste guarantees a younger-looking smile (which is totally awesome because I can’t think of anything hotter than a forty-five-year-old sporting braces).
Here’s the worst part: If you added up the money I’ve spent stockpiling my anti-aging arsenal over the years, you could probably buy a brand-new Range Rover with it. Which really pisses me off, seeing as I am here to tell you that shit did not work. I like to cling to the vague possibility that without it, I’d look even older and more haggard, but unless I find I have a separated-at-birth twin out there who hasn’t been indulging in these luxuries, it’s not like there’s any way to find out. Even with dutiful use of my overpriced haul, I have not-so-fine lines around my eyes, deep grooves on either side of my mouth, and a constellation of spots that may have something to do with my liver dotting the better part of my face.
This did not happen overnight. Although I worked hard on aging my skin all throughout adolescence and early adulthood (think: iodine-laced baby oil and monthly unlimited tanning bed memberships*), I’d say the visible decline started around thirty and has been steadily accelerating ever since. It’s one of those things you don’t really notice—like your kids getting taller or your house paint starting to fade and chip—until you stumble across a photo of what it used to look like. Every time I see a picture that was taken ten or seven or even two years ago, I have exactly the same thought: Wow, I look so young. This is when I do the skin-tugging thing—up and out until it’s taut across my face—and marvel at the difference several months and a few millimeters makes.
There was a time in my life when I didn’t think twice about having my picture taken. After all, pictures are just captured moments; what was there to think about? It turns out a lot—like lighting and shadows and angles,* to name a few. After a certain age, if all of those elements aren’t perfectly aligned in your favor, you wind up looking like Ebenezer Scrooge or Nick Nolte in every shot.
It never fails. I’ll get all decked out and done up and think I look pretty damned good, and then someone will whip out their iPhone and snap a picture, and I’m like, “Wow, who’s that old lady who jumped in front of me right as you were clicking the—OMG.” Is my mirror broken? Do I need stronger glasses? Why do I look like a bloated corpse? Delete, delete, delete. I delete a lot of pictures. I realize that there’s always Photoshop, but that’s a double-edged sword because if you go around posting all of these doctored shots all over Facebook, when people see you in person, they’re going wonder what the hell happened. It’s a lose-lose.
Recently my literary agent wondered casually if I had a different headshot I’d like to use on my books and in my marketing materials. “You don’t like the one I’m using?” I asked her, surprised. I loved that picture! What was wrong with her?
“Well, um, it’s just . . .” she stammered. “When was that picture taken?”
“I think it was 2005 or 2006,” I told her. “Why? Is that bad?”
“You might consider using a more recent one,” she suggested gently.
Well, why would I go and do a thing like that? I knew I’d never take another picture that good again, because I’d never look that good again. Oh right, the in-person letdown. I mentioned this conversation weepily to my husband.
“You’re still hot for your age,” he insisted, as if this was consolation. To me this response sounded like “I’d still do you,” which is fairly meaningless since I’m the only one he’s got clear and reliable access to for those purposes.
Still, I was almost inclined to believe him until a recent shopping trip to Bed Bath & Beyond. I wandered into the magnifying mirror aisle where I made the mistake of peering into one of these tools of the devil. The one I chose, purely by accident, had a ring of fluorescent lightbulbs all around it and a sticker boasting MAGNIFIES TWELVE TIMES right on the glass. In retrospect I should have known this would be a bad idea, after long-ago learning that the smaller I make my pictures, the better I look in them. (Postage-stamp size is ideal, but good luck finding frames.) But before I could stop to consider the wisdom of what I was doing, I pushed my nose toward the thing until my entire face came into overblown focus.
I have never been so horrified in my life. There were black rogue eyebrow hairs growing an inch outside of where any respectable brow hair should otherwise be, and the pores on my nose looked like dirty, cavernous sinkholes. There were eraser-size patches of dry, scaly skin everywhere and a subway map of tiny red veins around my nose. I had a fucking moustache—one that any fifteen-year-old boy would envy. How had I never noticed any of this before? I grabbed my youngest daughter, who was shopping with me, and thrust her perfect, dewy face in front of the glass. Magnified a dozen times it looked even more dewy and perfect, if that was at all possible. I suspect deep down I was hoping to find that the evil mirror had a handy knack for finding and highlighting flaws, but I realized in that moment that it simply made whoever peered into it more of what she already was. Which in my case was a middle-aged woman in serious need of attention.
