Searching for the Fountain of Youth

     I admit it: I’m vain

     Oh, I know I’m no beauty – more like the Beast. But in all honesty, I’m ordinary-looking. No one would pick me out of a crowd. On a good day, if the hair cooperates and the eyeliner on my lower lids goes on just right to make my grey eyes look a bit blue, I may even look nice.

     I’ve enjoyed looking younger than my actual age most of my life. But in the last five years, gravity has taken over. Wrinkles have taken command of my face. In the last year or two, I’ve noticed the left side of my face looks older than the right, the result of driver’s-side-window sun during the daily hour-long commute each way to and from work.
     The 25-year-old who lives inside this body now looks in the mirror in shock and thinks, “Oh, my Timelord! There’s an old woman in that mirror. Who the heck is she?”

     I am an eternal optimist. I really want to believe those too-good-to-be-true ads about skin creams that reverse the signs of aging giving one a youthful appearance. I’ve spent scads of money on the promise of regaining the face of my misspent youth, all to no avail.

     I’ve bought creams I didn’t believe in to help out friends or relatives who were trying to start up a business, more because I enjoy doing senseless acts of niceness, although I’d be better off supporting their Go-Fund-Me account for their next vacation. The result of most of these changes in my normal moisturizing regimen is a case of that scourge I never had as a teen: acne.

     I’m also a believer in that Judeo-Christian ethic called Karma. Perhaps if I help out friends and relatives with their skin creams, someday people will return the favor and buy my books.

     Not long ago, I again believed in a miracle face cream that promised youth in 30 days. It did look nice, and had no scent. The texture was rich and creamy. It felt nice going on. But it was, for all its pricey-ness, about as effective at rejuvenation as applying vegetable oil.

     Out of curiosity, I looked at the ingredients. What I didn’t realize when I bought it was that it supposedly contained snake venom. Wait, snake venom?

     I’m fairly certain no snakes were harmed in the production of this cream. More than likely, it was the result of some 30-something with a new chemistry kit. But snake venom sounds more daring than a string of unpronounceable polymers.
     I know what they were going for: the manufacturers wanted the public to believe that applying a topical toxin would have the same effect as an injection of botulinum toxin (aka Botox)

     It didn’t.

     But think about snakes for a moment. Even young snakes. Have you ever seen their skin? It’s positively scaly. I don’t even like snake skin shoes; I certainly don’t want a snake skin face.

     Into the trash went the promised snake oil, and I vowed I was through with promises of rejuvenation. My ordinary, Jennifer Aniston-endorsed, inexpensive moisturizer works just fine to keep my face from cracking.

     Enter the evil commercial from the competitor, another inexpensive lotion. “In just seven days you will see a decrease in fine lines and wrinkles,” they said – cue “In Just Seven Days” from the Rocky Horror Picture Show as you shake your head.

     Okay, it must do something. If I can see results in a week, it’s worth a try. Besides, it isn’t expensive snake oil.

     So, off to the local drug store’s beauty aisle I go. There it sits, just next to my usual cream. It has Retinol as one of it ingredients. That’s Vitamin A. That’s got to be good for you, yes? No.

     I gently washed my face each morning and studiously applied this lotion. It was sucked into my face – or the ozone – in seconds, leaving my skin feeling like it would tear if I cracked a smile.

     “Works well with any moisturizer,” the package said. 
     Okay, so it isn’t a moisturizer itself? I slathered on my usual moisturizer. Every. Single. Day.

     Each day, that 25-year-old peeked at the face. Day 1: nothing. Day 2: nothing. Day 3: some dry patches cropping up on my face. Each day thereafter, my face was redder and patchier. By day 7 it looked like it has looked in more naïve times, when I didn’t know about sun screens, after a day at the Jersey shore in strong sun. That was the only nod toward my youth that this cream provided.

     Fortunately, after a few days of simply using my regular skin cream, after I tossed out yet another failed promise of youth, my skin returned to its soft, although still just as wrinkled self.

     Once again I am determined that I will accept Mother Nature’s decree, and stop looking for the fountain of youth in a bottle. I can say that now, looking at a blank piece of paper, with no commercials or ads down the side of my Facebook page to lure me into another deception.

     I wonder if there’s a Fountain-of-Youth-Seeker’s Anonymous.

Working with Kids

  Working in schools can really keep you honest. Children tend to speak without filters. Perhaps because I usually work with one or two at a time, once they get to know me, they ask questions they would probably not ask their teachers.

            They particularly like to know how old adults are. When I was in my 40s and they’d ask, it came as a shock when some would tell me I was older than their grandmother. I didn’t really need to hear the follow-up statement, “My mother had me when she was 15.”

