Oh, Grow Up!

I’ve found that a lot of really profound events seem to happen in bathrooms: doing blow with a celebrity; discovering you’re pregnant; crawling through the window to escape a truly horrible date or, as in the case of this morning, finding your first gray hair. Down there. I know, you’re shocked and disgusted, but trust me, you are not nearly as horrified as I was upon discovering the renegade pube.

Until this morning I always thought I was ok with the whole aging thing. It’s not like I run around screaming my birth year out at the top of my lungs, but I’m not ashamed of the fact that I am a 30-something-year-old woman. In fact, I actually like myself a lot better now than I did when I was younger. What I don’t particularly like is when the proof that I’m aging is staring my vibrator in the face (and sometimes my Husband; like once every three months or so). While on the one hand I think it’s completely pointless to attempt to fight the inevitable aging process, I also don’t think you need to just throw in the towel and let everything go grey and sag. I plan to look my best at every age, which is why I hope my hairdresser lives a very long and happy life.

The ironic part of this is that when I was a teenager I couldn’t WAIT to get older (I also thought that if I hadn’t “made it” by age 30 I would kill myself, so obviously I was irrational). I thought that life would get so much better when I became an adult. No one would be around to tell me to go to bed, or get off the telephone, or to stop eating pints of Ben and Jerry’s Mint Chocolate Cookie while crying over 16 Candles. I couldn’t wait to grow up and go out every night and live my own, glamorous adult life. When I moved to New York to go to college, I started lying about my age, telling people (okay, men) I was 25, when I was in fact only 18. I didn’t want to go on dates with guys who thought buying me a combo at Mamoun’s Falafel meant I was going to sleep with them in their dorm room. One experience of “what’s a clitoris?” college sex was enough to convince me that I needed to grow the fuck up. So I started reading Vogue, bought myself some designer clothes on consignment, and got to know the doormen at all the clubs where wealthy men went to find young, pretty, very naïve girls. I got myself a lot of dinner dates that turned into breakfast dates, but that was as far as they went. Because even though I thought I was so worldly and sophisticated, most of those guys could tell I was just a teenager dressed in model’s clothing, and they saw me solely as a conquest. I was so busy trying to be a grown-up adult, that I ended up missing out on having a relationship with someone my own age who might have really loved me and would’ve been willing to learn that shoving a finger in a girls’ ass does not equal foreplay.

Now that I’m older and a little bit wiser, I’m not so interested in rushing through my life and trying to get to the next step. I’m learning to appreciate where I’m at and not be so focused on where I’m going. Yes, adulthood is wonderful in certain ways, but it also comes with a lot of negative stuff as well. I’m starting to wake up with aches and pains some mornings, and while I like the idea of going to a bar on a weeknight, usually I’m too busy working or too tired from working to actually motivate to do so. While the days of lying about my age are behind me, I’m definitely not going into the future without a fight; which is why I may soon be sporting a new hairstyle in my neither regions. Here’s hoping my Husband is into the Brazilian look.