Naturally, I bought it. I love/hate that thing. I spend far too much time staring into it, and it makes me pick at things I shouldn’t, but when I pluck my brows and do my makeup with that mirror and then turn the light off and flip the mirror to the unmagnified side, I’m usually pleasantly surprised by the results—compared to how I looked in floodlit, big-screen size, in any case. So at least there’s that.
Unfortunately, now that leaving the house barefaced no longer feels like a viable option, I get to enjoy this experience a lot. I say unfortunately because I do not really like makeup. I can tolerate putting it on, but I hate taking it off, and with the exception of a brief blue eye shadow phase in the ’80s, I’ve never been much into experimenting with it. Plus I really prefer the natural look. Dolly Parton famously said, “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” I’d like to add that it takes an arsenal of makeup to look un-made-up if you’re over forty and also want to appear halfway presentable.
Because the rules change as we get older, like it or not. Do a quick Internet search for “makeup to look younger” if you don’t believe me. See those 178 million results? Exactly. You don’t want to actually click on any of the links, of course, because your head might explode when you see all of the “here’s how not to look like an old bat” articles alongside pictures of fourteen-year-old models.
To spare you that indignity, I’ll distill the drill for you here: First, you need a makeup primer. Without it, your foundation will slide right off of your no-longer-supple skin and into a puddle on the floor, leaving you naked faced and sobbing, which is only a good look for Kristen Bell when her boyfriend surprises her by bringing home a sloth.* Speaking of foundation, yes, you need it, and yours better have light-reflecting particles in it, because youthful skin naturally reflects light (think Keira Knightley), while old skin sucks it up like a thirsty ShamWow (think Glenn Close as Cruella de Vil or the old guy with the pitchfork in Grant Wood’s iconic American Gothic). Next, step away from the powder. I know you’re all gung ho about that mineral crap because you saw it on QVC and it’s supposed to be good for your skin and it has sunscreen right in it and you bought the fancy goat-hair brush to apply it with and everything—but after a certain point, powder is not your friend. Whereas a nice dusting of the stuff used to be a fine way to “set” your makeup, now it’s a no-no because a matte finish highlights wrinkles—as does powder blush—so you’re better off switching to a cream formula. (Which apparently you must apply with your fingers and above your cheekbones, not on or heaven forbid below them, so as not to draw attention to your sunken cheeks.) Give your babysitter or teenage niece your black eyeliner, and replace it with a softer brown model—the pros say its “much less jarring”—and never, ever put any shade of liner along
your lower lashes, unless for some reason you’re trying to accentuate the titanic dark circles you’ve got under there. Oh, and that lip liner you love? Use it, and you might as well tack a strip of marquee lights under your nose to highlight your craggy kisser. Add some pale, plumping gloss to your lips—never anything dark or flat—and a few fake eyelashes (yours aren’t half what they used to be, sister), and you’re as close to ready to face the world as you’re going to get.
I mock this advice, but I also have to admit that I’ve tried it all. I bought a twenty-dollar egg-shaped makeup sponge because some famous makeup artist called it the “fountain of youth” in a magazine article. (It’s a sponge. Shaped like an egg.) I’ve stopped using powder, and I switched to lighter lips and bought a brown liner. I prime the shit out of my skin before doing all of this, and sometimes, if I’m going out somewhere really special, I wear fake eyelashes. (When you buy them somewhere like MAC or Sephora instead of the drugstore, they’ll put them on for you for free, which will save you a lot of cursing and also is a hell of a lot easier than curling your own anemic lashes and attempting to apply mascara, trust me.)
I was visiting my sixty-nine-year-old aunt Linda recently when I discovered the hands-down surefire way to being young and beautiful forever: Be Italian. Seriously, those damned Italians don’t age. Unfortunately, I’m sort of screwed here. Although both of my parents sported plenty of Pisano blood, their English-Irish genes clearly dominated in all of their kids. Which means we share the same relatively fair skin that’s prone to both sunburns and wrinkles. In other words, none of us is getting carded to buy booze anymore. Don’t get me wrong; we don’t quite resemble raisins yet. We just don’t look all that much younger than our full-blooded Italian aunt with her still-gorgeous olive complexion. So, if there’s any way you can be Italian when midlife hits, I highly recommend it.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 2