Me, my mother, and aging…

Seeking

I used to look in the mirror and see a person I thought was me. There were features I saw that I thought were mine… the smooth skin, the dark eyelashes, the reddish hue of my lips. I thought these were things I’d always have. I thought they belonged to me.

I would look at my mother and see a person I thought was her… the slightly blotched look of expanding pores, the looseness of her skin, the pale shade of her eyes. I didn’t know that I was seeing youth in my reflection and age in hers. I learned the hard way — I look in the mirror today and see someone very much like my mother.

Age has crept up on me and I’ve turned to meet it feeling a mixture of outrage and surprise. This wasn’t supposed to happen to me… there are still so many things I want to do, so many people I want to be. Does this mean I’ll never be an actress? A singer? Does this mean I’ll never return to college? What happened to that life I thought I was entitled to?

All around me women are aging, some more gracefully than others, but someplace inside I’m thinking it wasn’t supposed to happen to me. I was always going to be young — laugh in the face of the years. Blessed with youthfulness since first bloom, I’ve always appeared to be younger than my years, but now that I’m turning 45, I find that ‘younger’ is not young enough. I guess I believed by the time I got “old” I would be content. But that’s not happening.

I’m still waiting for that time when I will be thin. I’m still waiting for the time when I’ll be the “belle of the ball.” I still feel like I haven’t lived the story of my life. Somehow I went from playing a supporting role in my parent’s movie to playing a supporting role in my children’s movie and I thought that I would still be young when I got to star in my own.

Now I seek the positive side of this event… this “getting old” thing. There must be some carrot to dangle in front of my nose, something to make this all worthwhile. There must be some way to slip into this without so much kicking and screaming.