The wish I didn't want

I was sitting in the back seat of the car, next to my partner’s grandson, his buddy on his other side. A few of his many grandparents were taking the kids to a corn maze, and I drew the back seat. As it happened, this position meant that I kept seeing myself in the driver’s rear-view mirror. And I found myself wishing that I weren’t so bothered by what I saw. I kept wishing that the thought passing through my mind weren’t there. But there it was. “I wish I didn’t look so old.”

I’ve thought a lot about this topic of aging in recent years, as you know if you’ve been following this blog. In my mind, I’m clear that aging is a part of living, a part to be celebrated. “Old” is an inevitable and valuable position on the “people mover” of life, and it’s the one I currently occupy. In my mind, I am genuinely fine with that. But deep down, in my gut, I realize I’ve taken in all the ageist notions that float around us, the stuff we hear and see and breathe in every day.

The wish I didn’t want to be having merged that ageist stuff with our societal obsession with appearance. The combined message is clear and demanding: dye your hair to hide the gray, use Botox to hide the wrinkles, wear “youthful” clothes to hide the rest. The message is especially strong for women, of course; women’s appearance is a measure of their value at all ages. Stir in the cultural devaluation of age, and looking old as a woman is about as bad as it gets. It’s sort of ironic, actually, that even as we old women slip into social invisibility, we still worry about how we look, about what impression we make. Even when the world, increasingly, doesn’t care, isn’t impressed. At all.

Yet, despite knowing all this on an intellectual level, there I sat, glancing at myself in the mirror, wishing …

Actually, like most folks, I look in the mirror several times a day. I comb my hair, check whether clothes are on straight, put in eye drops—focusing on some isolated part of the whole picture, and doing it in a particular, familiar context. But there’s something so vastly different between that intentional narrow focus and the sudden image of myself caught by chance in an unexpected mirror—my reflection in a department store mirror, in an elevator mirror, in a shop window as I pass. I first wonder, “Who is that?” Then I realize: “Oh … it’s me.” This time, I caught myself wishing it weren’t.

I recognize that I look especially old for my age—at least in the wrinkle department. Some combination of the genes I got from a mom (I almost said “bad genes”—there it is again, that ageist stuff) and thousands of hours in the sun over years of serious outdoor activity gifted me with a very old-looking face. But I forget that all the time. I experience myself from the inside as I am, not as I look. So I’m regularly surprised when people assume that I’m older than I actually am. And I’m surprised when I see myself, unexpectedly, looking exactly how I look instead of how I feel.

Now, I know that people do respond to what they see. They can’t possibly know all of who I am, and their best clue is how I look. Predictably, I don’t want people to respond to me first and solely as an old woman—both because of my own internalized ageism and because I know that they’ll make assumptions about me that are simply false. That’s how stereotypes work.

But still, I can’t put this all on other people, the misunderstanding “They” in the world, the “Our society” that fails to honor age. The truth is that as I caught my image in that mirror, no one except me was telling me that it would be better if I looked younger. It was my stuff that tripped me up in that moment.

I wish my age and my appearance didn’t matter—to me or to anyone else—as I insist they shouldn’t.

But there it was.

I was sitting in the back seat wishing I weren’t thinking what I was thinking: “I wish I didn’t look so old.”

Ah, the work goes on …