I shaved my legs yesterday… above the knees.
You know what that means. Yep, clean sheets. I was counting down the seconds until my husband made the bed.
Life. After 40.
Immediately… immediately following the fresh shave of the first leg, I couldn’t remember which leg I had done. Basically, what that means is…
I lifted a leg, shaved it, lowered it and couldn’t remember which leg to do next.
Life. After 40. You should know I didn’t want to shower yesterday. The only reason I did was for the clean sheets. On those special laundry days I live in complete anticipation of crawling into bed and feeling that 90-second rush of freshly-shaved legs on freshly-laundered sheets; rolling around in them, stretching out, quietly sneaking over to his side and doing the same—doubling my pleasure—then straightening them out, so he thinks he’s crawling into a clean bed. I’ll do whatever it takes to have those precious 90 seconds, even if it means showering when I just don’t want to be clean.
Life. After 40.
Life. After 40? I’m there. I’m officially middle-aged, right?
Yes, OK. Truth is, I don’t feel 41. Mentally, I feel the same age as that drunk girl who found herself topless on a Greenwich Village street one boozed-up St. Patrick’s Day. Nice girl. Should thank the kind couple who put her in a taxi back to her hotel. For the record, she was 28. And she had a thing for randomly taking off her top.
Physically, most of the time, I feel like that 28-year-old girl. I can still bend myself into a human pretzel, and when I get skinny—it’s going to happen—yoga class is going to be that much better.
I look at people half my age and I think we’re the same. I don’t think it; I know it. I could throw on a college t-shirt, walk into a college bar, sit next to a group of Pabst-drinking pseudo-hipsters and completely believe with every ounce of my deluded 41-year-old mind they think I sit next to them in English Lit.
But then there is this:
I keep a pair of tweezers in my car…for that rogue strand in one of my eyebrows that stands taller than a Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace. The strand of hair that thinks it has to test me every time I look in the rearview mirror, giving me brows that rival those of Andy Rooney. Life. After 40.
I can’t update my social media profile pictures. In the past two years, I’ve taken 31,397 selfies and every single one of them hasn’t looked like me; I do not have those wrinkles and age spots. Either every camera I’ve used must have been broken or it’s just life…after 40.
My eyes. I may have pulled a teeny tiny fast one on the Florida DMV last month. You know, my eyes have always been perfect – better than 20/20 vision. In the last couple of years, I’ve noticed changes… changes I don’t like or approve. If I close my left eye, everything is a little blurry. Crazy, I never thought that would happen to me. When I took the eye exam for my driver’s license, I couldn’t see the last line of letters but remembered what my left eye had seen. Yeah, I should probably check into that one. Life. After 40.
Every morning when I get out of bed, my poor little tootsies. The walk from my bed to the bathroom is ridiculously painful. COME ON! Life. After 40.
Recently, I went blond for a few weeks. I can’t even believe I just wrote those words. I am not a blond. I don’t have the skin tone for it. I’ve never wanted to be blond. I love my natural black hair. I went blond to try and hide the gray–the mother f*@#ing wiry gray hairs that are sucking the soul out of me. Blond didn’t work – 11 days in, there they were: gray, wiry, triumphant. This is the bane of my existence. The one. If there were only one thing in my life that I could change, it would be that my hair wasn’t going gray. Life. After 40.
I found a nose hair this morning… dangling. Wait, let me start over. I found a grey—or was it white—nose hair this morning, visibly hanging out of my nose for the world to see. So, not only do I have nose hair—visible nose hair—but it’s old nose hair. Well, I yanked it and it made me cry. Real tears. Then I got depressed. Life. After 40.
I’m an extremely healthy eater. No, really, I am…for almost three weeks now. I can eat fruits and veggies all day, every day, and lose three pounds in a week, then have a couple micro-brews on Saturday night and gain back five. Life. After 40.
Life. After 40.
You know those over-40, “I’m in the best shape of my life” liars who say they’ve never felt better? You know who I’m talking about, those “life is just beginning, I’m having more fun than I did at 25” bitches? Their noses grow with each syllable.
This morning, as I was drinking my first cup of coffee, I realized those were clean sheets last night. Clean sheets. My reason for showering. My reason for shaving. My muse (just go with it) for today’s much-anticipated, slightly overdue and a tad bit wordy, blog. I had completely forgotten. Never basked in their glory…crawled into bed and zonked out. Life. After 40.