Vanity and Sanity.

Lately, getting to the gym has been a struggle. Used to be, I was pretty good about it-four, five times a week, even when I was feeling a little logy. Especially when I felt a little logy, because I chose to believe what all the women's magazines I write for have said: that working out gives you energy, even as you expend energy climbing endlessly to nowhere on a machine made by someone who must have had a terrible childhood. The theory defies physics, of course, but then, I was applying eye shadow during physics in high school and I needed as many reasons as I could muster to get my f.a.n.n.y on the cardio machine.

I worked out as much as the m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.ts experts say you should, not because I'm so virtuous or an athlete or find the "scene" at the gym scintillating or enjoy watching middle-aged men do things with weights that are only going to make our health-care crisis worse.

No, I went to the gym for two simple reasons. 1) I was just vain enough (I look better when I exercise) and 2) just grouchy enough (I'm in a better mood after I've worked out). I knew that if I didn't, I would become someone I can't be around. Which is a problem, considering I'm stuck with myself, and so are my kids and, arguably, my husband. I went to the gym in the same spirit in which I brush my teeth: There is little enjoyment but not doing it wasn't an option, either. I felt gross when I didn't go, and a.n.a.logous to minty fresh when I did.

Hence my dilemma. I'm becoming a teeny bit less vain as I get older-overall, an excellent development, one that gives me a sense of peace and relief, but one that is nonetheless significantly reducing my desire to exercise. I no longer feel terribly gross when I skip the gym for a day, two or even three. In fact, it feels like the natural order of things-why would I go to the gym, really, when it's not going to make as much of a difference in my appearance as it used to? My second reason for going to the gym is still there (I'm still p.r.o.ne to the grumpy blues) but now that I care a bit less about how I look, the ratio of vain to sad and anxious is off.

Does this mean I need to become more emotionally off-balance to compensate for caring less about my looks, to ensure I get a healthy amount of exercise?

I hope not, because then I'm just a hop and a skip and a deep global recession away from bag-lady city. For all I know, that woman who wears everything she's ever owned and mutters to herself on the street was a Formerly and a mom of two who simply lost her vanity, upped her mental instability, saw her 401(k) go down the c.r.a.pper and now gets her exercise by wandering from homeless shelter to homeless shelter. Some days, the bag-lady image is enough to get me there. Other days, not so much.

12.

Of Two Minds, One Body.

Lest I have given you the impression that once I (ding!) finally grasped that the cause of my strange disquietude was that I was no longer hot, at least not in the same way I used to be, I settled smoothly into my new iteration as a Formerly, that's not quite how it happened.

Okay, that's not even remotely how it happened.

It certainly helped me feel less nuts to recognize that I was undergoing a subtle but nonetheless all-encompa.s.sing life change that ran much deeper than the creva.s.ses between my eyebrows. But the realization alone hardly made me want to go skipping through a wheat field, arms open wide and ready to embrace my future as an aging woman and all the joy and wisdom and reverence from society to which my new status ent.i.tled me.

Nay, it was a herky-jerky, one-step-forward-two-steps-back trippy odyssey fraught with insecurity, hypocrisy (societal), hypocrisy (my own), contradictory messages and conflicting, shifting priorities. And guess what? I'm still not there, wherever "there" turns out to be. One moment, I'm laughing with my children, enjoying my work, hugging my husband or walking down the street on a crisp, clear day just glad to be wise and aware enough to appreciate how lucky I am and the enormity of all that I've built and have been gifted. This understanding of my good fortune has come with age, and the fact that nothing lasts forever only enhances the experience for me. I am as wealthy as I could ever hope to be. And, not coincidentally, I feel beautiful.

Then, later that very same day, I'm examining my tired eyes in that stupid 15 magnification mirror I told you about. The skin underneath is newly adorned with tiny white b.u.mps and dark patches, a blue vein that I'd barely noticed before appears to be throbbing cartoonishly and my skin is sallow and looking subtly more slack. A mild panic mixed with exhaustion sets in. I start to ponder "what can be done" about it all. I completely forget that that same face had only recently been smiling and laughing, and, as some cheesy Hallmark plaque over a receptionist's desk I read once rightly said, "A smile is an instant face-lift." I'm back to looking at my outsides, my brain churning with ways to keep them from revealing that too much has changed with time. Only hours before, I was splashing happily around in all that had changed internally for the better.

It's a little schizo, I know, but it's where I'm at. I am of two minds about the way I look (which, as I've said, is just fine), the way I no longer look and how important it is to me as I get older. I am of two minds, and both of them overthink things. I see no solution save learning to roll with how I feel at any given time. So that's what I'm doing, b.u.mpy though the ride sometimes is.

