Forty-five years ago, I sat on the floor of the den in my mother’s house, watching one of her favorite programs, “Mission: Impossible,” with her. In this particular episode, the character of Cinnamon was to impersonate a princess who was about to celebrate her fiftieth birthday. Using the usual prosthetics and makeup, the IMF turned the lovely Barbara Bain into a haggard, sunken-eyed, aged European royal.
I turned to my mother and said, “Is that how people look when they’re fifty?”
My mother, who was forty-nine at the time, replied, “God, I hope not.”
According to the boyfriend, who persists in believing I was born in 1963, I’ll be fifty on Monday. In reality, I’ll be fifty-two. I don’t look like Barbara Bain’s unfortunate princess, but I noticed a few months ago that between my head and my shoulders, my mother’s neck has appeared. The first sign: horizontal lines that would make an excellent guideline for a guillotine: Cut here. The second sign: the unmistakable onset of crepiness.
You don’t have to tell me there’s more to a person than physical appearance. I learned this lesson early. I was a pretty child until I turned nine, and then as prepubescent hormones started to churn, I morphed into the ugliest of ducklings. Adolescence is tough even for attractive kids. You’re figuring out who you are and who you want to be. When the reflection that looks back at you isn’t merely plain or homely but undeniably unattractive, you don’t spend a lot of time gazing at it. Instead, you try to make yourself invisible, which is easy in a society that’s fixated on physical beauty, and you turn inward.
I wasn’t unhappy with what I found inside, even though at the time developing an inner life seemed a pale consolation prize. But I did figure out who I was and who I wanted to be, so in short I survived adolescence, as most of us do. It wasn’t easy, but as a friend once told me, “Most things that are worthwhile aren’t.” Surviving adolescence was definitely worthwhile. I wish I could impart that understanding to every unhappy, misfit teenager out there.
It was a relief to chip my way out of the hard shell of adolescence and emerge into adulthood, but some things were slow to change. The mean girls of junior high and high school don’t just disappear; you can leave those individuals behind, but you’ll encounter others like them. As you age, though, you develop better defenses, and as you mature—maturing not to be confused with aging—you lose the defensiveness altogether, and you see them for what they are: innately unhappy people who bully others because they’re insecure and it makes them feel better about themselves. Although you may smile at them because you are, after all, a grownup and your mama raised you right, internally you give them a blithe, “Fuck you,” and go about your business. Sometimes you develop compassion for them. But you never forget who they really are, because you never forget how they made you feel when you were thirteen. And fourteen. And fifteen. And sixteen.
What does sixteen-year-old me have to do with fifty-two-year-old me?
Well, it’s the appearance of my mother’s neck and the marionette lines that run from my nose to my chin. It’s my eyebrows turning white, because my body is running out of pigment, which means I’ve used up my allotment of melanin. A bonus: White hairs are hard to see and therefore hard to pluck. If it weren’t for a high-powered magnifying mirror, I might be sporting a white unibrow. It could still happen. My eyesight isn’t what it used to be.
It’s morphing back into invisibility—whether you want to be invisible or not.
Fortunately, I’m better equipped to handle invisibility as an adult than I was as an adolescent. How I feel about myself now has less to do with how I look on the outside and more to do with all those traits I discovered about myself the first time around. Internally alive, introverted, dorky adolescent me was right. In the misery of the teenage years, with very little to guide me on a path that deviated dramatically from the societal norms of my hometown, I worked out how I wanted to live and who I wanted to be. Somewhat to my surprise, I’ve become that person. Even more to my surprise, I like that person. She isn’t a consolation prize.
If I’d been cute and popular, I might never have discovered the beauty of the invisible things that live inside: Love. Lust. Compassion. Humor. In a richly lived life, they manifest themselves in visible ways, but they come from within. Much more so than any physical characteristic, the invisible things determine who a person is.
Aging gracefully means different things to different people. For me, it means not obsessing too much about the visible cracks and crepe, although it also means coloring my hair because I was meant to be a redhead, dammit, and now I am, and so shall I remain, and if someone makes the observation that my hair is a little too red, I am pleased. It means moisturizing with vampire-grade sunscreen, because when you live in the high desert, preferring that your skin not resemble that of a rattlesnake doesn’t signify an obsession with physical appearance.
Most of all, aging gracefully means feeling genuine, deep gratitude that I have the opportunity to turn another year older—and if the price of admission is more wrinkles, my mother’s crepy neck, eyebrows that are determined to go rogue, and a return to invisibility, I’m okay with that, because I’ve learned that the important things, the things that make life worthwhile, are, in fact, invisible.