The Case for My Mother’s Face
(Why I won’t be getting any “work done”)

    My mother’s face tells you who she is.
    “I am seventy-four, “ it says. “I am a wife, an artist, a mother. I am intelligent and funny. I am quick to judge. I believe in loyalty, hard work, and inspiration. I am shy, but I hate being alone. I want to make the world a better place. I care what others think about me. I am brave and cowardly. I am a worrier who believes that my worrying can protect those I love from harm. I love dinners out, the lake in my backyard, and the first snow. I believe in a God who does not reveal himself to me.”
    My mother’s face is the most beautiful and complex that I have ever known. And I am grateful that she has done nothing to alter its architecture.


    “Sure I’ll get a little work done when the time comes,” my friend Shannon says.
    I’m having lunch with my friends. We’re all in our early forties.
    “What, exactly, are you thinking of getting done?” Cathy asks Shannon.
    “Definitely my eyes, because they go down right here,” she says, touching her finger to just above her eyelid.
    “I’m going for Botox,” says Cathy. “We should all go together – I think there are two-for-one deals some places.”
    “I’d do that,” says Mel. “What about you Brett? Let’s all get Botox!”
    My friends look toward me.
    “Uh…No thanks. You know how much I hate needles and pain and botulism.”
    “Right,” they say collectively, my physical cowardice a well-known fact. I black out when I give blood, take a Valium before I go to the dentist, and eschew waxing as I do death by fire.
    My friends poke their salads as they continue talking about all the work they’re going to have done. I’m relieved that I was able to pull out the fear-of-pain card. Because I know that my feelings about this issue won’t be popular. If I tell them the reasons why I won’t be getting cosmetic surgery, I’ll appear judgmental. A killjoy. A prude. Refusing to participate in the “what you’re going to get done” conversation with girlfriends, is akin to going to an ice-cream parlor with them and saying, ”Nothing for me, please. I don’t do dairy.” Who am I to refuse an indulgence that we’re all supposed to be secretly, giddily, guiltily sharing?
    As the conversation winds on to other topics, I think about my mother’s face and all the things I cannot say.

    I’m not immune to the terror the aging face inspires in its American owners. Watching myself age is difficult, frightening, maddening. I was a pretty enough girl. Not stunning. But I got enough attention from men, mostly because I was young and stacked, and they were horny. Having lost that attention has unsettled me. “Who am I now?” I ask myself when I’m with a bunch of strangers who look past me toward the younger, hipper folk in the room.
    So I get it. I understand why women want to buy some time before they give in to middle age.
    For a long time, I didn’t see the changes. For a long time – even through my late thirties -- I was guessed to be younger by pretty much everyone. So often, in fact, that I began to think that I was that rare bird who’d managed to skip aging altogether.


    Right after I turned forty, I was sitting in the back of a Taxi, when the young cabbie told me that he was an expert on guessing people’s ages.
    “I bet you’d be surprised,” I said, pulling up in the seat.
    “No,” he said, “I always guess right. It’s something I do.”
    “No one ever guesses my age,” I said, flipping my hair over one shoulder (a youthful gesture I’ve hung onto).
    “I could guess,”
    “OK,” I said.
    He looked at me in the rear view mirror and assessed, “You look like you are exactly forty years old.”
    Wham. I felt like he had just reached back and slapped me in the face.
    As he turned onto my street, I wondered why on earth this cabbie played so dangerously with his income. He, after all, had introduced the age-guessing conversations. Surely he knew that he’d fare better in the tip department if he under-guessed. I could only conclude that he actually thought I looked forty-five and was anticipating a hefty remunerative reward.
    He got a buck and some sticky change.
    When I got home, I ran to the mirror to take a look. That morning, when I had glanced at my reflection, I had looked like my normal younger-than-the-real-me self. Was it possible that I had aged 10 years in an afternoon? I believed this to be possible only because I had once gained 7 pounds during a Sunday brunch.
    I took a closer look. And there it was. I had indeed aged ten years since that morning. My mouth had become smaller. A bit of flesh dangled under my chin. And my eyes appeared to be sinking into my head. I figured that, at the rate of ten years per afternoon, my eyes would be completely swallowed by my face by that Friday. I’d look like one of those old people dolls they make out of stuffing and pantyhose.
    Once my panic subsided, I poured myself a couple of glasses of wine and considered my options. I could go the route of so many of my friends and start to consider my first surgery, or at least Botox. I could only go out to places where the lighting was dim and the people too drunk to notice my fine lines and thinning lips. Or – radical thought – I could embrace the aging process.
    All the women I’d known who had embraced aging were the ones who had been born old. High school classmates who couldn’t wait to slip into that first patterned housedress. Friends of my mother’s who lived to sit on their front stoops and natter about their absent men and ungrateful children. Cousins in their forties, who had already bought burial plots and planned their memorial services. Women from the old neighborhood, only slightly older than myself, who sat in groups around big tables at the mall, sipping from Big Gulp cups and talking about their bunions, arthritis, incontinence, and sores that would not heal – as if each ailment was a badge earned on the torturous road to earthy release and the kingdom of heaven.
    Was that what getting older meant? Good God, hand me the damn scalpel, I’ll do it myself.
    I had another glass of wine and considered.
    I thought about women who were my mentors. Women I revered. Women I wanted to emulate. Joan Didion, Nadine Gordimer, Frances McDormand, Maya Angelou, Barbara Boxer, Gloria Steinem, Janet Reno, Christiane Amampour – a list that could go on and on. All over forty-five. All with faces much like my mother’s. Not one of them wearing housedresses.
    These women, I thought, project a solid sense of themselves. They are women who continue to live extraordinary lives, while not denying their losses and their vulnerability.
    I was three glasses of wine in, and ready for bed. But it seemed clear to me that by denying my age I would be denying a part of myself. And I wasn’t going to become my best self, my most splendid self, if I became ashamed of the most banal of human conditions— that we all get older.
    I took another sip, got up and threw the remainder of my glass of wine into the sink.


    I worry about women cutting into their faces. I worry that our culture places a higher premium on looks than on character. That’s a given. But I also worry that that women have changed the conversation around this issue so much that feminist rhetoric is used to justify our maniacal pursuit of youthful beauty, “It makes me feel better about myself.” “It’s my body, my choice.” This rhetoric clouds the truth – that we “feel better about ourselves” because the world will perceive us as youthful and therefore viable.
    I worry that surgically staving off the inevitable makes us radically unprepared for our own deaths. The aging process eases us toward our certain end, forcing us to place value on our inner journey rather than on our outer selves. Without this process, we will be far more frightened than our predecessors, when called upon to jump ship.


    Last summer my mother and I dangled between two mountain peaks in a chair lift. I was so terrified I couldn’t look down. So I fixed my gaze on her face.
    “I thought you were afraid of heights,” I said, remembering her sweaty grip in similar situations through the years.
    My mother swung her feet a bit. The sway of the chair causing my bowels to clutch.
    “Oh yes. I used to be so scared,” she said. “But I’m not anymore. If we go down now, I will not regret. I have had an extraordinary life.”
    It was little comfort to me then that I might hurtle to my death with my mother, leaving a relatively youngish corpse behind, with so much to live for.
    But later, I remembered her words. And how her blue eyes looked the same as they had always looked, when she reached for my hand.