And b.u.mpy though my body sometimes is! Always is! Not that it was ever perfectly smooth, but with pregnancy and childbirth, creeping weight gain and the general southern migration of all the fleshy bits, it really isn't hanging together quite the way it used to. I've been resisting incorporating "shapewear," which is what they're calling girdles these days, into my regular underwear routine, as many of my Formerly friends have, because I find it uncomfortable. But of course there's that other definition of comfort, as in, I'd like to feel comfortable wearing that slinky sheath dress, and I don't because I'm too fat/rolly/whatever, which can be just as powerful a consideration.

Superstrong body squishers like Spanx are the nexus of these two ideas: Can you smush your body into a physical shape that makes you feel psychologically comfortable wearing a s.e.xy dress, and still feel physically comfortable enough to sit, stand and wriggle out of it when you have to go to the ladies' room? There is shapewear for virtually every part of the body, including one's pelican-beak-like upper arms.

And then there's that third comfort, which is to say, ideologically comfortable with the idea that a woman should have to endure one second of physical discomfort for psychological comfort. Why can't I feel s.e.xy in a s.e.xy dress the way I am, which is admittedly a bit on the loosey-goosey side?

My husband works for a congressman, so last year we were gearing up to go to President Obama's inauguration. There are not many events or many men I'd compress my intestines for, but this President is one of them. I went and got me some Spanx, but my two minds had a good long argument about it.

On the one hand, shapewear (remember Scarlett O'Hara getting her corset stays tightened to bring her waist to 17 inches?) is a G.o.dsend to many Formerlies. Part of me thinks, whatever gets you through the day, date, red carpet paparazzi gauntlet or Civil War is fine.

But there's another part of me that resents having to even think about wrapping my body in sausage casing in order to feel I look acceptable. I mean, really! I'm a Formerly. I am smarter, cooler, funnier and more comfortable with myself and the world than I've ever been, and yet I am considering tucking my belly rolls into a pair of Power Panties or something called a Slim Cognito, which goes from my knees to my sternum and hooks to my bra so it won't roll down when I exhale? Weirdly, the grumpier I get about the idea of Spanx, the better I feel about being a Formerly. It wouldn't have occurred to me to resent it when I was younger-I was too busy feeling fat.

Like most women who give it any thought, I am torn between wanting to feel like I am OK without binding and just plain wanting to look sleek in a sheath dress. Which is why I broke down and got the d.a.m.n Spanx, as if anyone would be looking at me at Obama's inauguration. (I didn't go-long, irrelevant story-and so I didn't wear the Spanx. They sit in my drawer awaiting another occasion where I'll think it's more important to look good than to feel good-and one will no doubt soon arise.) In the end, the "to shapewear or not to shapewear" question comes down to the comfort versus vanity balance-i.e., how much discomfort are you willing to endure in exchange for looking smooth and thinner (because they do work!) on any given day. For me, the deeper into Formerlydom I go, the more I tend toward comfort and away from dresses that require me to smooth my flab. So I wear a slightly looser dress and still look good and can digest my food.

Given the screwy world we Formerlies must navigate, I'm glad such garments exist, I suppose. The last thing a Formerly should have to be worrying about is her lumpy b.u.t.t, ever, and if a pair of Spanx gives her a reprieve, then fine. I just wish none of us was worrying about it in the first place, so shapewear would be obsolete.

It's not just my body that I'm of two minds about, either. Lately I've been getting bad face days, maybe twice a week, usually when I haven't had enough sleep. Unlike bad hair days, these are much harder to disguise; there is no headband or gel or baseball hat for a bad face day. There are no Spanx for your face. Sure, there are creams and serums that over time might make a drop of a difference. And there are expensive poisons that doctors might inject here and there like the guy at the automotive body shop might bang out dings and dents, if you have the money and the inclination.

But on any given morning, if you wake up with creases and craters for pores, and dark chocolate croissants under your eyes, and blemishes not next to but on your little wrinkles, and broken capillaries-oh, yes, and let us not forget, whiskers, the man kind-you've got no choice but to stare yourself down, go through your ablutions and then start s.p.a.ckling on the concealer if you have vanity enough to do so. Which, G.o.d knows, I do.

The good news is, after about 45 minutes of being vertical, many of the symptoms of a bad face day (puffiness, sheet cleavage on your chest, indentations on your cheeks from the chandelier earrings you fell asleep in) subside on their own. Others can be painted over. Still others can be yanked out with tweezers or, yes, shaved if things get really out of hand. Failing all that, there are ginormous sungla.s.ses that hide half your face.

