I don't know what happened over the last five years--whether it was bound to happen anyway or the pandemic just made it worse--but I feel like I have been aging at a rapid pace.
The challenging part for me is that for my entire life I have always been seen as much younger than I am. When I was a teenager I was forever mistaken for a tween. When I was in college I looked like a high schooler. When I was a young adult, people mistook me for a college student. And up through today usually people who don't know me think I'm much younger than I am. Often when my age gets out, someone will look at me and be like, "No way! I thought you were in your 30s!" I used to hate it, but somewhere in my 30s the tide shifted from it meaning that people didn't give me the respect I deserved to where they were just plain impressed by my lack of aging. It's nice, of course. But I feel like my looks are starting to betray me a bit.
The good news is that my hair is taking after my mom's side and holding steady. I've found maybe a handful of gray (or really blonde?) hairs over the years and that was it. I know I'm so lucky with that.
My face is where the problems start. I'm not super worried about smile lines. Eyes are almost impossible to manage, in part because my allergies will ensure I always have bags. Maybe someday I'll find a serum or something and see if that works. My forehead, which is already quite prominent on its own, is getting noticeably deeper lines, enhanced by a scar I got in the center of my forehead when I was eight. Remind me again why I grew out my bangs just in time to expose that area to the world as it aged? I am also getting a deep furrow between my eyebrows, and it has the extra nerve of being weirdly asymmetrical. I never thought I'd do injectables, but that one is bugging me. Speaking of eyebrows, all of the plucked hairs haven't stopped growing despite the world insisting they would, but yet other areas I've never touched are getting thinner, so I am trying to play with makeup to fix that oddity. Oh, and there's another scar on one brow (picked up a few years back courtesy of a really heavy car door) that makes shaping them extra hard. Good times. I have age spots aplenty (they could almost pass for freckles, but not really), and there are times where the sagging jowls get seen at just the wrong angle and I cringe.
My body is a bit of a mixed bag. Visually it's hanging in there, at least while clothed. My chest is still perky, which is great 364 days a year--with the exception of my mammogram, which hurts like heck because I have cysts and my breast tissue is dense so it's not like it's just a bunch of floppy fat. It also involves an extra ultrasound due to the difficulty of seeing through dense tissue. I do think they've gotten a little bigger in general despite my weight not changing that much, but I'm actually not thrilled about that because the bigger they are the heavier I look. They're fine, but it's just something I've noticed. Oh, and there are some mornings I wake up to wrinkles in my cleavage, which is clearly a sign of things to come. Sigh.
I'm definitely getting the middle age spread around my middle, no matter what I do, and the saggy arm fat is getting worse. My legs are oddly hanging in there and even look muscular sometimes--although my calves are not what they used to be. The one interesting thing about my shape now is I probably look far more proportionate than I used to. I used to think my shoulders were too broad (sometimes still do) and my hips and thighs seemed too big, but now that my waist is more proportionate, it doesn't bug me like it did. My butt is still pretty decent too--it benefits from some solid spandex but still doesn't turn into pancake butt without. Whew. I still remember when I lost all my lower body weight while nursing Jacob because I learned to miss my butt. It was flat and looked unimpressive even in jeans, and it gave me a whole new respect for it once it came back.
