Dear Modern Woman

Growing old is forbidden

Hey, woman? When you think about your mother, what’s the most vivid memory you have? Yes, I know. It’s her, standing in front of the mirror and crying at the sight of the new lines that had appeared at the sides of her mouth. At the sight of the bags under her eyes, and the increasing white in her hair. You remember her applying face mask after face mask, serum after serum. You remember her going to the hair salon to try out a new dye that should make her look all-natural; you remember her not eating because, after the menopause, she had somehow begun to gain unnecessary weight; you remember all those beauty plans, but most of all, you remember the fear in your mother’s eyes.

The same fear that you now see in the mirror.

When did you start using your first face cream, woman? When you were thirteen? Fourteen? Yeah, it was about that age. It was already time, wasn’t it? You were thinking you should start doing it before the aging process showed any visible signs. What your mother used to do was no longer enough, though. There were more types of cremes in your youth, serums, and special pieces of fabric soaked in special substances; there were all the nutritional supplements that you could take with your meal because a meal, of course, wasn’t enough. Your mother used to drink more milk and eat coconut butter, but did she know about CoQ10, collagen, and hyaluronic acid that could go directly into your system? Did she know about all the anti-oxidants that postpone the aging process, and did she know that if you hold back this process long enough, scientists will think of an immortality pill? Not that you care about immortality, of course. Who wants that? Living out your life looking like a porcelain doll until you die, however, is a dream come true.

Did you cry when you saw the first thin wrinkles around your eyes, woman? Cremes, serums, and masks hadn’t been helping that much, after all. You fell into a short bout of depression, and then you started to face yoga. You started to apply more cremes, serums, and masks. Years went by, and now the wrinkles are not only around your eyes but around your mouth, too, and on your forehead. Some parts of your face have started to sag. You never tell your age to anyone anymore. If they ask, you say, ‘Never ask a woman her age!’ or you smile widely and answer, ‘I’m always sixteen!’ Meanwhile, you start thinking about plastic surgery.

Why not? It’s so modern! Everyone’s been doing it these days: it’s not the actresses’ trademark anymore. Lips are thinning — inject fillers into them. Inject fillers everywhere. Pull back your sagging skin. My husband will like me more. Men don’t accept aging women; they want youth so that they can feel young themselves. They deserve it: they work so hard. I should repay my husband’s lifelong toil by looking the way he wants me to look. Besides, it’s not only him. It’s my job, too. What will happen if I lose it? Nobody else will hire me. They’ll turn me away the moment they see my wrinkles and my white hair roots. The horrible white roots are always there, I can never be fast enough to cover their telltale presence. If I look twenty again, however, employers won’t bother to look at my birthdate. They’ll offer me the contract immediately.

And you carry out your plan, woman. You do your plastic surgery. You even put implants in your breasts and your butt because they are sagging, too. You feel nice at first, although the image in the mirror looks somehow strange and unfamiliar. It triggers certain anxiety, unknown until this moment: the feeling that an alien has settled inside your body. Is it me or her, the interstellar intruder? I can’t even smile the way I used to! And these fillers are slipping down, and I’m beginning to look even uglier than before, I bet it’s the alien that’s been eating me from the inside, so I need to run to the plastic surgeon again and repeat the procedures, and it turns out I need to repeat them every few months, yes, I guess this is what appeases the hungry alien. This is the necessary offering. My money and my pain.

You grow old, but you remain young. Do you feel good, woman? Or, along with the money you spend on anti-aging cosmetic products and anti-aging surgical procedures, you’ve added money for anti-depressants and tranquilizers? You thought you’d be perfectly happy being young when you’re old, but in fact, you feel perfectly unhappy. Even your husband frowns. Even he says, ‘I don’t like your looks. You don’t match me. I want someone to grow old together with. Where is my aging partner?’

Do you cry more often now, woman, than when you saw your first wrinkles in the mirror? In between your selfies on social media, do you rummage through old black-and-white photographs that show women from the past? Women in their forties surrounded by six or seven children (all those children that destroy your body!), women who smile at the camera with their teeth missing, their hair falling out, their faces creased as dried apples, their bodies thin and bent over, their breasts sagging to the ground, oh, those ugly, ugly women, how can they smile and seem so happy?

Do you look at those photographs and cry, woman?

Do you want to turn back time and take the chance to show a different behavior to your daughter who is now following your steps and’s taking supplements you haven’t even heard of, and injecting her face and body with serums you could not even imagine existed, and you wish you could be like the toothless woman from the photography and you wish your daughter could be like her, too. Is it too late to change her way of thinking? Is it too late to change yours?

Do you cry, woman, and wonder who, for God’s sake, forbade you to grow old?

If you liked this story, you might enjoy any of my society and philosophy pieces here:

Thank you!