Still, if I said I was loving the way things are trending, my nose would grow and that would make a bad face day much worse. Granted, I'm more immersed in this topic than is probably healthy for me, because I recently covered beauty for a magazine. In some ways, though, being privy to the more extreme thinking in the beauty world snaps me back to reality. As startled as I sometimes am by my own bad face days, I am regularly more horrified by the kinds of stuff that are available to potentially alleviate them. This list is incomplete, but it is absolutely, 100 percent truthful. I have heard about: A perfume that I'm told is clinically proven to make men think you are years younger than you are A product that treats the scourge of "aging fingernails"

A foot treatment to help protect against "old feet" (that would be, feet that have been crammed into pointy, uncomfortable shoes for the sake of hotness for far too long) A skin serum-launched in time for Thanksgiving-to help you avoid "turkey neck"

Several lines of anti-aging hair care products (not the expected hair color to hide grays, but shampoos and conditioners designed to make the texture of your hair appear as if you had as much estrogen surging through your blood as you did when you were 16) And these on top of the usual creams, lotions and potions that have targeted the areas women were already worried about revealing their age, such as their under-eye area, their hands and their decolletage. They make me think about parts of my face and body that hadn't occurred to me that might be broadcasting my age (Attention shoppers: I'M 42!!!!), which is, of course, the point. And then they made me giggle. And then they made me annoyed. Really? My fingernails?

But at least most of these products are not advocating violence. There was an ad for a face product that popped up on the right side of my Facebook page about a year ago that made my arm hair stand up. It said, "Murder Wrinkles." Murder? Isn't that a little harsh, even for something so unwelcome as a wrinkle? Good people disagree on whether the death penalty is appropriate for exponentially more heinous crimes than making someone (who is, after all, not a teenager) look her age.

I kept an eye out for similar language in other appearance and anti-aging marketing and articles. Here's what else I came across: "destroy" (mostly with regard to fat cells), "blast," "torch," "melt" (fat and calories) and "annihilate" (belly fat, in particular). Do the employers of these words forget that the wrinkles and flab are actually attached to human beings? There's bound to be collateral damage. I'm looking down at my belly rolls right now. I've often wished they'd magically vanish or be sloughed off with a loofah in the shower, but these words make me want to hide them like Anne Frank until the war is over.

The violence in these words reminds me of when I was a teenager and so consumed with self-loathing that I tried to starve my body so it would disappear. When that didn't work, I tried to torture it into thinness by overexercising and throwing up. My body didn't like that too much, not to mention my psyche or my tooth enamel. I won't tell you that my body and I got on the Love Train and rode it happily ever after to the terminus together, but when I gradually dropped the adversarial "me versus it" att.i.tude, "it" became a part of me again, and we began to work together to at least be healthy and try to get along. For the most part, we have.

And here we are, 25 years later, and I'm being told to blast and destroy and murder it? I like myself too much to do that. The thing I've learned in lo these several decades is that as looks-concerned as I remain, there is a soul-sucking element to caring too much, to worrying too much and to giving too much credence to the external, and hard as it is to do some days, it is to be resisted.

The best way I've found to do this is to laugh at myself and the changes that are afoot. Luckily, there's no shortage of material, and my daughters are quite generous in helping me out in this regard. One afternoon last spring, when my husband was out with the girls, I seized the opportunity to do a closet purge. I made a huge pile of warm-weather clothes and determined to designate them fit to put back in circulation, to donate or to be saved for my daughters (maybe they'd eventually think they were cool and retro). I was still sitting amid the heaps when the crew came in, so I got up from my task to go greet them at the door. I grabbed something to put on, a black denim skirt that I wasn't sure fit. I yanked it over my thighs, pausing at an obstruction (my a.s.s) that was a bit of a challenge, but nothing a bunch of hopping up and down couldn't overcome. Finally, I sucked in my belly and wrestled the zipper up. The skirt flattened my b.u.t.t into nothingness and made my stomach pooch out more than usual, but I was kind of psyched I could zip it. I shuffled to the door.

Sasha ran up and hugged me. "Nice skirt," my husband said. After eight years of marriage he knows to say such things. He was not taught this at the Ivy League college he attended and to which he still sends checks; I had to home-school him.

"Thanks! It fits. Kinda." I hugged Sasha back, her face at the level of my abdomen. She pulled her head back a few inches and head-b.u.t.ted my belly. Her forehead sprang off it like it was a mini-tramp, and she laughed and did it again. "It's springy, isn't it?" I laughed, conscious of demonstrating how supremely comfortable I am with my own body (at that moment, I believe I was), to set a good example for my daughter.

"Yeah," she said, laughing, too. "That skirt makes it look like your v.a.g.i.n.a is in the back and your tushy is in the front." I glanced in the mirror, and lo and behold, that's just what it looked like. And then, while I was digesting that truism: "I can do that with my Barbie," she said.

The "donate" pile just got a bit bigger. Who says real women can't have bodies like Barbie dolls? Hilarious. I'm so glad my body can be a source of mirth and merriment in our household.

