in the eye of the beholder

My husband times his words perfectly to annoy me. In the middle of a nice dinner, he’ll say the exact thing to get under my skin. Or maybe we’re sitting by the evening fire, enjoying a glass of wine.  He’ll come up with that same exact thing that makes me break eye contact and look at the floor to avoid the awkwardness I feel. I’m not happy with his comment.

Advertisers have a lot of comments about women too. This is old news.  What they sell passes judgment on body size.  Now it’s images of aging (or not aging) that catch my eye. Perhaps you’ve seen the dreadful internet pop-up ad about wrinkles. I would include a link except I wish I had never seen it and wish the same for you. The pop-up displays a reasonable face being techno-peeled into the perfect skin of a young woman. The ad is effective. It makes me wince and go, “eeeewwwwww”. It makes me look away and hope to never see such a wrinkled face again, especially if it’s my own.

Why can’t we just decide wrinkles are beautiful? That a woman who has aged, like a fine wine, is the most desirable of all. She has blossomed, developing depth, complexity and ripeness. We could even create cosmetic products to reproduce these enviable creases for younger faces.

In spite of my “aging like fine wine” philosophy, this morning while I gazed in the mirror at my skin, I opened Pandora’s box. Placing my hands on the sides of my neck, I pulled the skin back. Wow! Just like that, I looked 10, maybe 20 years younger. This is what a face lift could do!

$&!%^#*!:(

I am going to “Just Say No” to looking in the bathroom mirror and manually “youthanizing” my neck. There is no way I would have cosmetic surgery. There is nothing wrong with my God-Given 52-year old skin. Surgery would surely make me scar like Mrs. Frankenstein. And I hate pain.

As for my husband and his obnoxious comments … I am going to have to muscle through those random times when he drops the bomb and says,

“You know – you’re beautiful.”

　

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