The First of Many Aging Meltdowns

For the last few years I’ve entertained the notion of writing about aging. Not so much my ‘experience’ with it but my hopes for it, the parts of it that excited me, and how happy I’ll be to be old enough that people stop questioning my “old Southern person” vocabulary. Anytime I tried to write about it though, I couldn’t put together my thoughts. It felt like something big was missing, something crucial. After all, how can a baby tell you anything about growing up.

Ari turned twenty-seven two months ago and she had this slight panic when she realized she was old enough to be a mom. “But you’re not a mom.” I told her, “There’s a huge disposition shift between a mom and not a mom.”

“It’s not that.” she moaned, “It’s that if I told someone I had kids, no one would say, ‘But you’re so young!’ They would think it was normal.”

That’s when it hit me. I’m the age where girls start panicking that they’ll never find someone to marry. Ari’s old enough to have two kids and it not be weird. A lot of my friends are in their thirties. I remember being twenty-two and thinking that someone in their thirties was too old for me but now I realize you’re just as young in your thirties as you are in your twenties. You're just older.

Ari says she’s too old to wear her favorite pair of denim shorts. “They’re way too short!” she whined.

“No they’re not! And no you aren’t… Are you?” Is twenty-seven too old for short shorts? Naturally at this point I made it all about me. I’d always looked forward to aging. I was excited to have a full life under my belt, countless stories and adventures and I was happy to know that one day I would know all those things that prompted your parents to say, “If I had known then what I know now…”

I thought age would look good on me. I thought I’d finally match up with my disposition, my enjoyment for moving slowly through a day and feeling a pure form of glee when a flower blooms. Those are old folk things. But now I’m kind of scared. It’s not that my brain will get older, just my body. There’s no way my parents feel like they’re in their fifties because numbers have no feeling. They’re twenty-three year old kids. They just happen have these achy bodies holding them back from what they want to do. I won’t be older. I’ll just be limited. I’ll want to run and jump into a pool but my damn hip will blow out if I try. That’s not fair.

I stared at my body in a mirror the other day and it does look young but it also looks so different from the body I had in high school. It looks more tired than my high school body. I tried to picture it older.

“Skin not bouncing back like it used to?” Kristen Bell asked me through the tv and a tsunami of bubbles flooded across the screen. “Introducing Neutrogena’s new skin firming….” I stopped listening. Is this bouncy skin? I pressed my cheek up and watched it fall. What’s going to happen to it?

Now I’m wondering if missing my youth will be painful or something that slipped away so slowly that I came to terms with it as it left me.  Will I wish I had played a sport when my knees could let me jump so high? Will I be sad that I didn’t flaunt my young body? Am I wasting my youth? I’m having a legitimate crisis here! Why do I spend so much time thinking about life and people when I could just be out shimming around town without a care in the world? I’ve always looked forward to aging and now I don’t want to get old.

A few days after this crisis I woke up, threw on my work dress, inched into the bathroom, and looked in the mirror. What I saw confused me. My face didn’t look like my face. Maybe I hadn't really looked at me in a while. Maybe I hadn't paid attention to the faint crease between my eyebrows or hadn't noticed that my cheeks are less full. It all seemed so sudden. I held still and pointed my phone camera my way.  I needed a second opinion. I sent the photo of my foreign face to Ari and she only laughed at my look of terror. "It's not funny Ari. Who is that woman? Where are her round cheeks and oily skin patches? She looks dry and frightened."

I’ve got four more years to be in my twenties. I’ve got anxiety, low blood sugar, a bad knee, the tendency to faint in the summertime, a clicking sound in my brain when I run, two painful ganglion cysts, and a big toe that cracks when I walk. One day I’ll long to be twenty-six again. That really scares me.