My Formerly Hot Life (13 page)

Oh, and I can spend hours staring at pictures of stars who have had botched surgery and so look way worse than they did before. It’s sick, and I truly don’t wish them ill, but it makes me feel strangely validated.

My friend Sarah, who had breast reduction surgery for mostly cosmetic reasons (she came on like a wall of boobs before and looks much better now) is thrilled with the results and has not a pang of regret. She thinks I’m being way too hard on myself, and holding myself to standards on this issue that most of the world doesn’t adhere to. She’s right. But one thing I’ve learned as a Formerly is that if something preoccupies me to the extent that the “to nip and tuck or not” dilemma does, there’s probably a bigger issue behind it.

And that issue is this: The fact that it’s no biggie to get a procedure or 20 puts many Formerlies in an untenable spot. We are at the precise age where things start to droop and live in a world where looking like a middle-aged woman looks naturally is considered “letting yourself go.” This can be profoundly upsetting and seems relatively easy to fix. At the same time, we are finally old and wise enough to know—emotionally know, not just understand intellectually—that looks are by far not the most important thing in the world. My two minds are at war, and they’re leaving the landscape of my brain looking like Baghdad after a night of air raids.

What’s more, Formerlies like me are experiencing a mass cognitive dissonance—that is, when you hold two contradictory
beliefs at the same time, unless you find a way to reconcile them, they will totally stress you out. Many of the Formerlies I’ve spoken to know that they shouldn’t care as much as they do about their aging faces and bodies, and yet they do. They don’t want to be “the kind of person” who gets cosmetic surgery (that is to say, vain enough to go that far, to spend that much, to take a risk with their health by undergoing elective surgery), but they really would like to. To reconcile these conflicting desires, they either decide it’s not vain but feminist to get surgery (after all, it’s a woman’s choice and more attractive women stand a better chance in a man’s world), or they decide that a procedure is not as expensive or risky or painful as they thought it was. Or they come to feel that they were wrong all along—looks really
do
matter—and that our children may as well get used to the idea. By the time they’re adults, everyone will be having cosmetic surgery. Why fight it?

No matter how you slice it, it’s a rotten spot for a Formerly to be in. In the same way that I support the men and women fighting in Iraq even though I’m against the war and don’t think we should have taken it on, I don’t judge women who act on their desire to get cosmetic surgery. I might easily be one of them, and I know that a Formerly’s gotta do what a Formerly’s gotta do. If getting your boobs lifted will stop you from thinking about how you hate your boobs, more power to you. But just as I don’t think war is a great way to solve conflicts and I wish there weren’t fighting troops to support, I also wish we lived in a world where Formerlies
felt that there was a happy place for them to exist when nature took its inevitable course. I’m hoping that the older I get the more I will resent the idea that I need to stop the aging process, but I can’t predict. I don’t know if I have the strength to be the one prune in a sea of plums. Time will tell.

Deep breath. Calm down. Stress, I understand, gives you wrinkles and causes your cells to age more rapidly. Now, we can’t have that, can we? Especially because I’m told I look pretty good. For my age.

That qualifier started following me around like a hungry puppy in the last couple of years: “For her age,” as in, “Stephanie looks pretty good for her age,” and “Demi Moore looks preternaturally, extraordinarily, suspiciously stunning for her age, especially since she claims she didn’t have plastic surgery.”

Of course I realize that someone who says I look good for my age is trying to be kind, to cut me some slack. “For my age,” my skin looks nice. I have a decent figure “for my age” and “for a mother of twins.” That’s clearly meant to be a compliment, in the “considering what you could look like” kind of way. So when someone tells me that for my age, I’m not half bad, I say a sincere thank-you to reward their intent. But it still smacks of
She runs a pretty good race, considering she has no legs
. How cool would it be to hear that your skin looks nice or that you have a decent figure, period, and let the rest be thought, if it must, instead of spoken?

When you’re a kid, “for her age” is usually used in the
positive, like Sasha is tall for her (young) age, or Vivian has a large vocabulary for her (young) age. The problem is, of course, that when you’re older, what’s meant is,
Her skin is relatively unmarred, for her (old) age
. I’m reacting not to the categorization (which I didn’t mind one bit when people thought I was poised or successful for my young age) but with my new category, old, or at least not young, is something I’m still not used to.