That sounded sarcastic, but I truly am. Having my daughters has been a net positive for my body image. Not only do I have to hand it to my body for lugging them around for almost nine months and delivering them safely to the outside world, but mothering two girls has forced me to walk the love-your-body walk and talk the love-your-body talk even when I'm feeling as big as a mobile home and might otherwise be standing in front of the mirror scrutinizing for more signs of decrepitude. Not only do I want to spare Sasha and Vivian any body angst I can, I simply don't have infinite time to count spider veins or track new cellulite puckers-not when I am so in demand as the shoe tier, waffle toaster and sunscreen applier. Besides, their questions, still innocent and devoid of judgments (at this age, they think I am a combination of Princess Belle and the sun itself, with a little Miley mixed in for the cool factor), remind me that there is nothing inherently ugly about getting older. In fact, some of it is funny, if you can laugh at it. Laughter, even the rueful kind, is beautiful.

A brief layover in Los Angeles or Miami, of course, will remind you that many Formerlies are not laughing when it comes to the physical changes having kids and edging into their 40s have wrought. There is a tendency for women, when they hit Formerly age, to feel they need to pick a lane: You can accept that your face and body are changing, sigh, shrug your shoulders and focus your attention on learning how to properly grow heirloom tomatoes. Or you can go all out to create the illusion that you are not getting older, get tons of procedures and spend your life in a spin cla.s.s with some sweaty guy with a headset yelling at you, and then go have steamed kale as your postworkout treat. The first adapts her opinion so she feels good about herself as her appearance changes, and the second makes certain her appearance doesn't change, so she never has any reason to have to adapt.

Between these two lanes is, of course, a wide highway of views, and most Formerlies try to stay somewhere in the middle of the road, balancing the desire to look young and fit with the knowledge that, ultimately, there are more important things to worry about, like improving public education and defeating the Taliban. We may even be thinking about these terribly important things as the dermatologist injects botulism toxin into our foreheads, as if that makes it somehow less vain. Or painful. Or expensive. Which it doesn't. But it may make us look less p.o.o.ped.

On the subject of procedures and surgery, not surprisingly, I tend to veer drunkenly from one side of this busy freeway to the other. Again, I am of two minds. One day (maybe a day that I've slept enough and that dark spot on my cheek that I developed since having the girls isn't particularly visible) I remember that I am a feminist. I decide that what some women do to themselves is nothing short of barbaric, and am ashamed of myself for fantasizing about getting a "mommy makeover," facial fillers and implants that will remain in landfills long after my body has decomposed. I can even muster sympathy for the celebrities who say they "chose" to have plastic surgery and are grateful to have the choice, when really, in the context of their lives, what choice do they have?

And then, the very next day, maybe after a fight with my husband or a day of staring at my computer without typing a word, my principled stance is circling the bowl. I'll stand in front of the mirror pulling the skin around my cheekbones back to see what my face would be like if I didn't have those parentheses around my mouth, as if looking a little less like a primate would help me feel like a more successful human. Hmmm ... maybe it is a "personal choice" whether to inject fillers into my face. And what is feminism about, really, if not choices?

And then I'll feel a little dirty and sick to my stomach, as if I made a compromise I knew in my heart was a poor one. Because in my heart, that's not what I believe.

There's a huge part of me that wishes plastic surgery would simply scurry back into the closet where it cowered before some celebrities felt it was their civic duty as role models to be honest about what they had done, and their right to have done it unashamed. If people were more embarra.s.sed about admitting that they'd had their bodies cut open or the fat sucked out for no other reason than that they could look better longer, maybe fewer people would do it, and the rest of us wouldn't feel so much pressure to keep up with the Joneses, or rather, the (Courteney) c.o.xes or the (Demi) Moores or whoever may or may not have had work done. When it became socially unacceptable to use racist terms, fewer people did and the virulent ideas they represented were tamped down. Certainly children, unexposed to such hateful speech, were freer to develop different points of view.

My girls are just six and (in response to a question about why, unlike the lady in the magazine, mommy's b.o.o.bies are so smushy and droopy) I've already had to explain to them that there's no natural way for someone's b.r.e.a.s.t.s to sit up on her clavicles.

But while I want my daughters to feel good about the bodies they come by naturally, the main reason I'd like cosmetic surgery to just go away and leave me alone is that-now that it's not only acceptable but being marketed as a feminist choice-it forces me to confront my own hypocrisy on a daily basis, and that makes me terribly uncomfortable. Demi Moore (who denies she has had anything done, and insists she naturally looks like a 30-year-old at 47) is not my role model, and yet I'd rather look like her as I get older than Sonia Sotomayor. I am a hypocrite, and about something that bothers me much more than making my daughters eat Kashi and then sneaking Apple Jacks after they've gone to bed. That's being a tiny hypocrite. I am a gigantic hypocrite. I despise being a gigantic hypocrite.

I would feel more internally consistent if I were the kind of person who could flat-out reject the supermodel body ideal-to say, Screw you for making me feel I'm not OK the way I am-and get on with it. But in case you've missed it, I'm only that person part of the time. When I'm not feeling all righteous, I'm Googling various procedures to figure out how much time off from work I'd theoretically have to take if I had them. I feel as if I have an angel on one shoulder, whispering, "Do the right thing. Set an example for your daughters. Show them what you believe in your heart: that there are many ways to be beautiful, and they needn't involve a cannula or a scalpel." On the other shoulder, there is a little Pamela-Andersonshaped devil saying, "Oh, f.u.c.k it, Steph. You've always hated your belly. You've tried to change your outlook and failed. Just get a d.a.m.n tummy tuck already."

