My Formerly Hot Life (12 page)

Given the screwy world we Formerlies must navigate, I’m glad such garments exist, I suppose. The last thing a Formerly should have to be worrying about is her lumpy butt, ever, and if a pair of Spanx gives her a reprieve, then fine. I just wish none of us was worrying about it in the first place, so shapewear would be obsolete.

It’s not just my body that I’m of two minds about, either. Lately I’ve been getting bad face days, maybe twice a week, usually when I haven’t had enough sleep. Unlike bad hair days, these are much harder to disguise; there is no headband or gel or baseball hat for a bad face day. There are no Spanx for your face. Sure, there are creams and serums that over time might make a drop of a difference. And there are expensive poisons that doctors might inject here and there like the guy at the automotive body
shop might bang out dings and dents, if you have the money and the inclination.

But on any given morning, if you wake up with creases and craters for pores, and dark chocolate croissants under your eyes, and blemishes not next to but
on
your little wrinkles, and broken capillaries—oh, yes, and let us not forget, whiskers, the man kind—you’ve got no choice but to stare yourself down, go through your ablutions and then start spackling on the concealer if you have vanity enough to do so. Which, God knows, I do.

The good news is, after about 45 minutes of being vertical, many of the symptoms of a bad face day (puffiness, sheet cleavage on your chest, indentations on your cheeks from the chandelier earrings you fell asleep in) subside on their own. Others can be painted over. Still others can be yanked out with tweezers or, yes, shaved if things get really out of hand. Failing all that, there are ginormous sunglasses that hide half your face.

Still, if I said I was loving the way things are trending, my nose would grow and that would make a bad face day much worse. Granted, I’m more immersed in this topic than is probably healthy for me, because I recently covered beauty for a magazine. In some ways, though, being privy to the more extreme thinking in the beauty world snaps me back to reality. As startled as I sometimes am by my own bad face days, I am regularly more horrified by the kinds of stuff that are available to potentially alleviate them. This list is incomplete, but it is absolutely, 100 percent truthful. I have heard about:

• A perfume that I’m told is clinically proven to make men think you are years younger than you are
  

• A product that treats the scourge of “aging fingernails”
  

• A foot treatment to help protect against “old feet” (that would be, feet that have been crammed into pointy, uncomfortable shoes for the sake of hotness for far too long)
  

• A skin serum—launched in time for Thanksgiving—to help you avoid “turkey neck”
  

• Several lines of anti-aging hair care products (not the expected hair color to hide grays, but shampoos and conditioners designed to make the texture of your hair appear as if you had as much estrogen surging through your blood as you did when you were 16)
  

And these on top of the usual creams, lotions and potions that have targeted the areas women were already worried about revealing their age, such as their under-eye area, their hands and their décolletage. They make me think about parts of my face and body that hadn’t occurred to me that might be broadcasting my age (Attention shoppers: I’M 42!!!!), which is, of course, the point. And then they made me giggle. And then they made me annoyed. Really? My fingernails?

But at least most of these products are not advocating violence. There was an ad for a face product that popped up on the right side of my Facebook page about a year ago that made my arm hair stand up. It said, “Murder Wrinkles.”
Murder? Isn’t that a little harsh, even for something so unwelcome as a wrinkle? Good people disagree on whether the death penalty is appropriate for exponentially more heinous crimes than making someone (who is, after all, not a teenager) look her age.

I kept an eye out for similar language in other appearance and anti-aging marketing and articles. Here’s what else I came across: “destroy” (mostly with regard to fat cells), “blast,” “torch,” “melt” (fat and calories) and “annihilate” (belly fat, in particular). Do the employers of these words forget that the wrinkles and flab are actually attached to human beings? There’s bound to be collateral damage. I’m looking down at my belly rolls right now. I’ve often wished they’d magically vanish or be sloughed off with a loofah in the shower, but these words make me want to hide them like Anne Frank until the war is over.