Come to think of it, I don’t mind “for her age” except when it pertains to my looks. That makes sense—getting older has been an overwhelmingly positive transition, except when it comes to my appearance. If someone were to say that I have great vision for my age (which no one would, because my vision sucks), I’d appreciate it, since it’s a biological reality that vision tends to get all wonky as a person ages. But that’s not the case when it comes to beauty, unless you believe that only young women can be beautiful, which I emphatically do not. Saying that someone looks good for her age assumes that pretty and young are inextricable. So being pretty “for your age” isn’t really pretty. It’s another category, to be assessed with different standards. It’s as if someone told Michael Phelps that he no longer qualified for the “real” Olympics, but a different, by implication less important, Pot-head Olympics for guys who like to party, where they gave out those plastic medals you get in the gumball machine that say “You’re Number 1” instead of the gold.

Of course, there are plenty of people, like me, who do not agree that pretty is by definition young. But the very fact
that I (and millions of other women who make this same point on blogs like mine) have to stand up and counter that idea means it’s a pervasive one. So I propose we shelve this particular qualifier, which is truly backhanded, along with the terms “cougar” and “MILF” (short for “Mother I’d Like to Fuck”), which don’t exactly advance intelligent dialogue, either.

Putting “for her age” on the shelf is but one tiny step toward marrying my two minds, the one that is grateful for the opportunity to get older, no matter how I look doing it, and the other that is terrified that looking old will marginalize me in the eyes of others to the point where no one will care what I have to say once they see me. That’s my biggest fear about looking older: not that I’ll wind up alone or unloved, but that I’ll wind up unheard. I guess that’s why I’m letting both of these points of view continue to debate loudly inside my head, painful as it is to listen to both sides and live with the perpetual conflict. One of my two minds will win out in the end, and I need to be sure it’s the one I can live with for the long haul.

I
’d imagine doctors hate being the people who bust women’s bubbles by telling them that they’re just plain getting older, and there’s no cure for the inevitable passage of time. On the other hand, when there is an identifiable medical issue at hand, doctors are good to have around. I just wish I didn’t have so many.

A colleague of mine replied on her BlackBerry to an email I sent her, because, she wrote, her computer was down. “My thumbs can’t take much more!” I wrote back that she needn’t worry, because according to my thumb doctor, it’s a myth that PDA abuse leads to carpal tunnel syndrome.

As I hit “send,” it occurred to me:
I have a thumb doctor
. A physician specifically devoted to a single digit on my right hand. He’s a neurologist to whom I was referred in the fall, after I wantonly continued to cut out pumpkins for Halloween decorations long after the nerve at the base of my thumb had begun to throb.
Must. Finish. Pumpkins
. Compelled by the same force that used to enable me to pull
all-nighters for pleasure or enterprise, I sat there cutting out several hundred goddamned jack-o’-lanterns for a neighborhood Halloween party. I was a wild woman! There was no stopping me. And I paid the price. And now I have a thumb doctor. This is what it’s come to.

It makes sense that as you get older, you accumulate more doctors. You’ve had more time bumbling around on this earth to injure yourself and develop diseases and wear out your organs with all that breathing and secreting, filtering and digesting.

But I don’t love the way doctors become increasingly focused on smaller and more obscure parts of the body as you get older, unseen “systems” that apparently govern everything from your moods to how much you perspire to how efficiently your cells process that French cruller you couldn’t resist at the morning staff meeting. It makes me fear for the future, because I’m sure I’ll need a mucous membrane specialist or to consult the world’s foremost expert on disorders of the cuticles.

What kills me about all of this is that, aside from a few dings and oddities, I’m a resoundingly healthy person. And yet, I’ve added far more doctors to my pit crew in recent years than I have aestheticians, and in case you haven’t noticed, I care not a little about my looks.