Oh, and I can spend hours staring at pictures of stars who have had botched surgery and so look way worse than they did before. It's sick, and I truly don't wish them ill, but it makes me feel strangely validated.

My friend Sarah, who had breast reduction surgery for mostly cosmetic reasons (she came on like a wall of b.o.o.bs before and looks much better now) is thrilled with the results and has not a pang of regret. She thinks I'm being way too hard on myself, and holding myself to standards on this issue that most of the world doesn't adhere to. She's right. But one thing I've learned as a Formerly is that if something preoccupies me to the extent that the "to nip and tuck or not" dilemma does, there's probably a bigger issue behind it.

And that issue is this: The fact that it's no biggie to get a procedure or 20 puts many Formerlies in an untenable spot. We are at the precise age where things start to droop and live in a world where looking like a middle-aged woman looks naturally is considered "letting yourself go." This can be profoundly upsetting and seems relatively easy to fix. At the same time, we are finally old and wise enough to know-emotionally know, not just understand intellectually-that looks are by far not the most important thing in the world. My two minds are at war, and they're leaving the landscape of my brain looking like Baghdad after a night of air raids.

What's more, Formerlies like me are experiencing a ma.s.s cognitive dissonance-that is, when you hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, unless you find a way to reconcile them, they will totally stress you out. Many of the Formerlies I've spoken to know that they shouldn't care as much as they do about their aging faces and bodies, and yet they do. They don't want to be "the kind of person" who gets cosmetic surgery (that is to say, vain enough to go that far, to spend that much, to take a risk with their health by undergoing elective surgery), but they really would like to. To reconcile these conflicting desires, they either decide it's not vain but feminist to get surgery (after all, it's a woman's choice and more attractive women stand a better chance in a man's world), or they decide that a procedure is not as expensive or risky or painful as they thought it was. Or they come to feel that they were wrong all along-looks really do matter-and that our children may as well get used to the idea. By the time they're adults, everyone will be having cosmetic surgery. Why fight it?

No matter how you slice it, it's a rotten spot for a Formerly to be in. In the same way that I support the men and women fighting in Iraq even though I'm against the war and don't think we should have taken it on, I don't judge women who act on their desire to get cosmetic surgery. I might easily be one of them, and I know that a Formerly's gotta do what a Formerly's gotta do. If getting your b.o.o.bs lifted will stop you from thinking about how you hate your b.o.o.bs, more power to you. But just as I don't think war is a great way to solve conflicts and I wish there weren't fighting troops to support, I also wish we lived in a world where Formerlies felt that there was a happy place for them to exist when nature took its inevitable course. I'm hoping that the older I get the more I will resent the idea that I need to stop the aging process, but I can't predict. I don't know if I have the strength to be the one prune in a sea of plums. Time will tell.

Deep breath. Calm down. Stress, I understand, gives you wrinkles and causes your cells to age more rapidly. Now, we can't have that, can we? Especially because I'm told I look pretty good. For my age.

That qualifier started following me around like a hungry puppy in the last couple of years: "For her age," as in, "Stephanie looks pretty good for her age," and "Demi Moore looks preternaturally, extraordinarily, suspiciously stunning for her age, especially since she claims she didn't have plastic surgery."

Of course I realize that someone who says I look good for my age is trying to be kind, to cut me some slack. "For my age," my skin looks nice. I have a decent figure "for my age" and "for a mother of twins." That's clearly meant to be a compliment, in the "considering what you could look like" kind of way. So when someone tells me that for my age, I'm not half bad, I say a sincere thank-you to reward their intent. But it still smacks of She runs a pretty good race, considering she has no legs. How cool would it be to hear that your skin looks nice or that you have a decent figure, period, and let the rest be thought, if it must, instead of spoken?

When you're a kid, "for her age" is usually used in the positive, like Sasha is tall for her (young) age, or Vivian has a large vocabulary for her (young) age. The problem is, of course, that when you're older, what's meant is, Her skin is relatively unmarred, for her (old) age. I'm reacting not to the categorization (which I didn't mind one bit when people thought I was poised or successful for my young age) but with my new category, old, or at least not young, is something I'm still not used to.

