My Formerly Hot Life (20 page)

Olivia had just had a milestone birthday—40—and so I guess was in inventory mode. Depending on when I catch her and if she’s sober (which she generally is), Olivia is clear that she loves her job as a hospital administrator too much to make a switch any time soon, and would not want the kind of career that would dig into her time with her two boys. But she still wonders. “You make choices, but you can always still mourn the path you didn’t take.”

That’s one thing I’ve managed not to do, so far, even after a full bottle. It appears I’m too busy mourning other things, such as my fuller head of hair and my erstwhile ability to pick up men on the subway. When I’m feeling good, which is most of the time, I focus on the choices I’ve made that brought me to where I am now, which is to say, feeling good most of the time. As long as I keep my eyes on the prize—remaining happy, helping my family and loved ones to feel likewise, and earning enough to cover what is truly needed—I expect to look back at a successful life career. Rather than asking myself
What would Anna Wintour do?
I
can ask myself,
What would
I
do?
and know that I’ll likely hit on the right answer for me. And just knowing that I will never again feel the need to steal toilet paper from the corporate restroom or to eat warm sushi in a moving vehicle makes me feel as if I’ve achieved a lot.

I
’ve done a few closet purges in the last couple of years, with my Formerly friend Rhonda sitting by to make sure I don’t cave in and keep everything, as well as to remind me of the nuttier things I did while wearing some of the clothes I’m donating. There’s a touch of the bittersweet, like when I’m reminded how intensely I felt for the guy I was dancing with at a particular bar in a particular pair of sandals. I then remember the blisters I had the next day and the agony I felt the next week when he didn’t call and I stalked him like the insecure hot mess that I was, and I’m happy to give them to Goodwill. Rhonda and I laugh, are grateful that we’re not young and raw anymore, and we move on to the next item.

These are some of the questions I ask Rhonda to ask me when we do the Formerly Purge.

I’m happy to say that I am no longer in a state of fashion emergency, now that I have better choices, wisdom and, of course, more of a facility with all things Formerly. I am often still late for getting my daughters to school, but this is now their getting-dressed issue, not mine.
I
get dressed every morning with new clothing and mix in a few old standbys that I think will always work for me. I haven’t missed anything I’ve given away—well, maybe that leather skirt, just a bit, even though it was too short—because hanging on to outdated clothing can be just as stultifying as clinging to an identity or a lifestyle that doesn’t work for you anymore. If you do that, you become another version of THOSE women (Google “Joan Van Ark images” and you’ll see what I mean), and frankly, I’d rather be me.

A
bout ten years ago, right around the time I got engaged to my husband, I was having coffee with a good girlfriend. Let’s call her Jackie. She and I had spent countless hours over the years trying to solve such nuanced relationship issues as to whether a guy who cheats on his girlfriend with you could ever be faithful to you, should you and he get together for real; if you really like a guy but despise his ’70s cop moustache, how long you have to wait to say something; and what the fact that he lives in a studio with nothing but a single bed and a stack of take-out menus might reveal about his long-term partnership capability. We had been sisters in singledom.

That crisp autumn day, Jackie was meticulously trying to tease out any potential speck of meaning that there may or may not have been in an interaction she’d had recently with an ex. She’d run into him unexpectedly on the street.

“I mean, when he said it was good to see me, did he mean, good to see me, as in,
Hey, good to see you
, or do you think he
meant it, like,
It was really good to see you and I’m having pangs of regret?
I
did
look good that day, thank God. Not that I’d get back with him, but you know what I mean.” I said I didn’t know how he meant it, because I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t in his head.

“Well, he said it like, ‘It’s good to
see
you,’ with the emphasis on ‘see.’ I think if he was like, ‘It’s good to see
you
,’ he would have meant
me
, it was good to see
me
. The way he said it, it sounded just, like, friendly. Oh, God, I don’t know. What do you think?” I replied something about it not really mattering, since she didn’t want to get back with him anyway, so who cared what he meant?

This went on for maybe 45 minutes. During that time we covered whether he was still seeing the woman he was rumored to have been seeing after they’d broken up, what would
definitely
have to change if my friend was to take him back, if his saying “Good to see you” was, in fact, an indication that he wanted to reunite and myriad other possibilities and eventualities and hypotheticals. I had a flash of us in a comic strip, a drawing of two well-dressed chicks at a café table. Jackie’s voice bubble, filled with teeny-tiny type, was taking up our entire square.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I thought she was being ridiculous, whipping a five-word comment into a giant, frothy meringue of meaning. “Jackie, here’s what I think: I think if he does want to see you again, he’ll call you,” I snapped. “That’ll be your answer! Or if you want to, you can call him and see what’s up. Either way, if it’s going to be something, it will, and if it won’t, it won’t.”

I instantly regretted being so sharp. Jackie looked stung, and then started casting her eyes about for the creamer. I stammered an apology and said that it was just, I don’t know, I had a lot going on, with work and planning the wedding and everything, and she didn’t ask me about any of that. She said it was OK, and that she was sorry, too, but I could tell it wasn’t OK, not totally. After that, and especially after Paul and I got married, things were never the same. We saw each other less and less.

