Measuring a life in Band-Aids, mattresses and eras
How Taylor Swift and my dermatologist reminded me of the stages we move through in life.
My two daughters and I arrived uncharacteristically late for the noon showing of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie at the AMC Theater at the Monmouth Mall this weekend. I’d been sitting around in my bathrobe obliviously chit-chatting with the kids in the TV room until my younger daughter was like, “Hey Mom, it’s 11:15.”
All plans to do my hair and put on a cute outfit for Taylor went out the window as I scrambled to assemble an all-black ensemble and throw my hair up into a ponytail, wondering when I’d ever master time management. I was shamed by all the little girls I stood in the concession line with who were wearing very sparkly outfits as we waited to buy our commemorative Eras Tour popcorn buckets and mega drink cups.
As my two daughters and I slid into our row of seats toward the back, I was happy to see the theater was pretty full and that people were wearing fun cowboy-ish hats with colorful fur along the brims and the group in front of us had light-up Taylor Swift batons.
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I’d seen a lot of TikTok videos when the concert movie first opened a few weeks ago of theaters full of fans dancing and singing like they were at the actual concert. In fact, there were a lot of videos of Swift herself watching the movie with an audience and dancing and singing like she was a fan and not the actual singer.
Instead of promoting just her most recent album, as singers usually do with concert tours, Swift chose to highlight songs in clusters from her 10 albums, spanning 17 years. The concert takes the audience on a journey of her musical eras from a love song she wrote for her ninth-grade talent show to the 33-year-old’s most recent album.
I could hear folks singing along in our theater in the beginning and a few songs in, I could see from our seats high up in the back of the theater that clusters of the audience were standing in the aisles and singing along. There were three middle school-looking girls in the row next to us who stood for a few songs as did a group of girls in the row behind us. I could hear them singing and feeling all the words about true love, getting jilted and finding everything you thought you needed from someone else, right there inside yourself.
I leaned over to my younger daughter and said, “Watching these girls is making me so weepy,” and she told me she’d been crying since the movie started.
The kids were home for their cousin’s wedding this weekend and my younger daughter had surprised me with the movie tickets like two months ago to make up for nobody wanting to go to the concert with me this summer. She thinks it’s funny that her mom is a Swiftie and wants to support that journey. When the lights in the mall movie theater came up, after we sat through the three-hour movie and all the end credits and watched clips of fans going to the concert, I asked the girls — who used to be so vehemently opposed to Swift — what they thought of her and both were like, “She’s kinda great.”
*enters era of vindication*
I also entered another chapter this week, one much less fun than being a middle-aged Taylor Swift fan.
I arrived for a day in the office on Tuesday with a Band-Aid on my face after having a suspicious-looking thing removed from alongside my nose the day before and joked that I’d entered a new era of my life.
“It’s my ‘Band-Aid on my Face’ era,” I told my manager after she assured me that she could hardly notice it.
I joked that I really just thought it was funny more than embarrassing. In my mind, it was always people of a certain age with Band-Aids covering up cancerous things they’ve had sliced from their faces and now, well, I’m apparently that age.
The dermatologist has also frozen two scabby-looking things off the tip of my nose after diagnosing them as “pre-cancerous,” and as the days have passed they have darkened and just added to the overall effect. It all felt like I was wearing a sandwich board that read OLDEST PERSON IN THE ROOM.
This summer, I bought a package of facial treatments at some medi-derm place I go to for a series of “needling” procedures around my mouth. The aesthetician goes around and around the area with some pen-looking contraption with tiny needles at the end which is meant to stimulate collagen production and help soften the wrinkles and acne scarring that I’m so self-conscious about in that area.
I arrived on Friday afternoon for the second treatment and the girl took one look at me and my Band-Aid and nose scabs and sent me and my pre-cancer home. “Why don’t you come back in about two weeks?” she asked nicely, but was probably thinking, “This woman is an idiot.”
It’s funny after spending decades worrying about my skin’s appearance — struggling with cystic acne that was antagonized by constantly fluctuating hormone levels — my concerns have quickly started to shift. I’d started examining the things on my nose this summer in my heavy-duty magnifying mirror I keep on a little IKEA table in my tiny guest bedroom. I pull up on my $19.99 white IKEA stool and click on the light to see what horrors have developed overnight. Of course, there were the usual sprouts of mustache hair that crop up every couple of days and need to get shaved off with this little thing I have for just that problem (although my 20yo often uses to trim his own facial hair). And I don’t really break out much anymore since all the hormones drained out of my body with the last gasp of menses when I turned 50. But I keep looking for stuff.
The little scabby things weren’t even noticeable at first, I could just tell the texture at the tip of my nose was a little different. And they weren’t going away. And then I noticed how there was always a sore spot right under my eye, near my nose, where my reading glasses sit all day. In truth, there had been these little calcium deposits there for months that I worked on sporadically and finally extracted them, but then the sore never healed.