Come to think of it, I don't mind "for her age" except when it pertains to my looks. That makes sense-getting older has been an overwhelmingly positive transition, except when it comes to my appearance. If someone were to say that I have great vision for my age (which no one would, because my vision sucks), I'd appreciate it, since it's a biological reality that vision tends to get all wonky as a person ages. But that's not the case when it comes to beauty, unless you believe that only young women can be beautiful, which I emphatically do not. Saying that someone looks good for her age a.s.sumes that pretty and young are inextricable. So being pretty "for your age" isn't really pretty. It's another category, to be a.s.sessed with different standards. It's as if someone told Michael Phelps that he no longer qualified for the "real" Olympics, but a different, by implication less important, Pot-head Olympics for guys who like to party, where they gave out those plastic medals you get in the gumball machine that say "You're Number 1" instead of the gold.

Of course, there are plenty of people, like me, who do not agree that pretty is by definition young. But the very fact that I (and millions of other women who make this same point on blogs like mine) have to stand up and counter that idea means it's a pervasive one. So I propose we shelve this particular qualifier, which is truly backhanded, along with the terms "cougar" and "MILF" (short for "Mother I'd Like to f.u.c.k"), which don't exactly advance intelligent dialogue, either.

Putting "for her age" on the shelf is but one tiny step toward marrying my two minds, the one that is grateful for the opportunity to get older, no matter how I look doing it, and the other that is terrified that looking old will marginalize me in the eyes of others to the point where no one will care what I have to say once they see me. That's my biggest fear about looking older: not that I'll wind up alone or unloved, but that I'll wind up unheard. I guess that's why I'm letting both of these points of view continue to debate loudly inside my head, painful as it is to listen to both sides and live with the perpetual conflict. One of my two minds will win out in the end, and I need to be sure it's the one I can live with for the long haul.

13.

Mortally Wounded.

I'd imagine doctors hate being the people who bust women's bubbles by telling them that they're just plain getting older, and there's no cure for the inevitable pa.s.sage of time. On the other hand, when there is an identifiable medical issue at hand, doctors are good to have around. I just wish I didn't have so many.

A colleague of mine replied on her BlackBerry to an email I sent her, because, she wrote, her computer was down. "My thumbs can't take much more!" I wrote back that she needn't worry, because according to my thumb doctor, it's a myth that PDA abuse leads to carpal tunnel syndrome.

As I hit "send," it occurred to me: I have a thumb doctor. A physician specifically devoted to a single digit on my right hand. He's a neurologist to whom I was referred in the fall, after I wantonly continued to cut out pumpkins for Halloween decorations long after the nerve at the base of my thumb had begun to throb. Must. Finish. Pumpkins. Compelled by the same force that used to enable me to pull all-nighters for pleasure or enterprise, I sat there cutting out several hundred G.o.dd.a.m.ned jack-o'-lanterns for a neighborhood Halloween party. I was a wild woman! There was no stopping me. And I paid the price. And now I have a thumb doctor. This is what it's come to.

It makes sense that as you get older, you acc.u.mulate more doctors. You've had more time b.u.mbling around on this earth to injure yourself and develop diseases and wear out your organs with all that breathing and secreting, filtering and digesting.

But I don't love the way doctors become increasingly focused on smaller and more obscure parts of the body as you get older, unseen "systems" that apparently govern everything from your moods to how much you perspire to how efficiently your cells process that French cruller you couldn't resist at the morning staff meeting. It makes me fear for the future, because I'm sure I'll need a mucous membrane specialist or to consult the world's foremost expert on disorders of the cuticles.

What kills me about all of this is that, aside from a few dings and oddities, I'm a resoundingly healthy person. And yet, I've added far more doctors to my pit crew in recent years than I have aestheticians, and in case you haven't noticed, I care not a little about my looks.

Think about it: Barring any chronic or catastrophic childhood illnesses or conditions, when you're a kid, you have a pediatrician. Later, as a young adult, a.s.suming you have health insurance, you'll have a general pract.i.tioner and a gynecologist. Being nearly blind, I also had an ophthalmologist.

It's when you approach Formerlydom that you start racking up doctors like so many refrigerator magnets. If you can't get pregs in the usual way (like I couldn't), you add a reproductive endocrinologist to your roster. And if, when the RE orders the baseline mammogram before he pumps you full of hormones (standard procedure), they find a scary blobby ma.s.s with blood vessels snaking around it (as they did with me), all of a sudden you have a breast surgeon! She biopsies the lump and determines that it's benign (whew!), so you're confirmed to be perfectly healthy, if imbued with a new appreciation of your own mortality, and your grand doctor total is up to at least five, six if you count the radiologist. Naturally all this drama makes you a little anxious and perhaps depressed, so you see a psychopharmacologist, who writes you (OK, me again) prescriptions that might help your mood. That's seven.

You get pregnant (yay!), deliver (woo-hoo!), but then your knees ache from all that exercise you've been doing to lose the baby weight and avoid the eventual need for a cardiologist. Time to see an orthopedist (9), who tells you you shouldn't run so much, and that, yeah, pregnancy can screw with your joints, especially a twin pregnancy, which resulted from-you guessed it-taking fertility drugs.

