I sat at the vanity and took a good thrice-over, for nearly half an hour. I hadn’t done so in a long while, as I usually breeze through personal time to get to something more pressing. I notice the gray has come in at a swifter rate than I had thought; rather, I had not thought but made only infrequent and brief observations. The ratio seems to now be about 1 gray hair: 10 brunette. I know most came in this year.
Then I noticed the more subtle changes like very slight skin tags around my eyes and the softening of crepe-y skin around my eyes and over my hands. And — oh, God — two age spots. When did I get my mother’s hands? I love those hands, but I thought they were hers alone.
When did this happen? What was I doing while age crept up on me? Loads of laundry, I guess. Cooking dinners, grocery shopping, filing papers, bathing children, holding precious little hands to cross parking lots, cleaning at times, writing to-do lists, turning book pages, too. And washing these hands — incessantly, as if to clean off the residue of multiple tasks perfunctorily, adroitly performed in the course of a typical day…so many days I hadn’t noticed had slipped by — slipped through these hands.
I figure this aging phenomenon was occurring when I began choosing to wear chunky sweaters around the house to keep my neck warm, or when I found I needed reading glasses earlier this year (it was amusing at first), or when I realized how much I prize my antique secretary.
And why was I always too busy until now to notice? It was, I guess, the kids growing less needful of my help, which finally afforded me a few months to catch my breath away from tending to others, and time to myself to reflect on impending change, advancing time. Maybe I got the chance to sit down with nothing else to do.
In all honesty, I know the truth. I decided that it had been long enough, and I was finally ready to take a closer look and to ask myself, “What happened to the girl I used to know?” This is what middle age is, after all — realization and reassessment. No midlife crisis going on here — just reflection.
Still…insidious, aging is. So damned insidious.
