Middle Aged Madness

At what age does a person become middle aged?

When I was between the ages of ten and thirteen, my mother was in her late thirties, and I think I thought she was middle aged then.  I definitely thought she was middle aged when she was in her early forties and I was a teenager – She’s going to kill me if she reads this. 
My only excuse is that I was a teenager – I thought everyone who had had their twenty first birthday party was middle aged.

I’m not afraid to admit (well, not terrified) that in eleven and a half months time I will turn forty.  Forty.  The big four oh. 

I’ve decided I can start crying and caterwauling and swearing I’m only thirty five, which would fool nobody, or I can just embrace it. 

But I absolutely do not accept that I’m middle aged.  I think that’s a load of old nonsense.  Some people act middle aged in their twenties, and my Dad still hadn’t started acting middle aged when he passed away three weeks before his seventieth birthday.

I do have a couple of issues though.  Since I seem determined to pour out all my darkest secrets today, I’ll confess that quite recently I was brushing my teeth on a Sunday morning, and thought I saw a loose hair on my face. 

You probably can’t imagine my absolute horror to discover it wasn’t a loose hair.  It was growing.  Out of my face.  I couldn’t believe it.  It wasn’t a tiny thing either.  It was quite long.

So long in fact that I’m forced to accept that either it had been growing there all week and everybody had been too polite to mention it, or it had sprouted overnight.

So either my eyesight is failing – I’m not going to pretend I’m devoted to my makeup bag, but in fairness I do wash myself and moisturise on a daily basis – how had I missed it?

Or I’ve started to sprout inexplicable hairs from my face overnight.

I almost fell apart.  I’d heard this happens to older ladies.  I had absolutely no idea that it happens before we hit forty.

Obviously my initial reaction was to become hysterical and start trying to yank it out on the spot. 

It really, really hurt.  Tears immediately sprung into my eyes and I yelped like the dog does when we accidentally stand on his tail.

I started rooting frantically through the myriad of makeup bags and baskets on the bathroom shelves.  Blowing off the dust as I went along.  For some reason, I’m far more enthusiastic about buying makeup than about getting out of bed early enough in the morning to apply it.

Anyway, the fecking tweezers couldn’t be found.  I thought I was starting to have a panic attack.  I know, I know, there’s no big deal, this is just part of becoming a grumpy old woman proper, but I really wasn’t ready for it.

I tried to remember if people had been staring at the spot between my jaw and my chin all week.  Was I the only person who hadn’t known it was there?  The thought filled me with horror.  I have enough to deal with, with my large personage, without becoming known as the hairy faced woman as well.

Finally, I saw my eyelash curler.

Don’t ask me why, but in my panic I thought “yes, that’ll work, I’ll just catch the bastard in that as if it was a tweezers, and pull it out”.

I gripped the offending hair in the eyelash curlers, and gave it a quick tug.  I can’t stress this enough.  The pain of trying to pull it out was awful.  It was really, really, sore.  I’d rather suffer the agonies of waxing than tackle even one of these hairs again. 

Although tackling the feckers is probably going to be a weekly chore from now on.

As I pulled the hair, the flesh actually pulled into a point.  It wouldn’t come out! Shite.  I briefly wondered what possible excuse I could give for not going to work tomorrow, because obviously I couldn’t go like this.

As I pulled pointlessly, the eyelash curler started to drag its miserable way down the hair, until eventually it pulled off the end, futile.

Lovely.  The only success I’d had was in curling the fecking hair into a corkscrew shape.  Again, belief was suspended.  I’ve never found the eyelash curler to be even remotely useful in curling my eyelashes.

All I’d ever got from using it was pinched and sore eyelids.  That’s why I’d found it in the bottom of my least used makeup basket, I suppose.  But with this eyesore, it sprung into life and curled like nothing I’ve ever seen.

So now I’d actually styled it. 
I found the tweezers eventually, and it was no less painful removing it than  the attempt with the eyelash curler.

I’d really only just started to get over it all, when I got out of bed this Sunday morning.  Again, I went to brush my teeth. 

To discover I had no less than four large spots.  All over my face.  One each on my chin, my cheek, my lip, and my nose.

I don’t know where they came from.  I haven’t stopped washing myself or anything. I have no idea why this breakout occurred. 

Am I caught somehow in the middle?  Between witchy old lady and teenager?  Is that what middle aged actually means?  And if so, how long can I expect this caper to go on?

Maybe I should just stop brushing my teeth?  That seems to be where all the trouble starts.  And black stumps where my teeth currently are will match up lovely with my face hair, and my spots, don’t you think?