A few days before my 45th birthday, I found myself doing it. Alone, in the bathroom, and not for the first time.

It’s true: I was staring into the mirror, slowly smoothing my fingers across my forehead to see what I’d look like with Botox. I didn’t really think I had that many wrinkles, until I’d pulled the skin taut and realized that, yep, should’ve been more vigilant with that sunscreen back in college, instead of slathering on baby oil and settling down on the tar-paper roof of my dorm with a tinfoil-covered record album under my chin to make sure that the sun hit every inch of skin.

From what I’ve read about Botox and other such “procedures,” it seems that it’s a bit like re-covering your couch: first you do just the couch, but then the couch looks so good that you notice the walls are dingy; so you do the walls and now the rug looks a mess…

I mean, if I were to shoot my forehead full of botulism, then what would I do with the hairline fractures appearing around my mouth? And if I fill those in with Restylane, what do I do with the delicate webbing around my neck? And below my neck? I shudder to think.  

It’s one thing if my face were my fortune – if English professors could also earn lucrative spots shilling for Revlon. If that could happen, then maybe I’d contemplate needles in my face, a nip here and a tuck there, here a nip, there a nip, everywhere a nip-nip.

Thus you should understand that when I went to the dermatologist’s office the other day, it was really and truly only to get some kind of cream for the little rash on my cheek that wouldn’t go away. The office was, of course, filled with ads for various products that will erase the effects of aging, but what struck me most was a framed certificate of commendation hanging on the wall in the examination room. The certificate was from, like, the Institute of Botox or something, and certified his training in some advanced procedure. Here’s the picture on the certificate:

Do you notice something about the woman’s face? Right. She doesn’t have one. She has features: nose, mouth, eyes, but there’s nothing holding it all together. She’s a blank, a cipher, airbrushed practically out of existence.

They say there’s no truth in advertising, but I think this certificate unintentionally hits it right on the (perfectly coiffed) head: we can use “science” to “remedy” the aging process and, in the process, surgically strip our faces of what makes them ours: the record of our experiences, our failures, hopes, worries, dreams. I won’t even mention the question of why we’re so afraid of mortality that we’re willing to inject poison into ourselves in order to defy the inevitable movement towards the grave; nor will I say anything about how our aging faces and bodies connect us to our parents (omigod! I have my mother’s knees!)…nope, not gonna say any of that.

I am going to ask, however, if any of you have seen the posters for
“He’s just not that into you,” which offers up an astonishing array of
Hollywood faces:

So many chiclet-sized white teeth, so much shiny taut skin, such perfectly oval eyes set jewel-like under eyelids that don’t droop… It’s amazing – not their beauty, but the fact that, except for variations in hair color, all those people look the same: it’s a big group of happy white people (apparently people of color do not experience romantic comedy the way white people do, with the exception, maybe, of Will Smith). All the individuality has been airbrushed out – but the airbrushing didn’t happen just to the photograph itself. Now the airbrushing happens beforehand, in the doctor’s office, where any flaw (real or perceived) can be magically whisked away. (On the movie poster Kevin Connelly has wrinkles in his forehead, but we all know that he’s going to be the comic relief, so it’s okay.)
 
Yes, I know, I can hear the protests: well-applied Botox just makes you look rested, revitalized; I don’t feel my age so why should I look my age; if I feel better about myself with fewer wrinkles, why shouldn’t I have some work done…

I don’t have answers to those questions and I can’t explain precisely why the Botox bonanza bothers me. Is it the overtones of Dorian Gray? Is it our relentless pursuit of physical perfection, regardless of the cost? Is it our symbolic rejection of previous generations?

Should I really be so afraid of getting wrinkles that I sleep only on my back, staring up at the ceiling, as a friend’s dermatologist said to her, quite seriously. Are wrinkles really such an atrocity I shouldn’t curl up around my husband or my favorite pillow and get comfy?

Or is this rant simply my own fear about being ignored by culture obsessed with youth? I get “ma’am” a lot these days – and it makes me feel like I should be in a wheelchair, or at very least bent over a walker.

Or maybe what bothers me is the hubris of thinking that we can airbrush away the passage of time, stop the wheels from turning; it’s as if we’re trying to reverse nature’s progress, whitewash away the truth of our experiences.

