Lately I have been contemplating on beauty. It is a quality so dear to me, I dedicate so much of my time, my energy, my possessions in service of it. When I think of a moment I consider to be one of my ‘peak beauty moments’ — standing in front of the full length mirror, modeling my bright red wedding dress, my super-fit 20 something bod and flawless dewy skin — it seems all rainbows and candy canes, the joy and pride and elation of seeing beauty, ‘having’ beauty, being beautiful. Of course I celebrate it, cultivate it, desire it desperately. Why wouldn’t I?

But beauty’s shadow self is already upon me — I literally see it in my own reflection — it is the fact that beauty fades. My own beauty fades, and that loss stabs me in the heart each time I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. 

I was looking through a photo album the other day, I found a picture of my Mom back when Seth and I were kids,  she was so young and so pretty. Now, in a more recent picture she looks so old, wrinkled and saggy. It happened to her, and it is happening to me, RIGHT NOW. My skin around my eyes starting to get crepey, my boobs sagging, my cheeks looking sunken.

Even when I can manage a beauty moment, there is always backsliding. Even as I stood there, 30-something-fitter-than-most-20-somethings, dressed for Halloween as a perfect Wonder Woman, I was eyeing the pizza restaurant wondering when starvation would win over my willpower to be thin.  I just had fillers and I am already thinking of the next treatment, worried about the second to worst cosmetic problem, now that the first worst is ‘solved’. I diet, and am thin for a second, before I backtrack, never really going back to as thin as I was in my peak days. Always, there is someone more beautiful. In my peak days, there were my drop-dead gorgeous friends Erica and Jessica that could turn every eye in a room away from me. Now, in my 40s, there is almost everyone younger.

In my own, rather short lived beauty, there have been countless physically painful moments; literal poking, prodding, fillers and botox, laser treatments and hours at the gym, seeking to maintain or return beauty lost. There are all the emotional pains too; the horror of  finding my fist gray hair, looking in the mirror as I get a hair cut and trying to bear the sight of my sagging jowls, humiliation when I have a pimple or a cold sore at a big event. The planning for procedures, the fear I might get found out, or permanently scarred. How do I regularly ignore these pains? How do I ignore a lifetime of hurt to achieve something so so fleeting?