Up Close and Personal (Or Aging Ungracefully)

 

I begged for glasses in elementary school.

A few of my friends rocked new prescriptions, and I turned green with envy. Their eyes failed them, and somehow this made them special. There was glamour in myopia. I’d buy sunglasses and knock out the lenses, desperate to share in whatever attention I thought a diagnosable condition might attract. I avoided carrots, tempted Apollo by staring into the sun, and sat too close to the TV.

Despite my best efforts, my only diagnosis was perfect vision.

My childhood fantasy of glasses passed with my love of My Little Pony figurines, and by middle school, I felt relief at not having to deal with lenses or face the absolute horror of touching my own eyes to insert contact lenses. Shudder. No, thank you. Let’s skip the part of the story where I shaped handmade wires over my teeth when my friends started getting braces.

(Not that I didn’t need braces. But after the unfortunate incident in third grade, in which my teeth allegedly assaulted Dr. Johnson’s finger, my parents stopped taking me to the dentist… because of their sheer embarrassment.)

Fast-forward through high school, college, and early adulthood. I visited the optometrist, with no great enthusiasm, because my husband’s work insurance covered annual eye exams. Every four or five years seemed good enough. By this time, I’d not only recovered from a desire to have glasses but had moved onto full-fledged pride at not needing them.

“Everything looks perfect,” was my favorite refrain. “Here’s a gold star for your twenty-twenty vision, a genetic trait for which you can take absolutely no credit.”

Anecdotally, I knew my days were numbered. The number ‘40’ loomed like a warning on the horizon, the age where everything goes to hell, vision included.

But 40 came and went without reading glasses.

Two years later, things changed. “Did they shrink the words on these medicine bottles?” I’d ask my clear-eyed daughters.

“Um, Mom? That’s not the ibuprofen.”

The time came to admit that I’d at last achieved a diagnosis: presbyopia—age-related vision loss.

Nothing about that appealed to me. Nevertheless, I brought home my first pair of reading glasses.

A few years later, I still had those reading glasses, as well as a pair I kept by my computer, another pair I kept in the sunroom by my Bible, another pair in the schoolroom, another pair in my car, and yet another pair in my purse. Because when did they make restaurant menus so shiny and difficult to decipher?

Finally, at age 46, when reaching for my car glasses at a stoplight so I could see the street names on Google Maps, my elementary wish came true.

Not only did I have presbyopia, but things in the distance looked hazy as well.

That’s when I got my first pair of progressives. I failed to find the specialness and glamour I’d once imagined. In fact, I failed to find my own eyebrows in the bathroom mirror.

Plucking eyebrows with perfect eyesight was tricky enough. Now I was in an all-out sweat—holding the mirror, tipping back my head, and adjusting my glasses just to see through the magnification. Also, was it my imagination, or had the elasticity of the skin near my eyebrows lost its stretch?

Further action was required. Rather than shelling out $10 every month for an eyebrow wax, I made the financially prudent decision to purchase a makeup mirror for my bathroom—one with 10X magnification. From here to the Amazon shopping page, the mirror looked like the perfect solution.

Up close, things were different.

Is there anyway to age gracefully in a 10X magnification mirror?

As of this week, I can definitively say no.

Thanks to failing eyesight over the last several years, paired only with glimpses of my reflection in normal mirrors, I was unprepared for the destruction I was about to witness. It’s one thing to see an earthquake-torn town on TV. Walking in those same streets is another matter.

Within minutes of setting up the mirror, I discovered a whole new topography of my face.

And I didn’t like it.

Those crevices weren’t there before. And what were those spots? And for the love of Neutrogena, why were there canals under my eyes?

They say ignorance is bliss.

I say ignorance saves you from the contemplation whether you would actually consider a facelift. (For the record, I would not… unless it was free, painless, and could be performed with a magic wand without downtime. Yes, I’ve thought this through.)

Some things are better left undiscovered, like the cryovolcano on Uranus, and my face in a 10X mirror.

And yet, I don’t plan to return the mirror. Is this because of my adventurous spirit and my childhood dreams of exploring unknown lands? Is it because I love being (too) close and (too) personal?

Neither.

I only hope to go out in the world with eyeliner that doesn’t look like it was applied by a crayon-clutching kindergartner, and to not return home from hours of errands to a comment from a teenage daughter: “Mom, what’s that smudge on your cheek? It’s been there all day, by the way.”

Because that’s my bar for glamour and specialness in this day and age. 

Do you want to feel sad too? Buy this mirror!