            Children want to know if you have children or grandchildren. Here’s one of my favorite conversations:

            “How many children do you have?”

            “I don’t have any children.”

            “Well, then, how many grandchildren do you have?”

            As if.

            What I could never answer was, after saying I had no children, when a child would ask, “Why not?”

            I had plenty of sarcastic answers, such as I might give an adult, but they’re hardly appropriate. It occurred to me to tell them, “Because I hate children.” But it might scare them. They certainly wouldn’t understand the sarcasm.

            As I got older, I would make a joke of being old when telling them of my experiences in school.

            “When I went to school with Fred Flintstone…” got me some wide-eyed looks until they realized I was joking. I stopped using that phrase when one student asked, “Who’s Fred Flintstone?”

            Now I usually say, “When I was in school and dinosaurs roamed the earth…” Usually, that gets a laugh. Occasionally, I still get a wide-eyed stare and a, “Really?”

            More recently, I was playing Jacks with a sixth grade student during an OT session. Because it’s a game where you can’t really keep the ball on a table, we sat on the floor to play. Once I was seated, the student made the comment that I wouldn’t be able to get up when we were finished.

            “Why not?” I asked.

            “Well, you’re old.”

            “I got down here, didn’t I?” I asked. Perhaps my look put him in his place. Perhaps the fact that I soundly beat him at a game I learned 55 years ago did it. Or maybe it was the fact that I was able to get up faster to retrieve his out-of-control ball than he was. Regardless, he hasn’t made a comment about my age since.

            Yes, kids can really make you feel old.

Don’t Mess with an Icon

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Bridget McGowan

 Much is written these days about shaming, whether it be body shaming or making fun of people with disabilities. I admire the efforts people make to help others feel secure about themselves just as they are.

It’s a shame they don’t extend that open-mindedness to the imaginary world of dolls.

When I was growing up, the first fashion doll, Barbie, came onto the market. While I had friends who weren’t allowed to own Barbie because she was considered too provocative by some mothers, most people from my generation onwards had at least one Barbie doll.

Barbie wasn’t just a doll. She was elegance and glamour. She owned clothes most of us could only look at in fashion magazines. She had a career or two (nurse, flight attendant, secretary – the allowable female jobs in those days) so that those of us who played with her could imagine ourselves having careers. There was even a Barbie Color and Curl kit, that included wigs, a wig stand, a doll hair dryer and our first acid-base chemistry experiment to change the color of the hair of the wigs, so that some could even dream of having that other acceptable female career – hairdresser.

Yes, Barbie had measurements that have been poked fun at for decades, but I don’t think little girls who played with her really imagined growing up to look exactly like her. She simply looked like a grown-up, unlike all of the baby dolls we had had previously, and a wardrobe of difficult to put on clothes to help us improve our fine motor and problem-solving skills. It is true that only Brigitte Bardot, Gina Lollobrigida, Sophia Loren and Raquel Welch were built anything like her, but that didn’t matter to little girls of that time.

Initially, Barbie had two hair colors: brunette bubble cut and blonde cotton ponytail. Her friend, Midge was the red-headed representative, just as her little sister, Skipper, represented the prepubescent, and her cousin, Francie, the teenager. Later, along with the Civil Rights movement and international trends, Barbie became available in different races, with different cultural costumes. This was all well and good, but now things have gone a bit too far.

Because of the protests that Barbie is setting up an unrealistic body image for girls, she now comes in various body types: tall and willowy, shorter and stouter and a range in between. Oh please!

Barbie is an icon. She was a fashion doll, therefore, something of a model. That is who Barbie is. While I applaud different hair and skin colors, these didn’t change the basic image of Barbie. A girl should be able to have a doll of her race to play with if she wants. Call me a hypocrite if you wish, but really, Barbie isn’t an American Girl doll. She isn’t meant to represent everyone or even Everywoman. Changing her basic design to appease adults who think she needs to be all-inclusive is just wrong.

If you want a taller doll, a shorter doll, one with more “meat” on her bones or less bosom on her chest, make a different doll, one who is friends with Barbie or a sister or cousin, as Midge, Francie and Skipper were. If all dolls have to have counterparts to all people, Bratz dolls, with their oversized heads and spindly legs would have to come off the market. No one is making a variety of them to conform to all shapes and sizes.

I think the real question I have for people worrying about Barbie’s shape is, in what universe did any little girl ever dream of growing up to look like one of her dolls?

Barbie, for all of her press, is a doll.

She’s pretty.

She has a dream house.

She has lots of clothes.

But she’s just a doll.

She has an emasculated boyfriend and she doesn’t even have nipples. She’s not anatomically correct. no one dreams of growing up to be Barbie.

Leave the doll alone. Create other dolls, and judge their success or failure on sales.