The thing is, a few years earlier, it could just have easily been me on the Jackie end of that conversation, or if it had been her, I would have been totally into holding a tuning fork to the timbre of his every utterance. It was part of understanding what was going on around us, and working through our single-gal stuff. Nothing had changed in our dynamic, except my outlook and where I was in my life. After getting together with Paul, and having it work out so straightforwardly, it was clear to me that examining the minutiae of male-female interactions only got you so far and that with time (and usually not that much of it) everything becomes clear. I didn’t need to fill my brain up with froth, because I had more solid things to think about. In short, I was done with all that. And just like when a smoker quits smoking, the smell of smoke becomes more irritating to her than to someone who never smoked, so were these kinds of conversations.

I get the exact same impatient, “grow up and get over it already” kind of response from some of the older women I speak to about the shock and unsettled feelings I’ve had
throughout this process of aging out of young. In the comments on my blog posts, as well as when I just get going on the subject at a party, some of them see my focus on the tiny, subtle changes in my looks, my outlook and my relationships as tedious and whiney, especially when I rant about the negative ones. I posted about when Sasha pointed out my “girlstache,” the one I thought I had eradicated through various painful means in my 20s. “All that frettin’ is terribly unattractive,” one woman in her 50s wrote on my blog. “Definitely not hot.” Her feeling is that she gets hotter every year, and that I was putting myself and other women down by calling myself “formerly hot.” (Trying to explain that you’re being ironic kind of kills the joke, so I gave up.)

They’ve been there and back, and from their perspective, I just don’t get it, “it” being whatever bigger-picture outlook they’ve come to develop in the years since they were Formerlies, going through what I am. Some of them may simply not have felt the Formerly shift as acutely as I do, and many of those who did don’t remember it. In any case, they seem to have found their new balance in the world, and realizing that you’re suddenly no longer young and no longer treated in the same way by the world is not something that affects them day to day.

In truth, I appreciate the fact that some older women readers think my priorities are misplaced (although if I have to make it clear one more time that, yes, I still consider myself hot, just not in the same way, I think I’ll just go ahead and make “Currently Hot” T-shirts and wear them daily to
save my breath). Partaking in their worldview flashes me forward to a time, not so very long from now, where I probably won’t be immersed in this kind of thinking, and won’t have as many fresh bitch-slaps and observations to blog about. “I am tired of wishing I had the body I once had. It’s been a long haul but I am learning to appreciate the one I possess now, in my 50s, with my great skin, health and intellect,” wrote a woman named Lisa. At 42, I’m sick of it, too, but at the same time, a part of me obviously still wishes for mine to look closer to the ideal. I look forward to the time when my emotional life catches up with my intellectual one, and I can 100 percent fully revel in my other gifts, gifts that I already know will be my foundations going forward. I’m more than halfway there.

Their response reminds me that the Formerly years are just a film still in a (knock on wood) long life of moving images, and that someday, no doubt, I’ll look back and think of how young I was when I wrote this book. And maybe how silly. And probably how good I looked. That’s where I expect to be at some point, and time and the process of writing this book has moved me closer to feeling like the Formerly years are winding down.

When that happens, I will be Formerly a Formerly. Unlike a double negative, however, I’m pretty sure they don’t cancel each other out, magically zapping me once again into my hot 20-something self. I don’t know exactly what the phase beyond Formerly looks like, but I have a feeling I’ll be keeping all the excellent developments from this period—the
groundedness, the confidence, the social ease and peace of mind—and hopefully putting some of the panic behind me. There will be new positive developments, and most likely, new things to panic about.

Right now, though, the Formerly shift feels very real to me, and worthy of the magnifying glass I’ve been applying to it. How I power through the Formerly years and the realizations I come to are critical to where I ultimately wind up. I don’t think I’ll be one of those women, who, like the one I corresponded with through my blog, is devoted to maintaining “hotness” until she dies, by any means necessary. I know I won’t be a cougar, if they even really exist, feeding on youth like a vampire in hopes of extending my own youth. I definitely do not want to be one of those women you see everywhere in California, who look like a 25-year-old from behind, but from the front, between 45 and 60, tired, bleached-out and somehow both puffy and hollow at the same time. Their strange, misshapen facial features broadcast their unhappiness with themselves, and no matter what I wind up looking like, unhappiness is not an option.

What has made me happiest and most unhappy in my life, no matter how old I am, is the degree to which I feel free to express what I think, without fear of other people’s reactions or their withdrawing their love. That fear is looking teeny tiny in the rearview mirror, which is to me the best thing about getting older. (I hope, of course, never to be the crazy old lady with blue hair and waaaay too much rouge on the bus who tells you you’re a terrible parent and that you look
trashy, to boot.) The other day, I had an episode that both made me feel as free as I’ve ever felt, and not a little old—and that was more than OK. It was transcendent.

I was rushing down 14th Street to go pick up my daughters, and this young woman with a clipboard angles over to me. She was wearing a light blue Greenpeace T-shirt, and was no more than 21. I shook my head no as I passed her, to indicate I didn’t have time to stop.

“Oh, so you don’t care about saving the planet. OK,” she said.

I wanted to smack her—OK, yes, I am prone to violent fantasies when my blood sugar is too low, which it was then—but instead just rolled my eyes and kept walking. About 30 feet past where she was standing, however, I realized I couldn’t contain my ire. I circled back.