And now – wait for it – a leap from beauty to the beast: the Bush years seem to me the embodiment of a plastic-surgery obsessed culture: eradicate the truth of experience, gloss over imperfection, erase any unpleasant fact, tug and twist and pull at anything even slightly out of alignment so that everything coheres into a happy-faced image.

Maybe now, in this new administration, we will become a country unafraid of the blemishes and age spots, brave enough to confront the truth about ourselves, and willing to look ourselves in the mirror without flinching – and without trying to smooth away the wrinkles. 

Yesterday, Sunday, the day before MLK day, kids doing their best to harass one another into acts of violence (no pacifists growing up here, nosirree). We were listening to the broadcast of the “We Are One” concert on the radio, or at least I was listening to it until I started vacuuming. But when I turned the vacuum off and started winding up the cord to put the thing away, I heard Barack’s voice addressing the thousands of people on the mall … “no doubt that our road will be long, that our climb will be steep. But never forget that the true character of our nation is revealed not during times of comfort and ease, but by the right that we do when the moment is hard. I ask you to help me reveal that character once more, and together, we can carry forward as one nation…”

And damn if I didn’t get all weepy, kneeling there on the floor winding up my vacuum cleaner cord. My kids stopped fighting long enough to stare at mommy – although when they saw that I wasn’t injured, they went right back to their baiting and bopping.

Friends of mine are reporting a similar syndrome: a tendency, during this inaugural weekend, to get all vklempt utterly without warning. Some turn of phrase filters through the household noise; or a photo op catches the eye; or you suddenly remember – as a friend of mine said – that Voldemort is dead (and let’s be clear here that by invoking he-who-must-not-be-named, we are referring to Cheney, not potus-the-doofus).

What is it? Why are we all suddenly, collectively, misty-eyed at the thought of the Obamas moving into the White House? Is the birth of the “Obama Presidency” the death of cynicism?

Remember when Jon Stewart, during the campaign, reminded his audience that it’s okay to laugh at Barack?

Stewart is right, of course – I know we can laugh at Barack … except so far he hasn’t done anything particularly funny. Or jaw-droppingly illegal. Or breathtakingly ignorant. Or stunningly arrogant. Or wincingly embarrassing. Bush’s eight years have been god’s gift to cynics, comedians, and oil execs. The rest of us? mmm…not so much

What will we all do, those of us who have spent the last eight years being – variously – snarky, bitter, and terrified? What if our ability to believe can’t extend beyond the ballot box? What if our feelings of patriotism, optimism, and civic pride have rusted from disuse? Are we really, really going to wake up and help this man do all that we’ve asked him to do? 

Yes. Yes, I think we will. Wake Up.  And for the first time in a long time, I’m not laughing at myself for feeling all do-goody and optimistic. My cynical self seems to be on holiday
somewhere (Dallas, perhaps? Crawford?) and that too seems exciting: suddenly it doesn’t seem hopelessly naive to think that maybe It’s
All Going To Be Okay.

The lines of the Whitman poem that head this blog seem oddly apropo for such a chaotic time of upheaval, renewal, and excitement: maybe in Barack we’ve found a leader “liquid, sane, unruly, musical, self-sufficient” – a leader who yokes together disparate elements, who doesn’t see the world in terms of either/or (with us or against us; good or evil) but in terms of both/and (black and white, national and global).

Tomorrow, as it happens, is my forty-fifth birthday (now Michelle and I are the same age. I know we could be BFF if she would just call me!) I plan to celebrate my arrival on the doorstep of middle-age by planting myself on the couch with the TV remote (going to watch the Obamas on every single possible channel); a really, really big box of kleenex; and perhaps just a dollop (or two) of champagne.

Birthdays 41 and 37 were significantly less exuberant occasions – but this
one? What a gift. Would only that the symbolism had completely lined up
and Barack were Prez 45, not 44. But I’ll take it, regardless – and share
this birthday gift with the rest of you. I will also share with you the birthday wish I’m going to make tomorrow night, when I blow out the candle on my cupcake: that Barack’s second term ushers in my 49th year.