My Formerly Hot Life (2 page)

Still, the transition to Formerly was, and is, a process, and for quite some time there were moments I’d forget that I was a Formerly entirely, or that any time had passed at all, really, only to be snapped back to reality. One time on the train
(again on the train!) I saw Mike, a guy I knew 15 years ago. He was a bandmate of a guy I was dating at the time, and he looked precisely as he did when I’d last seen him, across a nasty basement club on Bleecker Street that no longer exists: thick-framed retro-nerd glasses, the kind that only the least nerdy among us can pull off. He was short but had a swagger, and always seemed to feel that he was more talented than the rest of his band and that no one realized how egregiously they were holding him back. He had his axe strapped to his back, which I took as a good sign—perhaps he’d made it as a working musician, despite the odds.

I snaked across the crowded car to say hi, but the closer I got, the clearer it became: It wasn’t Mike, but Mike 2.0, the 2009 model of Mike. It was the guy who is now playing the role of Mike—the short, somewhat arrogant guy in the band who is a friend of someone’s boyfriend. He was Mike’s replacement. The real Mike, wherever he was, probably no longer looked or acted like Mike. I just knew deep in my gut that the life this guy was living mirrored Mike’s in every way, except with a few new bells and whistles, like a nylon backpack contraption to hold his guitar (as opposed to those heavy hard cases they used to carry back in the ’90s) and an iPod instead of a Walkman. It was entirely possible that he was wearing Mike’s actual motorcycle jacket, as I imagined that Mike’s wife donated it to the Salvation Army when he was out of town selling bathroom fixtures or whatever he now does to pay for, say, his daughter’s speech therapy. It felt as if the real Mike and the real Stephanie, the ones we used
to be, were abducted by aliens and simply replaced by the new Mikes and Stephanies who populate the F train just like we used to.

These kinds of old-friend sightings were truly startling to me, but I suppose I needed to learn, again and again, that after several decades, I was in a different life phase. How bizarre that I was excruciatingly aware of every droopy body part, every pucker, each stray hair and both nasal-labial folds on my own person, but I imagined somehow everyone else was frozen in time, going about their lives as if nothing had changed. I mean, I knew they were not, and yet when I saw these updated versions of people I used to know, and was reminded in such a
Twilight Zone
manner that time marches on, it was unsettling.

Once I realized Mike wasn’t Mike, I saw myself through new Mike’s eyes: He didn’t see the early ’90s hot Stephanie coming toward him through the throng, but some harmless lady in yoga pants and sneakers clearly chosen for function over fashion, carrying a child’s rolled-up collage with glitter and feathers peeking out of the top. He probably thought,
I must be blocking the subway doors because I can’t imagine she’d have anything to say to me
. And it turns out he was right.

The Formerly years hit me when they did because my late 30s were the first chance I had to look up from what I’d been doing and take a breather. I think this is true of many people like me who got on the hamster wheel in high school and kept running until career success or giving birth or something else made us want to (or have to) slow down.
You don’t feel as if much has changed in some ways—you still look, dress and socialize as you always did, more or less. But you’ve slowly been taking on responsibilities and time has been passing and your parents have been getting creaky and you’ve likely even married and had kids (it’s nice that you’re a cool parent who appreciates the Killers, but time is still passing). I, for one, took each of these things in stride as I experienced them.

No, it wasn’t the milestones I reached that made me feel older. For me it was when I began to not feel like the me I once was. In my case, my self-image as a young, attractive, relevant, in-the-mix woman started to feel wobbly, and probably affected the way I carried myself and behaved. Perhaps because I didn’t exude as many young, attractive, relevant, in-the-mix woman vibes (and because I looked like the overwrought working mom with no time to tweeze her eyebrows that I was), people didn’t treat me as such, and so I didn’t behave as such. It was a self-perpetuating cycle and soon I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It made me feel a little cuckoo.

