First of all, two things: the other night, I had a dream about struggling in vain to do the frog kick while swimming breaststroke in the eighth grade swim team at my school’s pool, a trial only compounded by the dread I felt in the dream at remembering when I reached the end of my lap, I would have to pull off my white, rubber bathing cap, knowing that, despite its purported purpose, much of my long, straggly hair would actually be fairly wet, and that, because of it, many strands of hair would have become entwined in the ridges along the edge of the cap and be ripped screaming from my scalp, no matter how gingerly I managed the removal. That was the year the boys who wanted me to look at them took to calling me ‘seahag’ because of the way I looked with my long, straggly wet hair. Upon waking, I was awash with the kind of intense relief one feels following a very, very bad dream.
Here’s the other: the following morning, I scrutinized my face in the magnified mirror I bought on impulse in IKEA, one long ago day in the once upon a time world I used to live in when my face was firm and my neck had not yet betrayed me. Lately, this has become one of my more masochistic tendencies, I confess – I find myself bizarrely fascinated at what is happening to my once youthful face. And there it was – I thought I had felt it the other day! Yet another long, stray hair sprouting out from under my chin. It was so long I could yank it out with only my fingers. Doing so presented something of a relief, as though I’d just narrowly escaped something even more unpleasant than the quick pang at my plucking; at the same time, it represented only a temporary stay, I knew. There would be more rogue whiskers, more of those little boar bristles that actually require tweezers. And as I stared at my reflection, the bright morning sun shining across my face clearly highlighting the rather surprising amount of soft, downy fur that grows all along my lower cheeks and my jawline, I resisted the temptation to go and get my razor from the tub. I keep it there for old times sake, really, since, ironically, almost no hair grows on my legs anymore.
And as I peered resignedly at my reflection, my sad, droopy eyes taking in my sad saggy neck and my sad thinning hair, giving over to self-pity just a nano-second or two longer before flipping the mirror to the other side and discovering that I looked pretty much the same as ever, I began to think about what it means for women to get older, especially for a very vain woman to get older, and how on earth one can possibly do so with even a modicum of graciousness. Not being struck with any kind of blinding insight, however, I sighed and, letting the problem go for the time being, turned away from the mirror to trundle downstairs, focusing on how to zhoozh up my low-fat yoghurt, making my coffee, and taking my blood pressure. Further sighs.
But I just couldn’t shake the feeling that there was just something so unfair about what happens to us as we age and, worse, how society’s perception of older women changes so unkindly. None of the Bond girls – note, we call them ‘girls’ – looks as fabulous as she once did, but all the Bond men – ahem, the ‘men’, like Sean Connery and Roger Moore – somehow ease into their third third of life by growing their facial hair and, just like that, thereby transforming themselves into dashingly handsome, nay, dare I even say, objects of desire. It’s just so unfair. Princesses fade from glory like tired, sad flowers in the garden. Princes apparently bloom with age.
And that’s when it hit me. Why can’t women grow beards, too? It’s a good question, isn’t it? A fair one, n’est ce pas? At this point in my life, I feel certain I could nearly do so, based on my recent discoveries in the mirror; I might even sport a moustache too, come to think of it. What a simple fix for my increasingly wrinkled upper lip, not to mention my sagging jowls! I could happily rock a neatly trimmed goatee, especially now that my hair is turning silver, a little like that dapper Pierce Brosnan, he whose wrinkled crinkled eyelids only add to his appeal and whose salt and pepper closely trimmed beard makes women like me swoon. Oh, the injustice of it all – never mind that the idea of actually lathering up my cheeks for a shave – trimming said beard makes me shudder, and the thought of what I would probably look like makes me cringe. But wouldn’t life become simple. No more fussing about eyebrow liner, either – another sad irony, given that half those follicles have stopped producing any hair at all, and the other half sprout unruly, insidious bits of curly wire that insist on growing out and down, so unlike my well-behaved, feathery soft brows in days of yore, and which I now have to trim with the help of my nail scissors – and my magnifying mirror, of course.
I know the answer, of course, as do you: stop looking in the mirror, Snow White. Give over to the wonderful, warty old crone who has taken up residence, who has eaten her own poisoned apples and lived to tell the tale, and be grateful to have done so. Learn to love the hag whose days of enchanting men are long gone, but whose wit is still razor sharp and who has better things to do with her time than exfoliating what little hair she has left. Seahag, indeed.