And as much as I really love to ignore the things, I also recognize that at my age, those little things could really be big things. So last week I finally got around to calling the derm and leaving a voicemail on the secret extension they gave me years ago to talk directly to her nurse and describe my concern. I haven’t been there in a few years and although the doctor had treated both me and my kids for years, was afraid they’d tell me to sod off. Instead, the nurse called me back and said they’d squeeze me and my nose (AND JUST MY NOSE) in for an exam on Monday.
Before she began slicing and freezing things off my face, the doctor asked if I had any upcoming travel plans and I told her that my daughters and I were headed to Aruba in November. She gave me some side eye and asked if I planned on exposing my face to the sun and I promised to wear a hat and sit under an umbrella, like all the other old people.
Up until about a week ago, I wasn’t even sure if I was going to be able to join my daughters in Aruba. While the trip had been planned for almost a year, it wasn’t until one night in late summer when I was relaxing on my porch and chatting with one of my girls about the trip that I realized that my passport had just expired. “I gotta go,” I said and began to panic as I quickly ended our Facetime call and Googled, “How to get a passport fast.”
I am no stranger to emergency passport situations. It happened 10 years ago, right before I went away to Greece by myself and realized I’d never changed my last name on my passport following my divorce. It happened about two years ago after I booked a spur-of-the-moment trip with the two younger kids to the Dominican Republic and realized the youngest’s had expired months earlier. All three situations turned out okay but also, were preventable. I freaked out the first two times and spent a lot of energy stressing about whether the passports would work out. But for this most recent emergency, I did everything the internet told me to quickly do, and then I put it in the Universe’s hands. Like, I was either going to go to Aruba or my daughters would go without me. I was fine either way.
When I saw the FedEx envelope in my mailbox the other day, I didn’t even think about the passport. I thought some bad news awaited within. So I was pleasantly surprised when the stiff blue passbook fell onto my kitchen counter. Even the passport picture, that some young man took standing about 20 feet away with a digital camera that looked like the one I gave my daughter for her 13th birthday, looked less “Death Row” than I had remembered.
As I inspected all the data listed on the main page — name, place and year of birth — I came to the line with the passport’s expiration date: Oct. 6, 2033. My first thought was, “How many more passports will I have?”
Could this be my penultimate passport? This new one will take me through the fall of my 67th year. How many more will follow?
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend, Dan after I bought a new mattress to coincide with a move into a new house. “That’ll probably be your last mattress,” he said, “That’s the one you’ll die on.”
And while my first response to him was: “You need to rethink how often you are replacing your own mattress,” it did give me pause.
It was an interesting premise, measuring one’s life in mattresses. At the time, I had just turned 50 and while the number was imposing, I didn’t feel like I’d reached the end of the mattress line already. But considering the time we have left based on how many more mattresses we buy or, for me, passports we forget to update can certainly make life seem a little less endless.
I think about all the eras of my own life, and even though I get weepy looking at teenage girls singing about love, I wouldn’t want to go back there. Watching the three girls in my row at the Eras movie standing so close, the taller one bending lower so that all their faces were squeezed together as they sang about dancing with a boy in a storm — what could be better than this? — and thinking about how innocent they were. And dramatic. And full of emotion. All the things about life they had left to learn (or maybe not).
Despite the Band-Aid on my face, I like knowing what I know now. The lessons that have taught me so much about myself. What demands my attention and the stuff that’s really not worth the energy.
But oh to be young. I love getting to see the rawness of it up close. The emotional vortex of love and the thrill of taking back all that power to let their inner selves shine. Frankly, the movie lets me take a little sip of that juice. It lets me feel, just for moment, what that was like. The hopefulness of all the eras. Swelling inside a movie theater in a mall. Just me and my daughters and all the other Swifties on a Saturday afternoon.
sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy
Looks way fancier than it is. Guys, I know. Old Navy should pay me for all the promotion I give them. At any rate, after the movie, I dragged the girls to the Old Navy next door so I could look for this turtleneck I’ve worn practically every day since I got it last week. I bought it in black and wore it to work, lying around my house and to the Taylor Swift movie, and folks always compliment and assume it’s fancier than it is. Also, it’s 50% off right now.
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Sweater weather. Another item that has gotten good reviews is the new fragrance I bought for a wall plug-in I have near the sitting area in my downstairs. It is delightful and brings joy when I walk into my house.
Doors close and then open. A friend and former coworker really shines a light on the eras of her own life after a sudden job loss opened a portal into a whole new life. She and her family have left the East Coast rat race and settled in Nebraska and it is inspiring. Such a reminder that just because life doesn’t go the way we had it all planned out in our heads doesn’t mean that all is lost. In fact, all just might be found.
xoAmy
You are not alone in your passport/mattress measurement of life😎
Old Navy Turtleneck purchased! Thank you!