The violence in these words reminds me of when I was a teenager and so consumed with self-loathing that I tried to starve my body so it would disappear. When that didn’t work, I tried to torture it into thinness by overexercising and throwing up. My body didn’t like that too much, not to mention my psyche or my tooth enamel. I won’t tell you that my body and I got on the Love Train and rode it happily ever after to the terminus together, but when I gradually dropped the adversarial “me versus it” attitude, “it” became a part of me again, and we began to work together to at least be healthy and try to get along. For the most part, we have.

And here we are, 25 years later, and I’m being told to blast
and destroy and murder it? I like myself too much to do that. The thing I’ve learned in lo these several decades is that as looks-concerned as I remain, there is a soul-sucking element to caring too much, to worrying too much and to giving too much credence to the external, and hard as it is to do some days, it is to be resisted.

The best way I’ve found to do this is to laugh at myself and the changes that are afoot. Luckily, there’s no shortage of material, and my daughters are quite generous in helping me out in this regard. One afternoon last spring, when my husband was out with the girls, I seized the opportunity to do a closet purge. I made a huge pile of warm-weather clothes and determined to designate them fit to put back in circulation, to donate or to be saved for my daughters (maybe they’d eventually think they were cool and retro). I was still sitting amid the heaps when the crew came in, so I got up from my task to go greet them at the door. I grabbed something to put on, a black denim skirt that I wasn’t sure fit. I yanked it over my thighs, pausing at an obstruction (my ass) that was a bit of a challenge, but nothing a bunch of hopping up and down couldn’t overcome. Finally, I sucked in my belly and wrestled the zipper up. The skirt flattened my butt into nothingness and made my stomach pooch out more than usual, but I was kind of psyched I could zip it. I shuffled to the door.

Sasha ran up and hugged me. “Nice skirt,” my husband said. After eight years of marriage he knows to say such things. He was not taught this at the Ivy League college he
attended and to which he still sends checks; I had to home-school him.

“Thanks! It fits. Kinda.” I hugged Sasha back, her face at the level of my abdomen. She pulled her head back a few inches and head-butted my belly. Her forehead sprang off it like it was a mini-tramp, and she laughed and did it again. “It’s springy, isn’t it?” I laughed, conscious of demonstrating how supremely comfortable I am with my own body (at that moment, I believe I was), to set a good example for my daughter.

“Yeah,” she said, laughing, too. “That skirt makes it look like your vagina is in the back and your tushy is in the front.” I glanced in the mirror, and lo and behold, that’s just what it looked like. And then, while I was digesting that truism: “I can do that with my Barbie,” she said.

The “donate” pile just got a bit bigger. Who says real women can’t have bodies like Barbie dolls? Hilarious. I’m so glad my body can be a source of mirth and merriment in our household.

That sounded sarcastic, but I truly am. Having my daughters has been a net positive for my body image. Not only do I have to hand it to my body for lugging them around for almost nine months and delivering them safely to the outside world, but mothering two girls has forced me to walk the love-your-body walk and talk the love-your-body talk even when I’m feeling as big as a mobile home and might otherwise be standing in front of the mirror scrutinizing for more signs of decrepitude. Not only do I want to spare Sasha and
Vivian any body angst I can, I simply don’t have infinite time to count spider veins or track new cellulite puckers—not when I am so in demand as the shoe tier, waffle toaster and sunscreen applier. Besides, their questions, still innocent and devoid of judgments (at this age, they think I am a combination of Princess Belle and the sun itself, with a little Miley mixed in for the cool factor), remind me that there is nothing inherently ugly about getting older. In fact, some of it is funny, if you can laugh at it. Laughter, even the rueful kind, is beautiful.

A brief layover in Los Angeles or Miami, of course, will remind you that many Formerlies are not laughing when it comes to the physical changes having kids and edging into their 40s have wrought. There is a tendency for women, when they hit Formerly age, to feel they need to pick a lane: You can accept that your face and body are changing, sigh, shrug your shoulders and focus your attention on learning how to properly grow heirloom tomatoes. Or you can go all out to create the illusion that you are not getting older, get tons of procedures and spend your life in a spin class with some sweaty guy with a headset yelling at you, and then go have steamed kale as your postworkout treat. The first adapts her opinion so she feels good about herself as her appearance changes, and the second makes certain her appearance doesn’t change, so she never has any reason to have to adapt.

