Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Balm
There was a time, between when my son stopped making school art projects and this last year, when my refrigerator could have fit in a kitchen appliance ad: shiny, clean and devoid of magnetized clutter. Okay, you may have found a chip clip or national park magnet attached way back on the side, but I was aware of it and found it slightly distasteful. Now there is a giant magnetized dry-erase weekly calendar on my fridge, along with some coupons and a Doonesbury comic strip about Prevagen.
Something has snapped.
Other clues: even when the living room is clean, there is still a tube of hand lotion and a pair of cat claw clippers on the table by my chair. There is another particularly ugly (but very effective) pump dispenser of hand lotion on the dining room sideboard, beside a large bowl of face masks. There are tissue boxes everywhere.
My house is starting to look like your grandma’s house.
The why is simple. I am Grandma Age. Sure, I noticed friends my age with grandchildren, but something in me told me that they were somehow submitting to grandma-hood, rather than the hard rock fact that time moves steadily for us all. It snuck up on me because there was no evidence of grandchildren. Grandchildren can change your household priorities fast. What once was a two-income-no-kids showplace is suddenly a toy-strewn play pen, and grandmas don’t give a rip. Understandably. But my lack of grandchildren is just a fluke of luck - neither bad nor good - that will not change with more age. What has changed with age is my concern about appearances. Just like my grandma friends, I no longer give a rip. Well, my rips are slowly fading. Or more fittingly, they are sagging.
I’m starting to look like your grandma.
My mom’s grandparents, looking like what you see when you think of the word “grandparent.”
It is easy to fool yourself for a while. You don’t NEED to look in that full length mirror every day, especially during a pandemic quarantine. You can blame the ravages of pants shrinkage for a while. But eventually, you will meet the mirror, or the scale, or those pants, and you will be unable to hide from the truth.
The worst truth comes in the photos: what’s that wrinkly thing on my neck? Where did my chin go? How many chins do I have? So you try new photo angles until that neck thing is stretched taut, and you are holding your phone straight up above your head and pretending you are studying the most fascinating cloud formation.
I’m starting to dress like your grandma.
I’m having problems finding pants build for women who have completely lost their waistline. Some of it is attributable to my bout with breast cancer two years ago, which resulted in some fat rearrangement and heavy-duty estrogen-removal drugs which drain me of energy and secondary sex characteristics. But most is attributable to the inexorable slowing down of my calorie needs as I age. And my sweet tooth. And my cheese tooth. And my pair of eyeteeth named Chips and Guacamole.
All this has convinced me that my lifelong poo-pooing of stretchy pants, an attitude that was certainly appropriate for a younger woman, is over. Absolutely and enthusiastically over. We have had the textillic technology to abolish buttons and zippers for decades now and yet we keep putting them in trousers. It’s not logical. I’m pulling my pants on from now on.
Does this mean I have given up? Oh no. I exercise, I try to eat right, I floss. But it does mean that I have given up on caring what YOU think. There’s nothing to prove and no one to impress. Maybe there never was. I can see that from here.