Botox and Bank Robbers

Notes on Love & Laundry

Dear Love and Laundry Readers,

I’ve been doing a lot of TV interviews lately to promote Behind White Picket Fences. And yesterday I made the mistake of watching some of these TV interviews.

Bad idea.

The last time I was on TV regularly, I was in my twenties and thirties working as a reporter, anchor and press secretary. I wasn’t married and I had no children

In other words, I had no wrinkles.

Back then, I wasn’t too worried about how I looked on TV, as long as my industrial strength bottle of Aqua Net kept my hair in place. But now, many years later, someone very different stares back at me through the screen when I do TV interviews, and once again I think about the proverbial old grey mare my dad used to sing about.

Which brings me to the latest dilemma of the modern age. Should we age gracefully, accepting the inevitable ravages of time? Or should we go into our AARP era kicking and screaming, attempting to hide our true age behind Botox, fillers, Ozempic, false eyelashes, and/or surgery?

Or to rephrase the question your mother asked when you were 15 years old: If everyone else jumped in a lake, would you do it too?

And the answer as a grown woman is...I don’t know? Maybe?

In the past, women handled the onset of age with a certain grudging dignity because we didn’t have a practical alternative. Movie stars got facelifts, and everyone else just got a bottle of Oil of Olay and accepted the passage of time.

But now we can actually do something about our aging faces and bodies, in addition to, or perhaps in place of, plastic surgery. These options can be expensive, invasive, painful, time consuming and have completely unknown long time side effects, but they are effective if you want to look younger.

I have not done any of these things. Yet. But I miss the way I used to look. I feel like I shouldn’t, and I wish I didn’t, but I do.

I recently read a review in the Atlantic Monthly for a book called Ugly, where the author states the raw facts about physical beauty. Attractive people make more money, are presumed to be smarter, and seem to have happier marriages, more friends, more professional success, etc. etc. etc.

So if you started your life as a moderately attractive person with all the benefits that go with it, wouldn’t you want to hang onto those benefits as long as possible? And if you weren’t born beautiful in the first place, wouldn’t you do everything your power to acquire beauty through any methods available to you?

When I was a teenager and very much wanted to be beautiful, my aunt told me that I was “pretty enough for all practical purposes.” I found comfort in that. I still do, except that I have reached a point where I no longer believe it’s necessarily true. I may have once been pretty enough for all practical purposes. But now? Well, now I look like an older woman.

Like if I robbed a bank and the teller were describing me to the police, she’d say, “The assailant was an older woman wearing sensible shoes and a cardigan from Talbots with a tissue tucked into the sleeve. She needed reading glasses to count all the money and at first she couldn’t remember where she put her handgun and then she realized she was holding it right there in her hand.”

Which brings us to the moral dilemma at the heart of this post. Should we spend time and money making ourselves look like something we are not? (i.e. young). Or do we gratefully accept the inevitable ravages of time?

And why do I even consider this a moral dilemma? Botox is completely legal. No one is harmed when someone chooses to get plastic surgery. Isn’t this just another choice, like coloring your hair or wearing lipstick?

I have lots of friends who use Botox. They look fantastic and they have not started running Ponzi schemes or cheating on their taxes. (As far as I know). They are still morally upstanding citizens and lovely people.

So if this is a morally sound decision and it makes you look decades younger, why am I not injecting botulinum toxin into my facial muscles, too?

Well, first, I’m a chicken. I have a whole bunch of weird auto-immune issues like ulcerative colitis and Celiac’s disease. I’m allergic to penicillin. Sometimes my body breaks into hives, just for fun.

So I’m afraid that if I start injecting weird things into my body, my entire immune system will leap up and start screaming AWOOGA AWOOGA and I will spontaneously combust into some kind of terrible hive-rash of anaphylactic doom.

The same is true of Ozempic. My digestive system is like an orchid. If I so much as ingest the wrong kind of almond the whole thing goes haywire with terrible consequences. So instead I just keep buying larger pants and trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid buttercream frosting.

In the end, this forces me to face the following question: am I a down-to-earth person content to age naturally because I am secure and comfortable in my own skin?

Or am I a somewhat resentful person who frames this as a moral issue because I would love to do all the things everyone else is doing and look ten years younger but can’t because I have a weird, messed up autoimmune system?

Sadly, it’s reason number two.

And to be honest, there’s actually a third reason, too.

I’m just too tired to care.

I had a good run. I was pretty cute in the 80’s and 90’s and the early 2000’s before I had kids. People flirted with me at parties and on airplanes. It was fun. I met my husband and got married.

And now I have someone to grow old with. Except he doesn’t look old to me. He looks exactly the way he looked the day I met him. And I very much hope he has the same form of delusional myopia when he looks at me.

My oldest friends look the same way too, whether they are Botox-ing or not Botox-ing. I see them today as I saw them in the past. I’ve known them for so long and love them so much that my eyes can only see who they actually are on the inside, instead of how they really look on the outside.

And that’s the best part about getting old. We don’t do it alone. If we’re lucky, we do it with the people who knew us when we were young.

We grow old simultaneously and complain about colonoscopies and creaking joints and reading glasses scattered all over the house and raising teenagers and helping aging parents as we shake our (grey or aggressively highlighted) heads and watch an increasingly incomprehensible world change around us.

So I will not do Botox or have plastic surgery. I will not even attempt to wear false eye lashes. I’ve settled on a middle ground where I color my hair, wear lipstick and enthusiastically use the Zoom filter that makes everything a little softer.

Maybe that’s the real definition of middle age. Too tired to care a whole lot but enough energy to still care just a little.And if so, that’s a pretty comfortable place to be, even with a wrinkled forehead. Or a furrowed brow. Or a neck like Nora Ephron’s.

I leave you today with an (unfiltered) picture from a trip my daughter and I took to New York City. I can’t carry a tune, but my daughter is a fantastic singer who loves musicals, so we saw Hamilton, Maybe Happy Ending and The Outsiders and loved them all. Each one felt like a great book, with fascinating characters thrust into a fantastic story. Plus, the Battle of Yorktown as a dance-fight!!!

And speaking of fantastic stories, I’m giving away copies of my friend Aggie Blum Thompson’s excellent new book, The Neighbors Are Watching AND signed copies of Behind White Picket Fences. Just hit reply to this email and say something like “Yes, please!” or leave a comment on Substack. I’ll toss your names into a hat, pick two lucky winners and reach out to get your address.

In the meantime, best wishes for a July spent reading a book beside a peaceful body of water. I will be preparing for an upcoming Mediterranean cruise. I am packing sunscreen. And a hat. Because you know, wrinkles.

All my love,

Christine

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