Wrinkles

I didn't want to be graceful YET.

I’ve recently become obsessed with wrinkles in much the same way you might become obsessed with red Toyota Corollas after buying one yourself: though you’d never given them much thought before, now you see them wherever you look—because now you happen to have one yourself.

It’s easy to advocate for graceful aging when you’re 26 years old and your collagen production line is cranking out beautifully bouncy cells. You use fond words for future facial creases, like, “elegant,” “well-lived,” and “natural beauty.” You think of friendly crinkled faces and remember all the matrons you’ve ever loved and feel a flutter of warmth in your chest toward it all; isn’t it such a privilege to age?

But when you’re thirty-three and your forehead starts to remember every expression you’ve ever made and your cheeks begin to pout ever-so-slightly below your nose and your aesthetician starts telling you how to care for more “mature” skin, you realize you didn’t mean that you wanted to be graceful yet.

And so now I’ve been watching the world around me and seeing only wrinkles and the absence of wrinkles.

My children’s faces, for example: Today I observed our daughter’s hairline, noticed the way her curls give way to the delicate velvet of her brow. I rubbed one knuckle from her jaw to the space above her ear; the skin was so wholesome and perfect there that I had to sniff back a tear. And our baby, oh—I could kiss the smooth architecture of his forehead for days and never be satisfied. My lips are hungry for such perfection, since there’s nothing of that sort found in me anymore.

I remember now being a girl and visiting the nursing home as a Brownie scout. We sang Christmas carols at the front of the stale-smelling room and, as we passed by the residents on our way out, some of them reached out to touch us. When I got home my mother said, “It’s because they don’t get to see such young skin often.”

And now I understand this fascination with youth—only when mine has started to evade me ever-so-slightly, and while I still think if I work fast enough maybe I can snatch it back, slather it back onto myself, remove those years of laughing and stressing and grieving and eating too much fried food. My entire Instagram feed has advertisements that promise me I can, and I have believed them, if only in the way a hopeful child might believe a deadbeat parent who says they’ll show up, they really will!, this time.

At night I cast my forehead with patches called “Frownies,” and perhaps they’re called that because we’re all so sad that our lives have come to this: patching our faces with stickers when we’d rather be doing a million other things—like laughing, or sipping pinot noir or, I don’t know…living. Even now I half-consider: Would renouncing such acts as smiling, winking, furrowing, and frowning really be such a large price to pay if it meant I could pretend I was 26 a little longer?

You might be thinking it’s incredibly vain to be so obsessed with one’s face, and I agree with you—it might be—but to be fair to myself and anyone else with a shipment of overpriced Viking moisturizers out for delivery right now, I’d like to point out that this is, of course, not really about wrinkles at all. [It’s never really about the wrinkles, is it?] It’s the fear of what comes with the wrinkles—and the fear of what will be lost with them, too.

Youth has a certain power to it—a verve that makes you irresistible and bright. It’s delicious and magnetic and makes people more likely to listen, because you’re first able to make them look. Sure, there may be wisdom with age, but there’s an allure to youth. Being young is sexy and fun, while being middle-aged is often paired with phrases like “crisis” and “mom jeans.” As the American Psychological Association put it, “Ageism is one of the last socially acceptable prejudices.”¹ Apparently, getting old is devastating—and everyone knows it.

And so of course we revolt against wrinkles with all the fierceness of a soldier entering combat. Thomas’ verses are the anthem in our ears: Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.² And so rage, rage we do: against the dying of our youth, against the shrinking of our perceived vitality, against the belief that our lives are somehow losing their luster.

But I return again to that phrase, to “age gracefully.” And I know that now is the moment where I stand at the fulcrum, where—though I wish it wasn’t already so—I’ll need to decide how I will exist in a reality where “crow’s feet” and “elevens” are interwoven with the other features of my face.

Will I welcome them?

Or will I rage?

I will not offer a reflection on the privilege of aging—although I do believe it is a privilege and I dearly hope to be given the gift of doing it. Instead, I will think about what type of woman I would like to be.

I would be lying if I told you I didn’t want to be a young woman, because it really is a delightful thing to be, but when the day comes when I can’t be that anymore, I want to be a hospitable woman.

I want to be a woman with eyes that crinkle and twinkle who sweeps her arms around in generous, lavish motions and says to everyone she meets, “Come! Be just as you are with me! Oh my gosh, don’t you know how lovely your existence is? Has anyone told you today that you’re wonderful?”

And this matters because, if I can’t find the grace to do this for myself, I won’t have the grace within me—not really and truly—to do it for anyone else. How could anyone feel perfectly lovely in my presence if they find me raging and revolting against my very own essence? How can they allow themselves to be seen by me if I can’t even bear to look at myself?

This is not me saying I won’t slather my face with that magical Viking moisturizer. [It is already en route, after all.] It’s not me saying that I won’t care for my skin, either, or that I’ll never struggle to accept new lines that surface. This is just me saying that I’ve found myself sitting on the tipping point between welcome and rage around my age, and while I’m tempted to try to slide backwards toward my youth, I still want to be the type of woman who marches forward into age with welcoming arms—for my own general sense of wellbeing, yes, but also for all those gorgeous, dewy women behind me who will one day have to find the courage within themselves to face their wrinkles, too.

I’m also trying out this new button, where you can chip in to show your support of The Second Cup by donating a dollar or two if a post really resonates with you, rather than committing to a monthly subscription. These donations will go towards tuition as I pursue my M. Div at Pillar Seminary, and while I appreciate them—please know that your presence here is by far the most important gift you could bring.

1. https://www.apa.org/monitor/2023/03/cover-new-concept-of-aging

2. https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night