Why I'm Going With What I've Got
Here’s my rule: If I can rub it in, spray it on or in some way apply topically, it’s fair game. I’m vain. I prefer to always look at least 10 years younger than I am or at the very least, great for my age. And I will always be the first (well, maybe third – I’m really never first at anything) in line for any over-the-counter product that will keep me from looking older than my age! And o.k., I will consider a surgical lift when my top eyelids finally droop over my eyeballs and place me in perpetual darkness. I consider that a medical need.
The gym doesn’t intimidate me either! I can squat and thrust with the best of them. I can pump it up, do reps, “just do it” and hope to continue until the skin on the outside has to be tied up in a knot to contain the sagging muscle on the inside.
I lost my mother recently to a six-year battle with cancer. The last time I saw her, her hair was gray and bristly and somewhat similar to the pictures I have seen of Albert Einstein. Head radiation caused that. That day she couldn’t speak because she was so weak, and as far as we knew she wasn’t really aware of the day or the hour. But when my sister and I stood by her bed to tell her we were leaving to go back home, she got that twinkle in her eye that only my mother could have, and she almost imperceptibly puckered her lips. “She wants to kiss us goodbye,” I told my sister. Then she grinned as my sister bent down to put her cheek next to my mother’s mouth. She gave her a gentle kiss, then I bent down and got mine. It was the softest, sweetest kiss I’ll ever know.
My poor mother would have been horrified to see into her future and know what she would look like in her last years. We always had an agreement between my mom, my sisters and me that if one of us was ever lying incapacitated, we would make sure that we didn’t have any chin whiskers. (My sister tweezed my mother’s that last week and we laughed and cried about it.) Yet as worn out as her body was, and as wild as her hair was, the hospice nurse remarked at how beautiful her skin looked.
As vain as she was (and she really was) my mother never had plastic surgery except to remove a skin cancer from her nose in the ‘70’s. She did color her hair until age 70 and occasionally had sculptured nails. But at her funeral friends and family came from all over the country to pay their last respects and to say kind words about what her life had meant to them. Six of her closest friends took it upon themselves to wear matching aprons and serve lunch to our family before the service. It was at this precise moment that I understood what friendship was worth, and how unimportant packaging is at the end.
Like my mother, I am vain. I don’t want to become a house frau. But in her honor, I am choosing to age gracefully with just the right amount of vanity to get a compliment now and then, even if it is only that my skin looks really good compared to my hair.
