It happened one day when I was walking past a gallery wall of family photos. I saw the way my eyebrows furrowed as I smiled in the most recent photograph, and I stopped. The printed picture of me did not match the picture I had in my head. The smooth skin on my forehead and delicate facial features now seemed somehow both sharper and slacker. My jawline was not as pronounced. My eyes looked more tired.
I had a baby on my hip and another child standing behind me. My husband to my left had similar crow’s feet starting to settle in, and he also looked tired. I attribute a number of the new wrinkles to our children. I think I aged at least five years in my face in my first year of motherhood. Of course my children are worth all the wrinkles and under-eye bags, but this is not an essay about parenting. It’s an essay about the cosmetics of aging and how much I did not think it would bother me, did not want it to bother me, and yet it does.
I never really noticed wrinkles until I turned 30. I never understood why people complained about them or worried about how their faces looked until that day I walked past the gallery walk. Then wrinkles became one of the only things I could see—on my face, anyway. I would take my index fingers and pull at the “angry 11’s” in between my eyes, trying to smooth them out. I started paying attention to how many people got Botox and began googling Botox providers. I began spending hundreds of dollars on skincare, lotions and potions and serums that would promise to resurface my skin and fill fine lines. I would compare the creases in my forehead and around my lips to those of other people my age. I stopped drinking through straws as I noticed laugh lines getting bigger. I wore special forehead patches that promised to freeze skin into place and prevent wrinkles (the natural alternative to Botox, the marketing claimed).
I do not have any grand conclusion or moral here. I still do not like my wrinkles, and while I appreciate that they show that I have lived and experienced life, and I appreciate that I will have many more wrinkles in the coming decades, I would keep my 25-year-old face if I could Of course youth is relative, and one day I will want this 35-year-old face. I wish I did not care so much, I wish I were not so bothered, but here I am. I now understand how people can say that the look in the mirror and do not recognize the old person staring back at them. I get why people go under the knife and try hosts of other cosmetic procedures.
Maybe the most disturbing part of seeing these wrinkles appear is the realization that I am not immune from aging. I am not special; aging will happen to me to, just as it does to everyone else. Part of aging is letting go of grandiose beliefs of exceptionality. I am not the exception. I follow the path and familiar scripts of everyone who has come before me. I repeat the same cliches that almost all other middle-aged women say in front of the mirror.
And maybe that right there is the lesson: not everything has to have an upside or a silver lining. Some things just are without serving a large purpose. Wrinkles happen, whether I am embrace them or not.
I am smiling as I read this as a 76 year old.