Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?
What’s more unbelievable: a magical, talking mirror or the middle-aged woman asking it to confirm whether or not she is the fairest in the land?
I’m going with the latter.
On a snowy day in January, I blew out thirty-six candles on a raspberry and buttercream birthday cake. I woke that morning not to the sound of songbirds singing through my bedroom window but to the thud of my son slamming a door at 5:45 a.m. There were no furry friends to help me flutter out of bed. Instead, I rolled off the mattress, fumbled around for my glasses on the nightstand, and plodded toward my bathroom to prepare for another day of the same.
I flicked a switch and grimaced at the harsh lighting from my vanity mirror. I noticed the wrinkles around my eyes. The splotchy patches of uneven skin. The stray grays sticking out of my hair.
Happy thirty-six indeed.
Hours later, my children belted out an exuberant rendition of the birthday song, and I exhaled an uncomfortable breath to extinguish the flickering flames. What did I wish for this year? Time. Because staring at me as steadily as the Evil Queen stares into her mirror is the stark reality that I am not yet middle-aged, but I am not young either.
I’m thirty-flipping-six. The age of hair dye and retinol. The age of bathing in sunscreen before stepping into the sunshine. The age of brushing gel along my eyebrows in order to compensate for twenty years of overplucking.
The problem is that I’m still young enough to peer into the mirror and picture the face from my past. To remember the unwrinkled skin and naturally blonde hair. (And, okay, the unbeatable acne because I’ve always enjoyed chocolate more than I’ve fancied being the fairest.) I am all too aware, though, that my appearance nowadays requires more effort than it did back then. My mirror refuses to lie, proving that time moves at a tenacious pace, and my current pace poses little threat to Snow White or any of the Disney princesses.
And yes, I have read the algorithm’s suggested articles online. I know that self-respecting millennial women do not care about body image because we are, after all, beautiful on the inside. Except I do care, because I am not beautiful on the inside…at least not entirely.
Muddling through motherhood for the last decade has taught me that I am often a cranky, anger-prone, rage monster who finds myself more sympathetic to the Disney villains the older I get. The women who want to borrow a bit of youth from the adolescent girls with plenty to spare? Who long to recapture the prettiness of their past in order to once again turn the eyes of the dashing prince? Lately, during a rewatch with my kids, I catch myself wanting to offer up an “Amen!” during their melodic, albeit melodramatic, laments.
I know. I’m supposed to allow my graying locks to grow out with my head raised high. This, however, merely accentuates my unwanted chin hairs. I’m encouraged to follow along with the celebrities and post makeup-free selfies demonstrating that I, too, am comfortable in my own, less expertly maintained, skin.
But I am not comfortable. Especially not when I stare at my third child, my only girl, who happens to be a miniature version of myself. I search her clear blue eyes, trace my finger down her flawless skin, and brush the curls of her golden hair. That’s when I feel it. The longing to trade places for a moment. To go back in time. To snatch a small piece of her prettiness and magically mush it back into my own body to regain a morsel of the beauty I once knew but is now fading.
Is it really too much to ask?
To be clear, when I purchase a half dozen apples at the grocery store, I don’t add a bottle of poison to go along with it. I munch on them at lunchtime, like the aforementioned articles advise, hoping the vitamins and minerals really will rejuvenate my skin. Perhaps if I also run, hike, stretch, bench press, and practice yoga for the recommended thirty minutes each day, I will miraculously feel young again. These same self-help articles fail to mention how I can accomplish all of these activities while caring for my three kids, the unwitting escalators of my aging.
So I eat an apple and aid its digestion with a quick stroll around my neighborhood. Then I buckle into my minivan with a handful of chocolates and devour them in the school car lane. I seize upon the serotonin boost, flip open my iPhone to browse Airbnbs, and dream about the vacations I can take in fifteen years when my youngest moves out of my house and I can finally, finally care for myself again.
Poof! As if bewitched by the world’s worst magic wand, my excitement abates and the real villain steps in – my anxiety. Because while I would genuinely delight in a childfree vacation, I also know I will miss my daughter then. I will miss her like I will miss her big brothers. Like I already miss the firmness of my pre-baby body. Like I miss the ease of marriage before kids. Like I miss the excitement of flirting with my boyfriend before we wed. Like I miss the carelessness of sunbathing in a bikini before zipping into a mini dress and strutting downtown with my college friends.
I am always missing something, so focussed on what no longer exists that I fail to settle fully into the present. It is this weakness of wanting that plagues my Type A, perfectionistic personality. Contentment continually evades me. I may not be talking to a magic mirror on the wall, but I might as well be.
Because the face in my mirror does not lie, but the images from my memories sure do. Particularly the albums that pop up on my iPhone with synchronized music playing in the background. There are the pictures from my daughter’s birth, cropped from the waist up, where I radiate joy at the sight of the newborn perched on my chest. I find zero trace of the terror that consumed me through seven high risk months of pregnancy or of the nurses holding my thighs in place while the doctor stitched me back together.
There are the photos from the half marathon I completed a year after the arrival of my second born. I smile at the finish line with a shiny medallion around my neck. Sweat soaked running shorts accentuate my toned legs. What’s unseen are the stretch marks racing across my belly that even hundreds of training miles could not erase. Or the panic attack at mile eight, in the midst of 23,000 runners, when the adrenaline rush mixed with the hormonal imbalance from having recently weaned. I walked through one miserable mile shaking with the reality that this race was my first personal achievement in three years since becoming a parent.
And then there’s my wedding day. Thanks to a stylist at a local salon, I appear as pretty as a princess. Perfectly pink cheeks, extra long (and only partially real) eyelashes, with a white flower tucked into my side swept hair. Only after a second glance do I notice the puffy stye beneath my eye from the stress of planning a low budget wedding in a big city. I have to look even longer to remember the most exciting moment from the ceremony, when my bridesmaid collapsed on stage mere seconds before my first married kiss.
How do I so easily forget?
I peer back at these snapshots through the lens of longing because I am able to view what once was without the conflicting emotions that coursed through me while living it. These photos may not literally lie, but they certainly distort reality.
When I look for too long, my heart floods with misplaced desires. For everlasting youth and perpetual beauty, for both my children and me. Yearnings that become dangerous distractions. Because time, for better and worse, moves without hesitation. Mere mortals, like myself, were not created to cling precariously to the things of this world that will not last.
And so I return to the Evil Queen, refusing to succumb to her fate. I choose to write my own story and learn the lesson before the lightning strikes. I may still tumble out of bed and begrudgingly flip the light switch at the unfortunate hour of 5:45 a.m. I’ll still slather my face with an expensive foundation and top it off with SPF 50.
But I will also stand tall when I look into the mirror. I’ll grin at the laugh lines and raise a hairdryer toward my freshly highlighted locks. Then I’ll chuck the hairdryer into the mirror and watch the glass shatter into a thousand snarky pieces.
A little villainous? Perhaps. Or the perfect amount of moxie for a grown-up princess?
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash
You’re so good at weaving in a theme, friend! Here’s to being grown up 36 year old princesses with moxie 🙌🏼 And fyi I’m literally Snow White…all I do is sing out my back door and all the animals emerge from the woods 😂
Loved this. Soooo relatable.