No. 128: When it Comes to Nipping, Tucking, Injecting & Aging Gracefully, Where do You Draw the Line?

Because at 35, there are lines.

When I started writing this last year, I had faith worked into the title. Here, ten months older and wiser, I’ve taken it out. This topic is prickly enough without adding in an element of eternity or right vs. wrong.

I’m spoiling the punch line and starting off by saying I have no judgement and no secret scroll of confirmed right answers. What you’re about to witness is a thirty-five year old’s reflections from a feeling rather than a truth. The truth: I’m aging in a way that shows for the first time. The feeling: No one else is. This is the thing you shouldn’t technically do, by the way, right? Draw attention to the insecurity? Direct all the eyeballs to the flaw? I have no problem putting my flaws and fears on display in this safe space and should you care to point and laugh at the space between my eyebrows, you’re more than welcome.

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I turned thirty-five this month and while I have only started to notice changes in my own skin very recently, those who warned me that things begin to change at a whole new level once you hit 34 were correct. I find myself asking God and Google impossible questions on a regular basis. Does Half-Black crack? Is there a non-toxic miracle product that will slow the pace of the inevitable and am I vain or self-important to look into it? Am I ignoring aging or obsessed with it?

Is age obsession woven into us? Personally, my age awareness began incredibly early. Movies and TGIF trained me to believe the tween and teen goal was to look older and in this single area alone, I reigned supreme. When I was a six-foot tall fourteen year old with bronze, tone muscles and acrylic nails, this was something I was proud of. My friends would say, “can you believe she’s only fourteen?” While introducing me. A party trick. They’d point out their chubby cheeks and teeny features, the way they were still undeniably a kid.

I was engaged at twenty, married at twenty-one and since my twenty-fourth birthday, my time, my body and maybe my youth have belonged to my babies. If you were to survey all of me—the wiry grey hairs stubbornly sprouting despite the red dye, the small lines on my forehead and lips, the stomach protruding from an abdominal wall that still has a three finger split in the middle, the varicose veins like Twizzlers trapped under the surface—you might have guessed that last fact already.

Here, at thirty-five, I’m confronted with thoughts of aging and anti-aging more than I thought I would be. All over the mom’s groups for our city I see people asking where they can find GLP-1s, trusted Injectors and the best Aesthetic Surgeons. Each request has hundreds of responses which leads me to ask, is everyone taking weight loss injections except me? It feels that way from a quick scan of most rooms. I rarely see foreheads that move anymore, both on the internet and in real life. There is a certain lip shape I have come to expect on the majority of faces I come across online and in real life and many mothers flaunt the same perky chest and elongated belly-button that accompanies the most popular current surgical treatment, the “Mommy Makeover”.

As I stand in the mirror after the shower on a day when I’ve come in contact with all the faces, all the bodies and all the thoughts, the swirling starts. There’s an uprising as I stand applying almond oil to bumpy legs I barely recognize, smoothing lotion over a sea of excess stomach skin and tapping moisturizer onto under eyes that are changing. As my gaze switches between avoiding myself in the mirror and fixating on something I don’t want to accept, I know there’s work to be done. Not on the body, on the mind.

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No. 35 Forever Undergrad

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My earliest memories were spent obsessing over the concept of beauty, likely because I was—by a landslide—objectively less attractive than my four stunning sisters. This was part of the root for my children’s book, Left Out, after all. I dreamed of being beautiful and was consumed with the thought. I’d sneak half-hour segments of E! Network on the teeny white television on our kitchen counter to watch Fashion Shows and interviews while my parents were asleep. My mom, a lover and collector of luxury makeup and armed with an incredible fashion sense, was a subscriber to all the glossy magazines. No matter how many times we’d move, Harpers Bazaar, Vogue, Elle and InStyle showed up right on schedule for the entirety of my youth and make a house feel like a home. I’d flip through the pages and choose who I wanted to look like, taking note of face shape and hairlines, teeth and cheekbones.

It was as if I was conducting a study. In all the glossy magazine research, model admiring and people watching of my young childhood, I gathered that there were a select few who were born with nearly otherworldly beauty. Some people just had the gift. In Illinois—and I’m sure it was this way all around the world—there were the four or five abnormally stunning people in every school, the four or five abnormally stunning mothers between school and sports and other than that, that level of beauty was reserved for the celebrities we saw in magazines and movies. The untouchables.

I wasn’t born with the gift and accepted the conclusion of my research with a hard gulp.

That was, until I moved to California my freshman year of high school. While, like Chicago, there was beauty radiating from every face, there were more like thirty abnormally stunning girls in my school, and don’t even get me started on the mothers. Let me tell you, these women were no strangers to a skincare routine. They were regulars at Soulcycle and Reformer Pilates studios. There was something in the water in California and it didn’t take long for me to learn it was called self-care, sacrifice and a standing appointment with an injector.

This was also a memorable and transformative time because of a few other factors. For one, the genesis of Myspace and Facebook meant we started seeing photos of one another more than ever. In years before, if a friend of mine wanted to see photos of a trip, a party or even a ten-percent-more-fun-than-usual weekend, it would require multiple steps. I had to take photos on my disposable camera, get them developed at Walgreens, put them in a photo album and just pray that friend would be allowed to come over soon to flip through them. Now, we needed photos to post as often as possible. We had cameras in our phones. We weren’t just doing our makeup or dressing up to hang out, we were doing our makeup and dressing up to have the moment memorialized in online photo albums available for peer and public consumption.

At this same time, my Dad became head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Let me tell you, seeing the wives and cheerleaders close-up on a regular basis further impressed upon me that things were changing. These women were ten years older than me and held a beauty I just couldn’t imagine possessing. Most faces had a similar thread—a sameness in the fullness of the mouth, cheeks, lips and breasts and thinness in the nose, the stomach, the limbs. Everyone still looked somewhat like their own person, though. It was simply overwhelming to comprehend the perfection that felt reserved for celebrities was now upon the faces and bodies of everyone in my orbit.

A few years later, I found myself in a new, yet familiar world. At twenty one, I married O who was in year six of his own NFL career. Months into the season, at the very end of our Wednesday Wives Team Bible Study, one of my friends asked the wife of our Team Chaplain (and my Pastor,) “is it sinful to get implants and a tummy tuck?” She had given birth to four children and was ready to enter into the next phase of life looking a bit more like she did at the start of the last one. As someone who has wanted the cushion of a full chest to feel more feminine her entire life, this was a fascinating question to me. If you read here often, you know I have a very strong moral compass and a guilty conscience. What is fine for someone else is rarely fine for me which means I build tight walls around myself that arguably don’t need to be there. You better believe I sat up straighter on the couch and fixed my glasses to ensure crystal clear hearing in anticipation of the answer.