The Other Hair

At certain times, and in certain light, I should avoid examining my chin in the mirror.

It used to be that tweezers were all I needed to pluck the occasional wayward facial hair. But lately, a scythe seems more in order.

Luckily, most of the hair is blonde (or is it white?). And it is more like peach fuzz than, say, crab grass. Still, there was a renegade, standing tall and defiant, from my neck of all places.

Surely there must be a spiritual lesson or some wisdom in this somewhere, but this morning, I’ll be damned if I can find it.

Wet Hair

In my 20s, when my sexuality was emerging (I was late) and dreams of romance insistent, I dreaded wet-haired couples.

They were ubiquitous on Sunday mornings, in all the breakfast places, with their fat rolled up newspapers and their gooey afterglow; with their wet hair, which told only one story: that they had just taken a shower together, after having spent the night together, during which they had slept little and loved much.

I ached for that love and it wasn’t until my mid-30s, when I met F., that I found it. In my bliss, I didn’t care about the wet-heads anymore. Sometimes, even F. and I were among them.

It’s been 20 years. F. and I are tight. We anticipate each other’s needs and finish one another’s sentences. We cradle each other. We stir the pot. We kvetch. We meet under the covers (or on top of them), and we are home.  

Long love can be wet-hair love, but most of the time, it isn’t. It is warm and steady more than dewy and electrifying. It is good, but sometimes its goodness pales in the glow of new, undiscovered love.

This defies reason. Good, solid, reliable, reciprocal love is hard to find. Wet-hair is illusory.

Still, when I see it, although I am in-love and well-loved, envy and longing take me by surprise.

Milestone

The interview had gone very well, I thought. I’d gone in ambivalent about leaving self-employment so soon, especially given all the assignments on my plate, and about returning to the kind of schedule that would force me to return my creative work to the back burner. But the more we talked, the more suitable the job sounded. Plus, the would-be boss and I hit it off nicely.

Still, there was the matter of my age.

It was an unspoken but unavoidable part of the conversation: She has three children, six and under. She had just returned from maternity leave. Her youngest—who she is still nursing—is six months old. When we finished the interview, she would have to pump.

Pumping. I remember like it was yesterday. I smiled to myself, old enough to be her mother. I had an eye into her world. But she had none into mine: two children, one in college, the other finishing high school; a career more than 30 years in the making, begun when she was in kindergarten, or earlier. When we finished the interview, I would make an appointment with my orthopedist who says it’s time for a new left hip.

I knew we could get along. I knew I could do the job. And I knew that my track record impressed her. It impressed the human resources director too, who looked not much older than my daughter.

There could be a dozen reasons why I never heard back. Perhaps they knew I would cost too much, or feared I wouldn't fit in. I’m sure it’s neither intentional nor conscious, the discrimination.

That’s the scary part.  

Sleep

Sleep—staying asleep--has become a challenge. The arthritis in my hip wakes me. Or the heat. Mostly, it’s the heat. Even though it is 17 degrees outside.

I turn down the thermostat before I go to bed and open the window before turning out the light but like clockwork, sometime around 3 (this morning it was 1 and 3) I awaken, a human furnace under the covers. I throw off the quilt, then the sheet. Then I strip down. Then, of course, I get cold.

This routine repeats itself until I finally get up to pee. By then it’s 3:30, sometimes 4.

It occurs to me to stay up (and to start a dairy farm, since I seem to have the schedule down) but the thought of making coffee and starting my day this early feels too lonely.

So I crawl back into bed, half-dressed, cooled-off but not too cold, and sink into a deep sleep, completely missing my 5:30 alarm.

This age requires tremendous self-acceptance, not to mention a generous sense of humor.

Skin

Paralyzed in the skincare aisle of CVS: I stare hard at the face creams, as if looking at them long enough will reveal a secret, a youth dew, an elixir to erase 20 years from my face.

I used to buy expensive creams. I believed the more I spent on potions with Shea butter and aloe and wheat germ oil and jojoba, the better my chances of turning back the clock. But I couldn’t afford $90 an ounce. Then I started reading labels and saw that most face creams contain the same stuff.

I also remembered something I once heard: that motor oil offers the same benefits as face cream. And I thought of my mother, whose skin was practically lineless until the day she died (smoking and drinking and lung cancer be damned), and who, for as long as I could remember, gave herself Crisco facials and walked around the house glistening in vegetable grease.

