Based on the ads that clutter the edges of my computer screen,
I should be worried about a lot of things.
These include my wardrobe (“The latest in plus-size fashion!”), my finances
(“Interest Rates Plummet!”), and my shoes (“Dozens of cute styles!”). But there is one problem that the Internet
Gods feel is even more appalling than my lack of trendy new pumps: the hideous
signs of my decrepitude.
I should be stressing out about the dry skin on my feet, the
wrinkles on my face, my maternal abdominal fat, and my general overall
sagginess. Scars are a biggie, too. I should be trying to smooth them. Erase them.
Photo-shop them. Something. Anything!
Indeed, I should be in a state of continual semi-panic about the visible
effects of the Sands of Time.
My proximal reaction is amusement at how poorly the digital
universe seems to be tracking me. I’m not terribly prone to tinfoil-helmet-type
fears; my thoughts are not valuable enough for anyone to want to steal
them. Still, it makes me snort and
giggle to see just how wide of the mark these ads fly. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take an MBA to
guess that a person who spends her time reading peer-reviewed journal articles,
cracking obscure Star Trek jokes, and utilizing an online text-to-hexadecimal
translator is probably not in the market for “The Revolutionary Secret That Dermatologists
Hate!!!”
Come on, Google and Facebook, can’t you do any better than
that? With all my keystrokes at your disposal, you still don’t know me one whit!
Or… do they?
Or… do they?
Oh, I don’t mean that I’m about to get liposuction and
dermal abrasion, or start sighing abjectly in front of a mirror. (I can hear my
friends snickering.) Nonetheless, I do sometimes feel a
disorienting disconnect with my sense of self.
Is that forty-two-year-old mom really… me?
I clearly remember the summer day when I had recently
reached the exalted age of ten, and my mother divulged that, deep down, she was
still a ten-year-old, too. The idea that
my reliable, stolid mom-parent was simultaneously the pigtailed child grinning
impishly from black-and-white post-WWII-Britain both comforted and terrified
me. Part of me wanted to cling to the
childish idea that she – and all grownups – were omnipotent, omniscient beings
who existed in a higher plane than my own.
But at the same time, I was already feeling the complex world of
adulthood closing in on me like a pall of dense smoke. I
already knew that I didn’t ever want to lose my essential self. When it came
time to navigate that daunting world, I wanted to still be me. The me I knew.
I am now the age that my mother was, on that particular day
in 1982.
I don’t obsess over vanishing beauty; I never had it to
lose, anyhow. At ten, I was not an adorable Shirley Temple; I was a grubby
little nail-bitten creature often found somewhere high up in a tree. At fourteen, I was not a peachy, blossoming
young sylph; I was an uncomfortable collection of bony elbows, scraped knees,
and miserable uncertainty. At nineteen,
I was not a gorgeously unblemished young lady with perfect curves; I was a doughy
lump of acne skulking in a shapeless pair of overalls. But through those horrifically awkward and
sometimes terrifying years, I still believed that I could grow up to do
world-changing things. Cure cancer? Visit Mars?
End war? Discover new subatomic
particles? Heck, yes. I adored logic puzzles, science fiction, running
around in the woods, and asking way too many questions. I liked inventing, and building. I liked playing. Playing!
And then Father Time wreaked a quarter-century of collateral
damage.
Facebook wants me to worry about the physical wear-and-tear
and the visibly droopy bits, but what about the metaphorical scars and
blemishes? The wrinkling and graying of
my perspective and personality? The
cumulative scarring of all of life’s failures and disappointments and
disillusionments? Those seem far more difficult to treat with ointment,
loofahs, supportive undergarments, or That One Secret Trick Your Doctor Won’t
Tell You*.
A few months back, a friend in his late thirties who is
half-heartedly doggy-paddling around the dating pool expressed consternation
about the fact that all the women he met had “emotional baggage.”
My middle-aged cynicism kicked in instantly. Baggage? What,
just like mine? Just like yours?
Jay, who has been married to me for a full dozen years now,
was about as unsympathetic as I was in the face of our friend’s complaint. His thoughts on the matter, however, were
radically different from mine. While I inwardly harrumphed that all of us
middle-aged farts carry a gray, wrinkly knapsack of past woes, Jay stoutly (and
sweetly) maintained, “That’s silly. Not
all women have baggage. Nancy doesn’t
have any baggage at all.” Yes. He actually said that out loud.
Oh, Heavens to Betsy.
The assertion alone threw all the dirty laundry in my head into a fast
spin cycle, churning up the staple set of humiliating and miserable memories
that refuse to fade into obscurity. I’m
sure that hundreds of happy days have blurred together into a polyglot, but the
most sparkling examples of my personal idiocy, embarrassment, and loss are as
immovable and as obtrusive as pillars of polished marble.
