I Look Just Like I Did Ten Years Ago, Only On Steroids

I went to physical therapy the other day and found myself in front of a three way mirror, diligently doing my rotator cuff exercises. I would blame the rotator cuff tendinitis on getting old, but there were a bunch of high school and college aged kids in there with me with the same injury. I will leave alone the fact that they are varsity athletes and I am a vintage athlete.

Anyway, there I was with nothing to look at but me, pretty much everywhere I turned and I couldn't help but notice that I looked like a puffed up version of my original self. Now, back when I was my original self (read before I turned forty), I always thought I would take this aging thing quite gracefully. Now that I am actually a victim of it, I must say it is rather disgraceful.

Like most things, it is easy to say and harder to do. So what of it? As Nora Ephron suggests, one can simply try to avoid mirrors, but that is a little hard to do (especially when one injures herself and ends up in front of a three way mirror...). As much as I don't like being Puff Mommy, I wouldn't become a botox pin cushion or worse. So, there is nothing to do to except accept that this is the new me. Puffy and proud. Well okay, not proud, but strong, healthy (except for the rotator cuff, which is coming along) and pretty much too busy to care too carefully what I look like...most of the time.

Twentieth Reunion

I know it is hard to imagine from my youthful looking picture, taken a mere two and a half years ago, but I am going to my twentieth college reunion this weekend. In some ways, I can't imagine that 20 years have transpired since my college years. In others, though, that seems like a lifetime ago.

If someone asked me then what I would be doing twenty years from now, I am not sure how I would have replied. If someone asked me how I would feel twenty years from now, I probably would have said something very clever like, "accomplished."

How do I really feel? Mostly great. I am healthy, happily married and have two great kids (at least when they aren't screaming at each other) and one great dog (except when she digs). What of aging? Well, if you told me that I would wander from one room to another in my home and wonder aloud "now why did I come in here?," you would have been met with a laugh and a question of "twenty years from now? I will only be 42!" I guess the laugh is on me.

If you asked me if I would be bothered by wrinkles, age spots, aches, pains and a sluggish metabolism, I would have said no (again thinking these would not yet set in except for maybe the wrinkles). The reality is, I don't like the wrinkles, and the parenthesis that have come to bookend my mouth, the tightness in my left hip, etc.

But age has also brought me wisdom. I am lucky to still be here, healthy and happy twenty years later. Wrinkles and minor aches are the tolls for the journey I have taken. I have seen others not so lucky, including a handful of classmates who are no longer with us. So, I say bring on the wrinkles, it beats the alternative and gives me something to whine about as well.