A letter: On aging, forehead wrinkles, and timeless beauty

This walk with aging is more uncomfortable than I’d anticipated.

Dear Dannii,

Is it me, babe, or is our generation frozen in time? Well, our foreheads, at least.

Are we the minority now, the women whose laughter takes their whole face with it?

The ones who, no matter how we try, can’t hide the furrow of our brow beneath the rage of the afternoon sun?

Why is it that in a sea of silky skin, I start to question my relevance? Even as the lines around my eyes speak of wisdom, the world around me whispers flawed?

Do you remember? You were the first person I dared admit it to: that this walk with aging is more uncomfortable than I’d anticipated.

It was right at dusk, and the chill of the evening had just started to catch our fresh faces. We had fallen behind the group as we walked, as if the moment itself wanted to stretch out, to ensure there was space for the truth to slip out.

We clumsily described the unfamiliar feeling of meeting the woman in the mirror. Not the one we expected to become, but the one who had arrived, quietly, over time. Wasn’t it only yesterday we were popping those silly little circle patches over our adolescent pimples and sleeping in our make-up?

Now we find ourselves wondering—is Botox the only bridge back to feeling like ourselves again?

It reminds me of those early days of new motherhood, when the ache to return to who I was before felt almost primal. I longed for the familiarity of tight denim, for the discipline of morning workouts, for some small proof I hadn’t disappeared. But when I got there, nothing fit. Not the clothes. Not the rituals. Not the version of me I was trying to revive.

Maybe our aging faces are the first to admit: we no longer wish to return, either.

I think I’ve come to understand our late 30s as an aging crossroads. The meeting place of all the years that have come before us (without enough SPF 50, obviously), and the exciting and confronting reality that we don’t turn back from here. That we are, now in fact, aging as a forever-in-motion thing.

Perhaps what’s most tender about this place, this crossroads, is the invitation it offers.
Aging isn’t just personal. It’s communal. Generational. Because without surrendering to our own becoming, the 20-year-olds don’t get to fully be the 20-year-olds, and the 30-year-olds can’t truly claim their thirties. If we, the women on the cusp of 40, keep clinging to where we’ve been, we don’t leave space for those rising behind us to truly arrive.

I’ve come to understand that this isn’t really a conversation about Botox at all. However, it does seem to enter the chat often. To be clear, some of my best friends have Botox regularly, and I love their beautiful (flawless) faces.

However, in choosing not to intervene, I know I will age visibly, perhaps even rapidly, comparatively speaking, while others seem to stay frozen in time.

I think I’m learning that this is the cost of choosing presence over preservation. Allowing my face to say, I’ve lived a beautiful life, thus far while others aren’t able to frown.

Just last week, we were out to dinner celebrating River’s 8th birthday. He tucked himself under my arm, and we smiled for a photo. When Jase flicked the phone around to show me, I instinctively swiped through, searching for at least one keeper amid a sea of silly, scrunched-up eight-year-old expressions.

I caught a glimpse; there I was, an almost 39-year-old woman and her eight-year-old son.

And then, there they were: my tired eyes. The Julia Roberts vein that runs down the centre of my forehead whenever I smile too big. And more movement across my brow than I was expecting.

It made me wonder, when did I learn to see myself like this?

To search for signs of aging instead of evidence of joy? As if joy alone wasn’t enough. As if the moment had to meet some invisible standard of beauty or, dare I say, worthiness. To look for the things I’d edit, instead of the things I’d remember?

But amidst all of it, I saw something else too, babe.

Happiness.

Real happiness.

The kind that takes over your whole face, a mother and her boy on his 8th birthday. The undeniable joy of having witnessed eight whole years of him.

Maybe that is the truest beauty of it all, the privilege of witnessing him up close, all this time.

And here lies the ongoing battlefield of an aging woman. Wild, isn’t it?

I think what I’m learning, my love, is that beauty isn’t something to hold still. It’s something to be witnessed, to be met in motion. Maybe that’s why it feels essential that we age together as women. Because within friendship, we remind one another that aging isn’t a failure of beauty, it is, in fact, the very embodiment of it.

And yet…

I might still get Botox, even though it goes against all the ways I live my life.

I might still get Botox, even though Jase reminds me often that I would be willingly injecting a neurotoxin into my pinel gland.

I might still get Botox, even though I read recently that Botox interferes with the empathy centre of the brain.

I might still get Botox, even though I deeply believe in the right of passage of aging.

And, I might not for all these reasons, too.

But if it's true, if this isn’t a letter about Botox, then maybe it is a letter about a deeper kind of acceptance.

A willingness to be seen not just as I was, but as I am becoming.

Love,
Jody x

Ps. Thank the heavens for tallow balm, facial cups and a strong slathering of retinol.