Thanks to plastic surgery, we can all look young forever. If you have enough money, you can redesign your face to become someone whose identity is held together with sutures and scars.
I see older women on TV who look as if their faces are tightly stretched balloons, and I imagine the frightened older woman beneath, afraid her real reflection is no longer beautiful.
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No, don’t get me wrong. I look in my own mirror and see the way time has marked my face. I see the jowls beginning to form. The dimples I used to flash in my twenties are now flanked by parentheses of wrinkles that cannot be denied.
But there is a difference between maintenance and overhaul. Like a classic car, the value of the vehicle diminishes when new parts replace the originals.
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My mother used to lie on her bed with her head lolling off the side, looking at me with her upside-down eyes twinkling.
“This is how I’d look with a facelift,” she said, using her hands to push-pull back her eyes in a slant and pressing her face back toward her ears. Her face reddened with the position and effort. “What do ya think?”
I’d shake my head in youthful disdain, wondering if she meant it, until she’d roll upright. Her face would once again be the one I’d known all my life: love in skin that looked at once tender and tough, playful and wise, eternally young and sometimes old.
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She’d smile, and the lines of her face would frame the message she sent to me.
“Better,” she’d say, patting her face and letting it settle back into its familiar shape, “I like this better.”
I had to agree. There was no reason to change…she was the same Mom I’d always known. Even better, she was a look into my own future. I could watch her mature and change with a grace and sensibility that would help me accept my own eventual transformation.
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I have watched the person I am grow and adapt, inside and out, over the years since then with a mix of trepidation and admiration.
The changes in my face tell a story I love to read.
In exchange for a smooth, unlined face, I have been given worries and joys that line my forehead and crinkle my eyes. The tight, elastic skin of my youth has been replaced with a softer, more expressive covering that can show feelings without effort: from worry to pride to sadness.
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The circles under my eyes, though not attractive, are a testament to the day-to-dayness of living as a mother and a wife. They bear witness to the sleepless nights with sick children, the pain of losses, and the tears that accompanied sadness.
But there are wrinkles I love. The lines that etch my older face when I smile have formed quietly and slowly over the years, digging into my skin without my having even noticed.
As life’s joys and happiness distracted me, they took their places—along the edges of satisfied smiles, around the eyes squinting with laughter, against the cheeks that held happy memories of kisses planted there by loving lips.
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My face holds the chronicle of my life in each wrinkle.
Why would I want to erase the past? Pulling back the years on my face would be like trying to forget the life that made me who I am. It would be sad to think I had nothing to show for my time here but smooth, tight skin and a startled, superficial expression.
I showed my daughter how I’d look with a facelift. My head throbbed as I hung over the bed, my hands patting myself back into youth.
“Cut it out,” she giggled. “That’s not you.”
Exactly.
Contact Robin at robinwrites@yahoo.com
