Just Breathe...

I was 11 years old when I started to imagine the New Millennium. Not so much what it would look like as what I would look like, who I’d be, and how old.

I would be 42.

Fortunately that was eons away. At least. I knew I would be old, very, very old by the year 2000. Until I turned 30. Then I began to realize how quite young I would actually be. Healthy, vital, energetic. In my prime. After all, wasn’t 40 the new 30?

Then I hit 40. Hard. I ushered in the new decade — or, perhaps, it escorted me — with a running injury and strep throat. And I’d heard 40 wasn’t fatal.

A few months later, I found myself in a “spin” bicycle class at the gym and was struck by the realization that I hadn’t died. In fact, I was fit, I was fortified, I was 40.

But then the descent began. It started with the tiniest crease at the right corner of my mouth. No one else noticed — or cared, I’ve come to understand — but I did. I watched with a blend of fascination and fear, checking it each morning in the mirror for progress, until I decided that if I stopped giving it audience, it just might disappear.

And it worked, in that I forgot about it. But once I caught up with it again, I found that, like a crack in the plaster, it had spread, its downward journey casting despair in my expression.

And there were more. The left side was barely behind in the tracery that was becoming my face. Those witty little laugh lines that had added humor to the sparkle in my eyes weren’t funny anymore.

In my dreams I would become my mother, who has given a soft, graceful face to aging. But staring back at me in the mirror was my grandmother, my father’s mother. Maybe it skips a generation.

Then, at the most inappropriate times (of course), came the flashes of heat and sweat melting my cool façade into a pool of panic. My aunt used to call it glowing. Get real; there’s nothing remotely illuminating about looking and feeling like you’ve just run a marathon in a silk suit.

Synthetic hormone replacement therapy was not an option for me because of a family history of cancer and the many possible, if not proven, side effects. And forget about the promise of weight gain, which could in itself jump-start the flashes.

So I read books, ate yams, drank soy, and slowed down on sugar. The threat of eliminating chocolate altogether was enough to cause a riot. I bought too many wrinkle creams and took an interest in designer handbags. I exercised more and confided in friends. I became a regular at Starbucks and, oh, I decided to adopt a baby. Or two.

I read somewhere that children keep you young.