Exhausted and layering on the pounds like there's some impending famine your body is aware of but you're not, you go for a physical. To rule out anything serious, you're sent to a gastroenterologist (9), a rheumatologist (10) and/or an endocrinologist (11) and find out you do not have any autoimmune diseases or thyroid issues. Best they can tell, you are simply p.o.o.ped because you have twins and have been working too hard and also maybe having too good a time (which now takes a lot out of you) and your metabolism is flipping you the bird.

So you shrug and drink more coffee and cut out pumpkins for Halloween and try not to eat the candy you bought for the kiddies, who are all dressed as Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty, the most pa.s.sive and lamest of all the Disney princesses. Creepy. Ouch-you now have a thumb doctor (12). And an allergist (13) and an ear, nose and throat guy (14), because lately you've been p.r.o.ne to sinus infections. WTF? Oh, Christ, I forgot about the podiatrist who dealt with my fungal toenail (15), which, of course, is still there because a fungal toenail will stay with you longer than any lover ever will. So will the lovely cyst on my back (dermatologist, 16).

I have 16 doctors and counting, and I've never had more than a bad flu. I'm not even including the other pract.i.tioners, like physicians' a.s.sistants, PTs or complementary medicine specialists, such as acupuncturists.

One could argue that I'm healthy because I've seen all these doctors, or that the fact that I have seen all these doctors is a sign that I take good care of myself. The second is true. The first is not. Regardless, I would be thrilled to cap the number of doctors at 20 and call it a life.

Anyone would, I suppose. As much as I try to bury it under the many more pleasant things I have to think about, it's getting harder to escape the fact that the older we get, well, the older we get. And whether it's because we're exposed to more sick-making chemicals the longer we live or because the machine of our bodies starts to wear out, we're just now, as Formerlies, starting to notice-weird!-that a pulled muscle took a week to heal, or there's a strange b.u.mp that the doctor thinks merits a second look, or that we have things like acid reflux or gout, which sound like old people problems. Plus, hearing of a contemporary who has cancer, while uncommon and still shocking, is not the freak thing it was in our 20s.

Last winter, I had a routine physical with a new doctor I picked strictly because of her proximity to my house and because she took my insurance. Big mistake. Two days later, on a Sat.u.r.day, as I was walking my girls home from soccer, I got a call from the emergency room closest to our house, the one at the hospital the new doctor is affiliated with. The ER doctor on the phone advised me to get there immediately; my test revealed that my blood counts were so low as to indicate I was bleeding internally, possibly in my brain (!!!). At that moment, I actually felt good-I'd slept in that morning-and told her so. She urged me to come in. I might collapse at any time. She may have even used the word "stat." I sent my daughters off with my neighbor and got in a cab. They admitted me right away, ahead of a guy who had been shot (only in the arm, but how dramatic, right?).

I won't keep you in suspense: Four hours later, worried husband by my side, the results of the repeat blood test came in and I was confirmed fine. The first test had been compromised by my doctor's office somehow, yielding false readings. In those four hours, I ricocheted between thinking, How ridiculous, this must be a mistake, and imagining never being able to kiss my daughters on the top of their heads again, and smell their little-girl scalp smell. The thought, even today, is crushing. This wasn't the narrative I could imagine for my own end-of-life story, being called in off the street one winter's day with bad blood and never going home. In fact, I hadn't given much thought to how I might die, but since then, I've been thinking about it more. I don't dwell on it, but compared to never having thought about it as a young person, the entire subject feels new. I still think it best not to envision it.

It's not only that Formerlies have more actual and pseudo-scares now than we did in years past, such as mammogram findings that wind up being nothing (I've had three so far, and like several Formerlies I know, have binge-shopped while awaiting the results of the biopsies). It's also that, as I've mentioned, I'm starting to perceive time as pa.s.sing faster than it used to. "One minute, girls," shouted through a closed bathroom door seems to take an hour to pa.s.s for them, yet only ten seconds to me, and that's not just because it's the only place I have any privacy in our house. I think it's because one minute is a larger proportion of their lives than it is of mine. I feel as though I'm ceding my time to them, like a senator might to a colleague who has more of a point to make. I can only imagine that this feeling grows stronger as you get older still.

And there's nothing like noticing your parents slowing down to cause you to feel every bit the Formerly. My parents remain young of affect, and vital, with no big health issues. Still, it's becoming increasingly clear that I and my husband are on deck. If your parents are older or less healthy than mine, it's scary to think that before long you will not have them to rely upon, a.s.suming they were reliable in the first place. The role reversal, if they become infirm, is difficult for everyone.

But perhaps less expected and more bizarre for some of us Formerlies when our parents get old and need our care is that we often have to knit back together that separation we made when we left home for the first time-and it just doesn't seem that long ago that we left! Depending on what your relationship was like with your parents growing up, having to be close to them in an intimate, day-to-day way can dredge up adolescent sewage better left in the septic tank of your childhood home. I suppose that's one way of feeling young again.

