Personal care

No cuticle left unexamined

The older you get, the less you care how you look, but the more you have to do to look decent. I remember having thoughts about absolute minutiae of my appearance as a kid that these days seem like the thoughts of another person. I would apply concealer under my eyes every day. I would not go out with my hair down unless it was flatironed, and this was in the era before efficient flatirons and my hair was long so it was a whole thing. I used to tweeze my eyebrows and now I guess still own tweezers but either that style of eyebrow went out of fashion or I stopped caring about whatever’s going on in that department.

These days I cannot imagine losing sleep over the cellulite or lack thereof as viewed from this or that angle from behind in a mirror. I do, however, know that I am approaching 40 and am looking what are those words? Haggard. Exhausted. Not gaunt (I like pastry too much) but whatever the thin and sunken version is of old, rather than the one where you reach for a tunic.

A divide begins to form between the women who take care of themselves and those who do not. Women who are 45 and look amazing-45 (they do not look 30, except possibly the ones without kids) and others who are 45 and look the way women look in those photos that periodically make the rounds, about how 45-year-olds in previous eras looked elderly but these days (and then there will be photos of various Hollywood actresses.)

And yet! The same time in life when you would stand to benefit from bigger cosmetic interventions (but what? all of them? until you look like that lion lady, or the man who had surgery to look “Korean”), you’re channelling money to things like daycare and mortgage, and hardly even have time to fit in a haircut let alone whatever Joan Rivers invested in.

There are neighborhood moms, technically other-side-of-the-tracks moms, where the big houses are, in those coats that cost $600 but don’t close, with long hair in beachy waves, looking yes a bit dated, a bit Los Angeles circa millennial pink times, but they seem to be leaning into the not letting oneself go approach and I admire them for this. I do not assume they do that in lieu of working. It’s Toronto, I’m sure they have impressive corporate jobs.

How are you meant to fit eating more vegetables in with cooking meals everyone in the household will find tolerable? When do you exercise when the childcare hours line up so precisely with, at most, the workweek?

Like all women on the internet I have some admirers but they have not seen me, not in person, not up close, not recently. On the internet (except in whichever niche parts of it) every woman is eternally under 25.

I would like to look like one of those Frenchwomen for whom Frenchwoman is one word, not separated out. I would like to have a line at Uniqlo where everything costs $30 extra because my name is on it. I would like this one line on my face gone, which is possibly feasible, but also to not look exhausted, which is probably a lost cause. I want to find time in the week to go running—the one workout for which I have the gear (sneakers) and does not require spending further money or time getting to/from some kind of place. Maybe situps or exercises or something or maybe go with being a lump.

I feel grateful as the mother of daughters that I have zero interest whatsoever in losing weight, so at least as I instill the traditional neuroses all mothers must, I can maybe spare that one.

I go back and forth between thinking, this is it, the last of my conventionally passable years, and thinking what a joke, if I were ever thus it was 15 years ago and even then I would never have been, say, hireable as a NYC restaurant hostess.

I couldn’t care less. Or more.