Functionally my body is...iffy. It could be worse, but it hasn't been as awesome as my young face would indicate. I've had my old age preview and I think I'd like a refund. I was talking to a colleague the other day who said her body went to crap around 40, and I tend to agree. It's been one thing after another. On any given day I could have digestive issues (although my reflux has mostly stabilized, interestingly), achy joints (mostly my arms and shoulders, but sometimes a hip), my back and shoulders are prone to tightness and knots, my sinuses are a mess, I can't smell or taste, my eyes have gotten old-age terrible (on top of having scarring, apparently from a hellish bout of pinkeye nine years ago), my energy level fluctuates wildly, I think I might have occipital neuralgia based on weeks of headaches (and the way something released when the chiro massaged that area last week), and I had to give up running because I had piriformis issues and I don't trust my cardiac health very much due to a high exercising heart rate (which my mom also has). My cholesterol is high, my iron and vitamin D are low, my thyroid seems like it might be crapping out, and the fun of menopause is on the horizon to throw everything into further chaos! I know I'm forgetting stuff, but suffice it to say I use an old person AM/PM weekly pill container and it's solidly full of supplements for a little of everything. I'm basically waiting for the day when I get some sort of autoimmune diagnosis based on something or another--there's definitely plenty to choose from. It's tolerable most days but it makes me wonder what old age might look like. My mom is my hero that she walks all the time and even does a 10-mile charity bike ride every year in her early 70s, but sometimes I wonder if my body will hold up even that well even though on the surface I appear to be in better shape than she was at my age.
For someone who has always looked young, seeing these very obvious signs of aging are a bit of a bummer. I know that makeup works wonders and I know I look better when I smile, but it's getting harder to look at old pictures of myself vs. new ones and not get a little discouraged. Again, I admittedly haven't put a lot of effort into reversing these things so if my self-esteem continues to take a hit, I guess there's always that. But who wants to spend all that money?! I suppose a lot of this is made worse by having a doctor that thinks everything can be cured with diet and already thinks I overthink things (I do, but what if my thinking is actually correct?). I'm hesitant to call her because I don't want to be held hostage by needing to change my diet to satisfy her thinking. I already have enough weird stuff and menopause is only going to make it worse, so I'm trying to find another doctor before that happens. However, it sounds like it's not going to be easy between finding one accepting new patients, in a good location, and within my health plan coverage.
I've also gotten to a point in my life where my age brings with it some odd realities. The passage of time and how other things relate to it is so weird, and realizing that I'm on the back end of my life facing down a lot of potential loss is rather depressing. I have a lot of odd realizations, like that when my mom was my age, she was about six months away from having one kid out of college and another out of high school. Craig is just about the age my dad was when I graduated from college. I know we waited a bit longer to get married and have kids, but...geez. I was looking at pictures of them from around that time of their life and it's just too hard to compare because styles are just so different. But I remember them so well at that age and to be there now myself is surreal. I also struggle with my parents' ages because for the most part I still see them as younger than they are, because I think about my grandparents at those ages and it boggles the mind a bit. But then I hear about someone dying in their late 60s or early 70s and reflexively think, "Oh, they had a good long life," and then realize that in the context of my parents that still seems terribly young. We have a lot of relatives that we will likely lose in the next 10-20 years, and that's hard to think about, especially as we head toward the holidays and realize that we just missed a few "normal" years and likely only have a short time left before traditions will have to change again and we'll be on to the next phase of Christmases when we are the older generation.
It's odd being one of the older, wiser parents at work and realizing all of the phases you've passed through, when sometimes you feel like it wasn't that long ago that you had babies. But at the same time, having babies seems like it was an entirely different life. Sometimes I forget I'm a grown-up--and an advanced one at that--because I'm now at a point in my life where I suppose I'd hoped I'd have accomplished certain things or be in a different phase of life. I'm sort of past the point of no return on certain things--like the moment you realize you definitely cannot have more kids--and it's just strange coming to terms with a huge chunk of life just having passed by almost unnoticed. Raising kids definitely has a way of distracting you at your "peak", and once you start to come out the other side, it's a bit jarring. It's weird watching friends who had kids even earlier go through high school or college graduations and become grandparents. Like, how is that our generation now? At the same time, I see all that my parents have done in the empty nest phase of life and hope ours will be full as well. I know my future can be as full as I make it, but then I remember not everything is within my control and I just have to hope for the best.