In actuality, most of the physical changes my body and my face had undergone over the last decade or so were gradual and fairly subtle. My ass, for example, which I’d never really paid attention to because, well, it was behind me, was all of a sudden crying out for a bra—I could literally feel it against the backs of my thighs, threatening to merge with them unless I found a way to lift and separate. The people who saw me every day (those would be the people I cared about
most, the only ones who should matter) didn’t notice anything different. I looked fine. Each of these little changes (did I mention my upper arms have recently begun to flap in the breeze like Grand Opening flags on a car dealership and that I must daily scan my chin for guy-caliber whiskers or else grow a beard?) didn’t keep me up at night.

But in aggregate, and because they all added up to my being in a brand-new category of person—that of the not-young woman—they bothered me. A lot. Was I really so vain that I cared about what complete strangers thought?

Why, yes, yes I was! Which was yet another blow to my self-definition: After overcoming an eating disorder when I was a young adult, I’d been proud to be someone who didn’t dwell inordinately on my looks. I certainly cared, and I liked to look good, but especially compared to some of the fabulous folks I worked with at various women’s magazines, I didn’t get nuts about it. Now it seemed that this was only because I looked good without
having
to get nuts about it, not because I was so secure. Ouch.

I quickly learned that being Formerly Hot was not something it was wise to go around complaining about. Talking about losing your looks, especially when you’re the main person who notices, smacks of a fishing-for-compliments trip, which was not what I meant to be embarking on. I knew rationally that I looked fine, and if I didn’t, it wasn’t the end of the world. But I wanted to talk about why it sometimes felt as if it was, and about similar shifts in identity—the loss of a self-definition, be it the whiz kid, the
wild girl, the people pleaser—I knew from my blog that many people were experiencing. The larger life changes (going off to college, getting married, becoming a parent) had been scrutinized, written about and researched to death in the hallowed halls of this country’s most esteemed institutions of higher learning. Not so the more subtle life shifts like the one I was experiencing, which are deceptively difficult to deal with, superficial though some of them may appear to be.

Now that I’m a few years into being a Formerly, I get that the phenomenon is about getting older in general and not as much about any specific aspect of it, such as how your looks change. Everyone gets older at the same rate, of course, but ten minutes seems like a squirmy, intolerable hour to my daughters, who are waiting for me to be done with work so I can pay attention to them; to me, it’s a millisecond. Things merely seem more accelerated as you age, and when I think of it that way, the transition to Formerly feels like any other, best dealt with one day at a time.

So I’m a Formerly. What of it? Most of the time, it’s kind of terrific over here on the other side of young. There are legions of us, and we’re an amazingly cool group of women (and men, by the by, with whom we may have even better relationships than when we were younger). By and large, we know our own minds, are done with caring too much about what other people think of our opinions, and can have a good laugh at our own expense. I love being a Formerly because I’m young enough to have fun, and old enough to
know what fun really is, as opposed to tossing my head back in maniacal mirth in order to
seem
like I was having fun because I was young and hot and hence supposed to be having the time of my life. I also know that if I’m not having fun, I can just leave, something that never would have occurred to me when I felt as if I had so much to prove. I’m surrounded with friends who have my back, and the family I’ve built is the family I’ve always wanted. I even like the family I was born into now, because everyone’s had a chance to get over that whole episode with the Cuisinart, which I maintain wasn’t my fault. It’s a tremendous time of life, weird limbo transition between young and old notwithstanding.

I’m even coming to terms with leaving the hot girl behind. Except when I’m not. That would be when I’m venting about it on my blog, fantasizing about some magical way to restore my former fabulousness or whining to my husband, who, fortunately for me, is blind or deluded or smart enough to insist I’m as dewy as the day he met me (for this reason alone I will not divorce him). Clearly, I’m still adjusting, but having so many women around me going through the same thing makes it easier, as does, of course, having a bit of perspective. Conveniently, that comes with age.

N
one of my clothes were working for me.

Lest you think this was your standard situation-specific fashion emergency, where you try on two or fifteen outfits before finding one you can see yourself meeting your potential in-laws in, it was not. I’d been experiencing acute paralysis before the closet every morning for months. My preschool daughters would be standing at the door, lunch boxes in hand, their little Care Bears backpacks strapped on, while, standing in only my bra, I’d holler from the bedroom, “Mommy will be just a minute!” I’d wonder if a black leather skirt that once said “downtown rocker chick” now said “Jennifer Leather sofa upholstery.”