Think about it: Barring any chronic or catastrophic childhood illnesses or conditions, when you’re a kid, you have a pediatrician. Later, as a young adult, assuming you have health insurance, you’ll have a general practitioner and a
gynecologist. Being nearly blind, I also had an ophthalmologist.

It’s when you approach Formerlydom that you start racking up doctors like so many refrigerator magnets. If you can’t get pregs in the usual way (like I couldn’t), you add a reproductive endocrinologist to your roster. And if, when the RE orders the baseline mammogram before he pumps you full of hormones (standard procedure), they find a scary blobby mass with blood vessels snaking around it (as they did with me), all of a sudden you have a breast surgeon! She biopsies the lump and determines that it’s benign (whew!), so you’re confirmed to be perfectly healthy, if imbued with a new appreciation of your own mortality, and your grand doctor total is up to at least five, six if you count the radiologist. Naturally all this drama makes you a little anxious and perhaps depressed, so you see a psychopharmacologist, who writes you (OK, me again) prescriptions that might help your mood. That’s seven.

You get pregnant (yay!), deliver (woo-hoo!), but then your knees ache from all that exercise you’ve been doing to lose the baby weight and avoid the eventual need for a cardiologist. Time to see an orthopedist (9), who tells you you shouldn’t run so much, and that, yeah, pregnancy can screw with your joints, especially a twin pregnancy, which resulted from—you guessed it—taking fertility drugs.

Exhausted and layering on the pounds like there’s some impending famine your body is aware of but you’re not, you go for a physical. To rule out anything serious, you’re sent to
a gastroenterologist (9), a rheumatologist (10) and/or an endocrinologist (11) and find out you do not have any autoimmune diseases or thyroid issues. Best they can tell, you are simply pooped because you have twins and have been working too hard and also maybe having too good a time (which now takes a lot out of you) and your metabolism is flipping you the bird.

So you shrug and drink more coffee and cut out pumpkins for Halloween and try not to eat the candy you bought for the kiddies, who are all dressed as Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty, the most passive and lamest of all the Disney princesses. Creepy. Ouch—you now have a thumb doctor (12). And an allergist (13) and an ear, nose and throat guy (14), because lately you’ve been prone to sinus infections. WTF? Oh, Christ, I forgot about the podiatrist who dealt with my fungal toenail (15), which, of course, is still there because a fungal toenail will stay with you longer than any lover ever will. So will the lovely cyst on my back (dermatologist, 16).

I have 16 doctors and counting, and I’ve never had more than a bad flu. I’m not even including the other practitioners, like physicians’ assistants, PTs or complementary medicine specialists, such as acupuncturists.

One could argue that I’m healthy
because
I’ve seen all these doctors, or that the fact that I have seen all these doctors is a sign that I take good care of myself. The second is true. The first is not. Regardless, I would be thrilled to cap the number of doctors at 20 and call it a life.

Anyone would, I suppose. As much as I try to bury it under the many more pleasant things I have to think about, it’s getting harder to escape the fact that the older we get, well, the older we get. And whether it’s because we’re exposed to more sick-making chemicals the longer we live or because the machine of our bodies starts to wear out, we’re just now, as Formerlies, starting to notice—weird!—that a pulled muscle took a week to heal, or there’s a strange bump that the doctor thinks merits a second look, or that we have things like acid reflux or gout, which sound like old people problems. Plus, hearing of a contemporary who has cancer, while uncommon and still shocking, is not the freak thing it was in our 20s.

Last winter, I had a routine physical with a new doctor I picked strictly because of her proximity to my house and because she took my insurance. Big mistake. Two days later, on a Saturday, as I was walking my girls home from soccer, I got a call from the emergency room closest to our house, the one at the hospital the new doctor is affiliated with. The ER doctor on the phone advised me to get there immediately; my test revealed that my blood counts were so low as to indicate I was bleeding internally, possibly in my brain (!!!). At that moment, I actually felt good—I’d slept in that morning—and told her so. She urged me to come in. I might collapse at any time. She may have even used the word “stat.” I sent my daughters off with my neighbor and got in a cab. They admitted me right away, ahead of a guy who had been shot (only in the arm, but how dramatic, right?).