There are other little things like realizing you've had a certain article of clothing or something decorating your house for far longer than you expected. I think we've all had a moment looking at something outdated of our parents'--that thing on the wall in the kitchen or that sweatshirt--and laughed because it never got changed, but here you are 20 years later realizing you've become that person who doesn't bother to change things out--either because you still like them, because they're comfortable, or because it's just not that important anymore. It's finding that balance between realizing what doesn't really matter and not becoming a stodgy stick-in-the-mud, right? Another one that came up over the last couple weeks is watching celebrities age and die. Matthew Perry, one of the stars of Friends, the sitcom of my young adult years, passed away. It was already weird enough watching him and the rest of the cast age (although the women have done it fabulously--but still, it's hard seeing them so young on the show and realizing so much time has passed), but knowing one is gone now is just sad. I vividly remember as a kid watching The Cosby Show and thinking about the actors playing the grandparents inevitably passing away at some point, and then realizing that there would be a time in my life where Bill Cosby himself would die and it would be sad. Clearly that thought didn't age well based on the accusations against him, but the concept is still accurate and playing out now as the stars I grew up with are getting downright old and passing away. It's usually not as much of a big deal as this one because this one was tragic and it was such a pivotal show, but it's just another one of those things that marks the passage of time in a way I'm not always ready to admit is happening. The longer you're alive, the more your life becomes a time capsule--songs that bring back memories, photos you just can't bear to change out of frames, souvenirs of life that you just can't toss--everything holds some sort of weird significance and as time passes some things lose their power and others get stronger.
Yesterday was sort of a funny memory day. Sixteen years earlier I was in Pittsburgh with my aunt, uncle, and cousin for a Chihuly exhibit that essentially rekindled my obsession that continues to this day. As I'm sure you'll recall if you've been here for a while, I felt terrible on that trip but blamed it on too much food and a bad night of sleep. But when I didn't recover after a day at home, I was sure something was wrong with me, as I'd been feeling a bit off for a bit. I'd recently taken Clomid to get my cycle back on track so I could get pregnant but it hadn't seemed to work, and I was essentially at the point of calling the doctor and being like, "What is wrong with me?" But then I figured I should probably take a pregnancy test before I called to be equipped to answer the inevitable question, and sure enough, sixteen years ago tomorrow I discovered I was pregnant. I remember that moment so clearly, even though sixteen years seems impossible and so much since has been a blur. I look at pictures from Craig's and my trip to Disney a month later and can't believe what different lives we led back then, compared to now...Disney aside, haha. Then six years ago yesterday we were in Baltimore. Jacob was more than a year younger than Carter is now, which is crazy. Carter wasn't even in school yet. We'd had some rough travels in recent years but that trip has always stood out as one where we did a bunch of stuff and the boys actually cooperated. In one day we took the Camden Yards stadium tour, went to Fort McHenry, checked out the Baltimore Inner Harbor, and went to the aquarium. And the boys were really decent for that long day and the rest of the weekend. I came back from that trip feeling like maybe we could take decent vacations at some point in the future. But it oddly feels like that was a lifetime ago, way more than six years, with puberty and basketball and a second ADHD kid and an entire freaking PANDEMIC changing the entire complexion of our family in that time. And then there was yesterday, a pretty unremarkable day. The boys were off from school, Jacob and Craig spent half the day focused on Jacob's rehab, Carter and I had our first meal at our recently rebuilt Taco Bell, and I worked from home the rest of the day. It certainly didn't match the flash or significance of those other days, but the normalcy of it (maybe one I couldn't have imagined for a couple reasons even four years ago) holds some significance itself. We had a lot of hard years and while it's still not entirely easy, things have settled.
The phases and stages just keep coming. We have expectations of what life should look like, but in the meantime life just keeps happening whether reality matches expectations or not. I spend more of life in some sort of survival mode than I'd like, and it seems like each time I come out of the fog, I'm shocked by how time has passed, in almost every facet of life. The pandemic seemed to warp things further, but let's face it, life was doing a pretty good job on its own. Aging is just weird. Keeps things interesting, but weird.
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