This was around three years ago, when I was in my late 30s, and looking back, my crisis of fashion was one of the outward manifestations of becoming a Formerly. I was no longer the person I used to be, the person who bought all of these clothes, so it made sense that they didn’t feel right on me. It wasn’t as if I was going through a stranger’s closet—in
fact, my jumbled, piled-high, two-tiered closet was like the ten boxes of snapshots I’d been intending to sort for years. Each groovy outfit and item meant something to me when I acquired it, and it might yet mean something to me again. I just didn’t know what. I was still figuring out what it meant to be a Formerly, a woman who at that point only knew that she wasn’t what she was (young), and was not quite sure what she is or is becoming. How was I supposed to know what to wear?

Clearly, my closet and my self-definition had some work to do, but I was not aware of this on any kind of conscious level. All I knew was I NEEDED TO GO SHOPPING. After that, my brain shut off, which is, I find, when I do my best shopping. I’ve heard people talk about how they get into “the zone” while making music, during sex or, if they’re an athlete, while breaking speed records. That’s me while shopping (and, alas, while doing nothing else). More than once I have stopped at J. Crew on the way to yoga, found meditative peace in flipping through the citron and salmon cardigans on their hangers (click, click, click), and bailed on yoga altogether. After a good shopping day, when I collapse atop my bags on my bed, I feel like I’d imagine a hunter would slinging a deer carcass off his shoulder after having dragged it back from the woods on pure adrenaline. The idea of shopping my socks off was exciting enough, for now, anyway, to distract me from the fact that my leather skirt most definitely no longer says “downtown rocker chick,” at least when it’s being worn by me.

With no particular plan, I raided boutiques large and small. What I learned (and am still learning) in attiring my new Formerly self is a lot about who that woman is. That’s what I needed to know, really, more than I needed any single article I came home with.

Except maybe jeans. Oh, I needed jeans, badly. The ones that fit were clearly out of style. The ones that didn’t (yeah, no, they hadn’t gotten too loose) had a nasty habit of dialing my BlackBerry whenever I carried it in my back pocket. I’d get home after a long day at work and find three messages on my machine from my own ass, recordings of me talking about something that was boring the first time I said it. I hated to part with my pricey “premium denim,” whatever that means, but I’d rather have to buy a bigger size than walk around with camel toe. Gross. Sorry.

Shopping for jeans as a Formerly, it turned out, is a special kind of torture. This is not so much because I used to have a better body for jeans, before I had twins and before my metabolism slammed on the breaks at 40 and decided it would tolerate no more Nutella. Of
course
I Formerly Looked Better in Jeans. I have long since factored that in to my new, mature self-image that values such superficial things less (can’t you tell?) and adjusted my expectations of what will reflect back at me in the three-way mirror accordingly.

No, what makes jeans-buying so hard these days is that the companies making the jeans and other interesting clothing no longer have names like Lee and Wrangler that by virtue of their ad campaigns conjure fantasies of a sexy cowboy
hoisting me up on his horse and galloping away to do untold sexy cowboy things to me in private. Now they have names like “Rich and Skinny” and “Young, Fabulous and Broke.” Seriously, the disparity between those labels and my actual life is just too, too vast. I stand a better chance of encountering the cowboy on my way to pick up my children from gymnastics in New York City than being rich and skinny. It makes me feel silly. Worse, it makes me want to shop at Eileen Fisher. After that, you’re just a few yoga classes and a hot flash from joining an ashram. I would be OK if that turned out to be my destiny. I’m just not there yet.

I love clothing, but I am not rich or skinny. Nor am I young, fabulous or broke, although I suppose I’d be willing to inch a bit closer to broke if it meant I could buy some more young and fabulous, and maybe a smidge of skinny, while we’re at it. (I’m not sure what skinny is measured in; it wouldn’t be pounds or inches or hectares or kilojoules or anything.)