14.

The Replacements.

A more optimistic way to feel young again, of course, is to have children of your own to drive crazy for the rest of their lives. I've heard people say that kids keep you young, and that's true in the sense that it's hard to take yourself seriously when you're walking down the street wearing a giant yellow construction-paper duck beak that your kid made for you in art cla.s.s. (The great thing about being a Formerly is that you're unself-conscious enough to wear a giant yellow construction-paper duck beak that your kid made for you in art cla.s.s.) But physically, children can kick your a.s.s. I have never felt so old as when chasing after Sasha and Vivian. It seems as soon as I finally sit down on the bench at the playground, one of them needs to be taken to the bathroom. They also take a few years off of me mentally, just keeping up with their sharp little minds, as mine gets more and more blunted. I suppose that's natural. They're meant to replace us, and the urge to reproduce is a gesture toward our own immortality.

Much has been written about the mad dash to bear children when you're a Formerly, or at least to decide whether or not to bear children before the decision is made for you by your body, which has been preprogrammed to start striking the reproductive set around age 40. I had my ladies when I was 35, through IVF. My inability to get pregnant without help had nothing to do with my age; I had plenty of eggs, but none of them seemed to want to drop out of the nest. Still, because I went the high-tech route, and because I have several single Formerly friends grappling with the get-pregnant-or-not dilemma who may need help, I've stayed attuned to what the world has to say about Formerlies having babies.

With the array of stigma-free options for single prospective moms who want to experience pregnancy and have a biological child-using a sperm donor, co-parenting with someone who you're not romantically involved with, egg-freezing, flying to India for lower-cost fertility treatments and others-you'd think there'd be this thrill in the air that for many women, babies that would not have been possible only a few years ago can now come into being.

And yet, it seems like women are more anxious, not less. If you're at the choose-or-lose age, you're not only making a tough decision to deliberately have a baby on your own, which, while increasingly common, is not easy, you're making the decision all by yourself-and against your will, because your hand, or your ovaries, is being forced. Add in all the judgments that some women place on themselves about the "right" way to feel in any given situation, and you've got stress with a side order of stress. Instead of covering the fabulous choices Formerlies have arrayed before them, many media treat the to-breed-or-not decision like the alleged mommy wars (aka, some guy's catfight fantasy, recast with MILFs), with all the hyperbole and hysteria that no social or personal issue that men face is ever treated with. Granted, it's a heavy decision, but there's a whole lot more nuance than what you see in these facile takes: * Women with advanced degrees who have embraced difficult truths in their years nonetheless scaling the corporate ladder, in blithe denial of the fact that their fertility is, in fact, finite * Women so control-freaky about their fertility that they seek counseling in advance of trying the old-fashioned way for any length of time * Women wringing their hands, wondering if there's something horribly wrong with them for not really wanting children * Women p.i.s.sed that others seem to think there's something horribly wrong with them for not wanting children * Women wondering if there's something horribly wrong with them for not being "feminist enough" to have kids sans partner * Women wondering if they've married the first loser with a willing p.e.n.i.s in order to get pregnant by the deadline * Formerlies playing Russian roulette with birth control, half-hoping to get pregnant "accidentally" so they can call their single momhood fate I'm sure I'm missing some, but do you see a pattern here? Panic, fear, uncertainty, self-doubt and a lot of unhappy Formerlies feeling ... if not cornered, then disempowered. It's a similar feeling, I'd imagine, to what women who had no option but to marry young and breed dozens of farmhands to till the field must have felt if the biological realities of their lives didn't fit in with their hopes, dreams and plans. And I think that plain stinks.

Look, I know I'd have been profoundly sad if I couldn't have had my girls, and I was fortunate to have a partner at the right time, so I didn't grapple with any potential societal disapproval for my decision, although that's not the kind of thing that tends to trip me up. I remember being initially disappointed that I needed help getting pregnant, and then glad to have science on my side, and the means to pay for it. The fact that many Formerlies have similar options makes it marginally easier to have a deadline on such a huge decision, one that isn't entirely within your control.

But here's the thing: The deadline by which to have a baby-whether you're single or partnered when it hits, and whether that deadline is at age 35, 40 or 50-is still a deadline. As in, you feel as if you will die if it doesn't happen.

Of course, you will not die, but you will feel about as powerless as the baby you are thinking of having, only without someone as together as you to coddle you. Formerlies hate to feel powerless. Well, the odd m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t likes it, but only in strictly proscribed situations involving whips and handcuffs. Formerlies in particular, who have just recently come to a place of maximal self-determination, might not be ready to hand over the future of their domestic life to biology and fate (even though these have been largely in the hands of biology and fate this whole time). When you're up against a deadline like this one, it hits you that your choices are no longer unrolling infinitely like the red carpet before you. You already knew this, of course, but now that knowledge has spread down from your brain into your heart and, worse, into your reproductive organs.