I was a teenager in southern California in the late 1970s, where baking in the sun and wearing little more than Bain de Soleil was just what you did. No one knew from skin cancer or premature wrinkling or SPF, except Mrs. Crisco Face, and who listened to parents anyway.

My skin is soft, but after a walk in 22-degrees, it feels like sandpaper. Plus, the powder foundation I wear makes my wrinkles look like cracks in the sidewalk. The other night, while removing eye makeup, a pinch of skin stayed pinched and pushed to one side long after I’d let go.

Now I’m a skin-cream maven, slathering products all over my face at every opportunity, like over-watering a parched and dying houseplant. The truth is, aside from Botox, nothing is going to give me the tight, lineless skin of a 20- or 30-year-old, because I’m not 20 or 30 years old.

And yet, away from a mirror, I sometimes forget that I am the age I am. When I am swimming or hiking, feeling fit and energized, I forget that my face reveals my age.

When I do remember, I try to look kindly, even lovingly, upon my aging face, with its wrinkles and puffs and sags; to see its lines as imprints of my history; of strength and perseverance; sorrow and laughter; struggle and triumph; of life vigorously lived.

Money

There’s nothing like arguing over money to make a family regress.

I get angry with R. because money burns a hole in her pocket. She gets angry with me because I comment on her spending habits. And F. (ever Mr. Nice Guy), believes that increasing her weekly allowance would solve the problem, which makes me angry with him.

And I thought middle-of-the-night nursing was tough.

I went to college on full financial aid. My mother was a single mom. For my entire adolescence, we lived on welfare and food stamps. Throughout college, I had work study. During my freshman year, I scrubbed toilets from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. five days a week before school started. F’s parents were able to afford his undergraduate and graduate education. He never had to work. Doing well was his only job.

Needless to say, we disagree about how much R should get each week. F. thinks she should have more than enough so she always has cash in her pocket. I think she should have just enough so she learns how to budget. We compromise: R. gets less money than F. would like, but more than I think she needs.

I also thought we were finally done with F. being Mr. Nice Guy and me being the police.

College costs are crushing, especially when campus is New York City. The word “poor” used to go with “college student.” But today—at least in Manhattan—kids go to college with money belts. I don’t know how families do it. More important, I don’t know why families do it. Doesn’t good parenting mean teaching kids to recognize limits? Would we really be doing R. a favor by keeping her ATM card loaded?

R. hates asking for money, and most of the time, she spends responsibly. But she feels embarrassed when low funds prevent her from joining her friends for dinner out or a cab ride. And although I believe that learning to manage money and say no to luxuries is part of her growing up, I am still a mama bear whose first instinct is to protect my child from pain, psychic or otherwise.

Who said it gets easier once they leave home?

Man-Child

S-s-s-u-u-p.

E. is on the phone. Even though he has initiated the call, he sounds put out, like I’ve interrupted him.

S-s-s-u-u-p. It’s the shortest shorthand possible for “What’s up?” or, as E. says when he’s really feeling chatty, Wuzup?

I don’t know what’s up, I say, trying to stifle my irritation at his pathetic phone etiquette. You called me.

Ite. (All right).

E. is a master of the monosyllabic conversation.

E., I say delicately, anticipating his annoyance, I’d like you to walk the dog before you leave for school.

Bet.

Bet. This could mean “You bet,” as in “No problem,” but in E’s universe, it usually means, “Don’t bet on it.”

As a little boy, E. was a chatterbox. He loved to talk about anything. He was always asking questions. He was especially eager to share his feelings: his anxieties about school, his fear of bullies, and his self-consciousness about being chubby. I felt doubly-blessed: Not only did I have a healthy, happy second child; I had a male child who could describe his emotional world and invited us in.

Then he turned 14, and the wall went up.

I realize that hormones, peers and popular culture’s images of what it means to be a man are powerful influences in what feels like E’s verbal and emotional retreat.  And I admit that assigning gender identity to personality traits, like communicativeness or silent stoicism, reinforces stereotypes. The unfortunate reality, however, is that the society in which our sons are coming of age continues to shame boys who are ‘soft’; who display any vulnerability by talking about their feelings.  And try as I have to raise a feminist man-child with nontraditional views on gender roles, the larger culture and its overpowering images of silent, grunting machismo have hooked him.

I’d like to think this is temporary. But even F., who is the gentlest, most communicative and sensitive man I know, is ambivalent about these very qualities that nourish my soul (and our marriage) and that society deems unmanly.