Between these two lanes is, of course, a wide highway of views, and most Formerlies try to stay somewhere in the
middle of the road, balancing the desire to look young and fit with the knowledge that, ultimately, there are more important things to worry about, like improving public education and defeating the Taliban. We may even be thinking about these terribly important things as the dermatologist injects botulism toxin into our foreheads, as if that makes it somehow less vain. Or painful. Or expensive. Which it doesn’t. But it may make us look less pooped.

On the subject of procedures and surgery, not surprisingly, I tend to veer drunkenly from one side of this busy freeway to the other. Again, I am of two minds. One day (maybe a day that I’ve slept enough and that dark spot on my cheek that I developed since having the girls isn’t particularly visible) I remember that I am a feminist. I decide that what some women do to themselves is nothing short of barbaric, and am ashamed of myself for fantasizing about getting a “mommy makeover,” facial fillers and implants that will remain in landfills long after my body has decomposed. I can even muster sympathy for the celebrities who say they “chose” to have plastic surgery and are grateful to have the choice, when really, in the context of their lives, what choice do they have?

And then, the very next day, maybe after a fight with my husband or a day of staring at my computer without typing a word, my principled stance is circling the bowl. I’ll stand in front of the mirror pulling the skin around my cheekbones back to see what my face would be like if I didn’t have those parentheses around my mouth, as if looking a little less like a
primate would help me feel like a more successful human. Hmmm … maybe it is a “personal choice” whether to inject fillers into my face. And what is feminism about, really, if not choices?

And
then
I’ll feel a little dirty and sick to my stomach, as if I made a compromise I knew in my heart was a poor one. Because in my heart, that’s not what I believe.

There’s a huge part of me that wishes plastic surgery would simply scurry back into the closet where it cowered before some celebrities felt it was their civic duty as role models to be honest about what they had done, and their right to have done it unashamed. If people were more embarrassed about admitting that they’d had their bodies cut open or the fat sucked out for no other reason than that they could look better longer, maybe fewer people would do it, and the rest of us wouldn’t feel so much pressure to keep up with the Joneses, or rather, the (Courteney) Coxes or the (Demi) Moores or whoever may or may not have had work done. When it became socially unacceptable to use racist terms, fewer people did and the virulent ideas they represented were tamped down. Certainly children, unexposed to such hateful speech, were freer to develop different points of view.

My girls are just six and (in response to a question about why, unlike the lady in the magazine, mommy’s boobies are so smushy and droopy) I’ve already had to explain to them that there’s no natural way for someone’s breasts to sit up on her clavicles.

But while I want my daughters to feel good about the bodies they come by naturally, the main reason I’d like cosmetic surgery to just go away and leave me alone is that—now that it’s not only acceptable but being marketed as a feminist choice—it forces me to confront my own hypocrisy on a daily basis, and that makes me terribly uncomfortable. Demi Moore (who denies she has had anything done, and insists she naturally looks like a 30-year-old at 47) is not my role model, and yet I’d rather look like her as I get older than Sonia Sotomayor. I am a hypocrite, and about something that bothers me much more than making my daughters eat Kashi and then sneaking Apple Jacks after they’ve gone to bed. That’s being a tiny hypocrite. I am a gigantic hypocrite. I despise being a gigantic hypocrite.

I would feel more internally consistent if I were the kind of person who could flat-out reject the supermodel body ideal—to say,
Screw you for making me feel I’m not OK the way I am
—and get on with it. But in case you’ve missed it, I’m only that person part of the time. When I’m not feeling all righteous, I’m Googling various procedures to figure out how much time off from work I’d theoretically have to take if I had them. I feel as if I have an angel on one shoulder, whispering, “Do the right thing. Set an example for your daughters. Show them what you believe in your heart: that there are many ways to be beautiful, and they needn’t involve a cannula or a scalpel.” On the other shoulder, there is a little Pamela-Anderson–shaped devil saying, “Oh, fuck it, Steph. You’ve always hated your belly. You’ve tried to
change your outlook and failed. Just get a damn tummy tuck already.”