Facelift

A friend had a facelift recently. There is nothing spiritual about this muse…she had a saggy face and the surgeon tacked it up. I thought that was an excellent idea. I was thinking about having my eyelids done myself but it’s kind of like painting crown molding. You always start with one room which butts up to another room so if you stop, it makes the next room look so bad…where do you stop?

I was sitting in the bathroom reading a magazine and happened to look up. The mirror facing me above the sink caught me from my neck up. It was one of those unguarded moments unlike when you are putting on makeup. When you put on makeup, you kind of hold your face a certain way, arch your eyebrows, pucker your lips, hold your chin up so your wrinkles are smoothed out. We don’t purposely do this…it’s just something inborn, like plaiting hair….no one teaches you, you just know how to do it if you’re a woman. An unguarded moment means you do none of the above…you just glance up and there you are…the real you.

I almost jumped out of my skin. My eyelids have lost all their muscle tone and are sliding down my face. One day I’m going to wake up, open my eyes and all I’ll see is the back of my eyelids. When I really concentrate, I can arch my eyebrows and kind of hold up my eyelids so they’re not obscuring my eyes…do you do that? It used to work well…but now, even when I’m really hoisting them up, I have developed this long wrinkle that’s at an angle midway on my eyelid. It’s kind of like a tent right in the middle of my hiked up eyelid.

But my little viewing of the real me didn’t stop with my eyelids, it moved on down to those little jowlie puckers on either side of your mouth and I’m not even overweight. How in the world did fat settle in there? I’ve got deep creases on either side of my nose...a nose that has not shriveled up over the years but remains a huge sentinel on my face.

When I first went to work in Dallas, Texas and was making probably $600 a month, I made a visit to the plastic surgeon. He gave me a large mirror and asked me what I would like for him to do for me. I told him to shave off a good portion of my nose. "So, how much would that cost?” I asked. He said about a million dollars. My nose remains unchanged.

The mirror also reflected my neck. I remember the first time I realized I had developed my mother’s neck. I was putting on lipstick. When you do that, you hold the mirror so you can just see from your nose down…but my mirror is big enough to show lips and neck. Holy cow…I looked like a lizard! One of those saggy lizards!

You and I both know that this scarey picture does not stop with the neck. Oh nooooo…it moves right on down the body. That little poochy stomach you used to be concerned about has been replaced by a butt that is sliding down your legs. And legs….the skin on my legs is sliding down as well! It’s like papery looking and wrinkly. I saw someone on the internet pulling the skin up on their thighs and putting duct tape at the top of it to hold it up so they could wear shorts! I was amazed…who in the WORLD would do something as dumb as that?

I wonder if they make flesh colored duct tape I could use on my eyelids?