F. recognizes his struggle to reconcile the “feminine” qualities that I adore in him with the “masculine” qualities that society values more. I don’t doubt that part of him is relieved to see our 16-year-old free of this struggle. He says E. is where he should be, cordoning us off from the details of his life and the depths of his heart; and building an emotional moat around himself, so that his eventual separation from us doesn’t hurt so much.

During the perilousness of adolescence, when depression and drug abuse and violence can cut a young life short, I suppose I should be grateful for any words that come my way.

Blizzard

Snow’s over, and we’re left with the predicted foot-and-a-half. 

Blizzards have no soundtrack. The whistle of wind, the scraping of shovels, the drone of snow plows and the crunch of rock salt beneath tires and boots echo in the aftermath. Traffic stops. People are absent. The crows and hawks and geese are silent. 

George makes the first tracks in the yard, blacker than black against the white. He ventures out back (the door barely opened!), shocked to sink shoulder-high in drifts. Habit guides him to the now-submerged steps on the side of the deck, and leads him down to the white blanket that is the lawn.

He is a mini-plow, cutting a swath across the yard and around its periphery. He follows his snout, sniffing hungrily but unsuccessfully for familiar smells, searching for favorite bushes and leaf piles. But the snow muffles everything: sights, sounds and scents. In vain, George burrows his face deep in clean mounds, hunting for some trace of recognizable smell, and emerges, his face bathed in winter's icing. In his thick double-coat, he shrugs off the cold, but amidst the uninterrupted white he is disoriented, unable to pinpoint the spot where he pees.

Blizzards turn the world upside down.

The night before the storm, F. came home in a panic with a dozen gallons of bottled water and groceries we didn’t need. As the snow fell, R. called to say she’d spent twice her weekly allowance on groceries (and needed more money) because she was worried about being snowed in. And E. groused around all afternoon, anticipating a night stuck at home, unwilling to consider traveling anywhere by foot.

Soon, George and I will hit the trails, and I will bask in the frozen silence. He will flop onto his back and wriggle in the whiteness. And I, the master, will wait for him to lead me through the woods. 

In the Moment

When they said the concert was in “Terminal 5,” I knew it would be a long night.

The space was cavernous, more like an airplane hangar than a waiting station, what with nowhere to sit (except for the upper tiers, which were jammed with bodies by the time we’d arrived). The whole place was jammed with bodies: young bodies, bodies that can stand and dance and stand some more without their backs throbbing; that don’t mind pressing against a stranger's flesh in the dark, or being knocked about as passers-by make their way to the bathroom or the bar; that consider proximity to pot smoke, a bonus.

Against a back wall I took refuge, until a twentysomething looked up from his IPhone to inform me, This space is taken. A piece of wall? Seriously?

Images filled my head: the recent tragedy in a Brazil nightclub, where locked exits trapped hundreds trying desperately to escape a fire; the stampede at a soccer tournament where fans were fatally trampled in their attempt to leave a stadium.

A light flashed. A text from R. Are you still at the concert? She was impressed that F. and I had joined our friends (who generously gave us the $130/apiece tickets) to hear the band. I vented about the crowdedness, the lack of seats. Be in the moment, she wrote.

Then I found it: a steel, three-sided, floor-to-ceiling beam with a deep recess. I tucked myself in and watched the crowd.

F. tugged on my arm, leading me toward the stage. He wanted to see the band, to be near our friends. Reluctantly, I followed, holding his hand. We found a small clearing, just enough space for one person to dance, alone. And one person was dancing there: the friend who’d given us the tickets, who is terminally ill, who wants to soak in the love of his friends and the rhythms of his favorite music, as much as he can. Oblivious to everyone, smiling and singing and waving his arms in irrepressible joy, he danced.

F. stood behind me and I leaned into the hollow of his body, as his arms held me close. We swayed together.

I was dancing too.

Solitude

We are in for a social blizzard, F. and I. Most people would be hyped and raring to go: Me? I’m taking a deep breath and waiting for it to be over.

I’m not a hermit. But more and more my contentment scale weighs in favor of being with just one friend at a time, or alone.

I have come to like my own company. That’s a good thing.

On most days, I like the silence that surrounds me. I like walking in the woods solo, (with the dog) and being able to hear myself think. On most days, the voices in my head are benevolent. They help me untangle my psychic knots, figure out which words to put on paper and which to throw away.

It gets lonely sometimes, being alone as much as I am. But the reservoir fills up faster than it used to: a few hours of tea with a soulmate or time with F. can fuel me for days.

It's a gift of midlife: being able to nourish myself from within.