I should pause here to say that, given that I don’t have
Baggage-with-a-capital-B, I have absolutely no ability (and no right whatsoever)
to comment upon the agony of extraordinary emotional pain, loss, or paralysis,
any more than I have the ability to imagine what it might be like to suffer
physical paralysis. Nor do the Facebook ads that plague my screen offer cures
for debilitating diseases, severe burns, or past abuse. They focus on the
superficial effects of the passage of years: the everyday wear-and-tear and the
inevitable scars, not the profound ones.
The ones we all acquire. With
time.
I worry that the impacts of all those small scars have
cumulatively, yielded a crop of cynicism, inertia, and stolidness. I peer in the metaphorical mirror, suspecting
myself of giving up adventure for security and reneging on idealism and
perfectionism in favor of Just Getting Shit Done. Do I see just a hint of jadedness around my
eyes? Is my optimism sagging, thus
allowing my sarcasm to flop around? How
did I get to be forty-two years old without ever paragliding, publishing a
novel, or setting foot in Africa? Why
can’t I watch romantic movies without groaning and rolling my eyes, rather than
sighing and tearing up? At what point
did the wrinkles of time inform me that my vote in the next Presidential
election probably won’t matter, the Indigo Girls aren’t all that profound, and
I’m never going to go to Mars? My idealism is mottled with stretch-marks, dammit!
Stretch marks.
Yeah. Okay, fine. What about them? The real, physical ones, that is. Maybe there’s something I can learn from the
physical that will inform the metaphysical.
So, okay, what of all the other physical changes and scars?
I took stock of my scars.
And I found a few stories.
Left knee: don’t slide
into first base if you are a second grader playing whiffle-ball in a parking
lot.
Right thigh: don’t go
hiking up snowfields with an ice axe that you don’t know how to use.
Left thigh: if invited
by a family of Jamaican farmers to stop by any time before five o’clock, do not
arrive five minutes late, after they have set loose their pack of trained
German Shepherd guard dogs. But if you
do, pretending you came to play super-fun doggie games will fool five-and-a-half
of the six.
Lower abdomen: removing
twelve pounds of tightly wedged twin by C-sections, by Jay’s report, involves a
crowbar.
Left breast: some
lumps are benign. Some days are full of
gratitude.
Arms: if you donate
blood enough times – like maybe fifteen gallons or so by now – you’ll
eventually have a collection of little needle-marks. But they’re not junkie-marks, okay? Okay?
Face: for gods’ sake,
stop picking at the acne! Also, dusk in moose
territory is a bad time to be driving relatively fast on a gravel road – but
the doctor and two nurses in Meadow Lake Saskatchewan in the summer of ’99 were
a kind, down-to-earth, and deeply generous team with a copious supply of
heavy-duty black thread.
What does this all add up to, other than a complex roadmap
of scar tissue (private tours -- by invitation only)? Well, first of all, it shows that modern
medicine is nothing to take for granted.
Second, it’s clear that I’ve gotten off pretty darned easily. Third, it shows that scars tell a complicated
story of good and bad luck, good and bad choices, and lessons fairly or
unfairly learned. But I think it offers
a few broader hints, as well.
One of those hints is – I kind of like my scars. Mythologically speaking, those who try to
turn back time do about as well as those who try to stop the tide or fly with wax
wings. But I don’t want to stop time,
and more than I want to erase my scars. My
worries have less to do with my neck-veins, my unsightly calluses, and my
too-too-solid thighs than with world-traveling still undone, world-saving still
unaccomplished, and relative lack of parties at which everyone blasts the music
immoderately high and starts taking clothes off – and these desires, I now
realize, don’t have to be tied to anyone’s calendar but my own.
Yeah, I’m female, and yeah, I’m middle-aged. As a result, the Advertising Gods think they
have me pegged: “You Won’t Believe Our Miracle Scar-Erasing Crème!”
No, you’re right, I won’t believe.
But there are things I do believe – and one of them is that
I’ll happily ignore you, Facebook Advertiser.
I don’t want your snake-oil goo. I
don’t want your Dorian Gray outlook on life. I don’t want to erase my scars,
expunge my past, return to high school, or reclaim all the fears, credulity,
insecurities I’ve shed along the way.
On the other hand, there are things I do want to hang
onto. My optimism is one of them. I want
to believe that I can make a difference, that some songs are worth getting
stuck in my head, and that sure, I will still travel the world one day with
just a backpack on my back. I want to stay
up too late, and run around in the woods, and ask too many questions. I want to eat s’mores with that once-me ten-year-old.
I’m pretty sure she’s here with me for good. She’s a bit battered and scarred. But… that’s okay. She’s in for the long haul.
*Admittedly, my doctor does seem awfully youthful, but I’m
pretty sure she’s not holding out on us.
