"How come your face looks so old?"
Facing aging with some unexpected assistance from kids.
At some point in the past couple years, the outlandish sequin jackets and rainbow stacked heels and chromatic eyeshadow that used to populate my Instagram ads were replaced by sad, dull IG stories shilling Botox and off-brand Ozempic and online courses to become a certified menopause coach.
I always knew that at some vague point in the future I’d probably have to consider whether or not I wanted to try and slow the aging process with needles and scalpels and semaglutides, but that future point always seemed juuuuust a little further off.
Until.
This past week, I attended a poetry reading hosted by my second grader’s teacher — an end-of-year celebration to show off all the progress the students had made since last August. I was lucky enough (?) to sit next to the toddler sibling of one of my daughter’s classmates, and after he grew bored of the seven-year-olds haltingly reading their poems into a crackling wireless mic (“How come he is taking so long?”… “Why is she talking so quiet?”), he turned his attention to me.
“How come your face looks so old?”
The last couple of words were somewhat muffled by his mortified mother’s hand as she tried to seal his lips shut.
I pretended I didn’t hear him.
But when I got home, I stared hard in the mirror. I hadn’t slept well in about a week, and the baseball hat I was wearing cast shadows over my face, emphasizing the deep hollows under my eyes and the lines around my mouth.
And because it suddenly seemed necessary to catalog the signs of aging not just on my face but all over, I cocked my head, pulled up my shirt, and poked at the soft bulge peeking out the top of my yoga pants.
Sigh.
So, a few days later, I found myself in the pristine, sunlit waiting room of Westlake Dermatology — their many billboards featuring dewy women with taught tummies had finally gotten the best of me, and I’d scheduled an appointment for a “cosmetic consultation.”
There was nothing they could do for my dark circles besides sell me some creams, but I might benefit from a tiny bit of filler. And I would be a good candidate for CoolSculpting, but the “thick, fibrous fat” they gently pinched on my tummy would most likely take three full treatments for me to see the 20 percent reduction the brochure promised. I’d probably see even better results if I added on a few CoolTone treatments to help tighten my abs and close the separation down the middle of my abdominal wall, which was caused by the two pregnancies that had stretched my belly out far and round and left my muscles slack.
Afterward, I sat in the car staring at the quote they’d printed out for me, tucked inside a glossy, white folder. With their May special discount, I’d have to spend just a little more than $10,000 to trim down my belly bulge.
A bit relieved that finances had made the decision for me, I thought to myself, “Well, veggies and exercise it is!”
That night as I lay in bed I reached over to my nightstand and picked up the children’s book that I had bought my daughter at an antique store in sleepy Johnson City, TX the weekend before.
I felt my tummy constrict as I tried not to cry, but eventually the lines around my eyes crinkled deeply, and my lips pursed thin and straight, and tears dripped from my chin as I read this passage in The Velveteen Rabbit:
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because when you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
…
The Rabbit sighed. He thought it would be a long time before this magic called Real happened to him. He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.
Now anytime I start to worry about growing shabby, I will think of the Velveteen Rabbit.
I will remember that the children who stretched out my tummy also expanded my capacity to experience tremendous love and pain and sorrow and joy and uncertainty and perseverance and self-discovery.
I will remember that I don’t break easily.
I will remember that I am not just “aging,” I am becoming Real.
And I will remember that I can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.
Hi friends, I know it has been a while since my last post! The past year of my life has been full of personal upheaval. But I am getting my feet back under me and am excited to return with more regular content of all kinds. For a peek into what’s been going on with me, you can listen to this interview I gave Cecily Sailer on her podcast “Your Creative and Magical Life.”