Time Marches On

I found wrinkles today.

My reaction surprised me, since it wasn't alarm, as I anticipated I would feel upon greeting my first wrinkles. Rather, I felt a sense of relief, as though I no longer had to anticipate them at all and could just move on from there. It was like greeting a blind date and discovering they had actually showered and had something resembling manners.

They're right around my eyes, on the underside by the outsides, right where my mom's are. And that made me laugh. Which made them crinkle even more. You see, I love my mom's wrinkles. (She may be indignant for me saying that, but it's true.) They seem to accent her eyes every time she smiles or laughs or makes a funny face. They're obviously worn in from laughs, and every time she so much as giggles they crinkle up her eyes until she looks like her eyes are shut from pent up snickers and half-a-dozen held-in guffaws.

So the fact that I have them in the same spot makes me smile even more - probably setting them even deeper - because I always tell people that if I age half as good as my mom does, I'll be in really good shape.

Hello, Wrinkles. Please pull up a chair and make yourselves comfortable. You can join the Grey Hairs over there enjoying their tea.

I've had those since I was 17.

It occurs to me as I write this that I'm paradoxical in the aging sense. I've had some people tell me I don't age at all. And looking at old photos, I can see where they get that idea. I look basically the same now as I did when I was fresh out of high school. Not bad for being nearly twice the age. But the paradox comes from the fact that - despite being a relatively young 32 - I seem to have aged significantly more than many of my same-age friends.

I wake up every day in pain, now. Often it's my back, or my feet, or my neck. Often it's my shoulder. Sometimes it's my knees, which have bugged me for years. My shoulder has worsened, and I consign myself now to knowing that it will never fully recover; there will always be that twinge of pain from where the impingement syndrome sent my rotator cuff into an outright riot, even if they don't slip out of socket as much as they were. Oh, and yes - my shoulders now periodically slip out of socket, with or without my say so. They were always capable of it, even in my youth, and I thought it was a funny thing to do, but now my ligaments don't hold them as tight as they used to. Payment for the abuses of childhood antics, when I thought contorting my body in improper ways was hilarious.

My wrist aches in cold weather, and I never did get 100% range of motion back after the surgery. I have a crown now; unfortunately, probably the first of many to come. And while I've gained a fair bit of strength lately, I've lost nearly all of my flexibility and gained wrinkles. My butt is no longer as firm as it once was, but that bothers me far less than the continual decline of my vision and what I fear are the first signs of significant hearing loss.

So while I may appear to be young and vibrant, the truth is I feel far older than I look, and older than I think I ought to feel at this point in my life.

But what choices do I have in dealing with it? Complain? If I learned nothing else as a child, it was that complaining solves nothing. So even if I hurt when I get up, and hurt when I go to bed (even hurting when I sleep), I shrug my good shoulder, roll my eyes, and say - with great conviction - "...meh." I'll medicate myself if it gets bad enough to warrant it, and if I think something's actually amiss I'll see a physician, but what precisely could a doctor do for "pain associated with the body protesting from incorrect use over long periods"? My knees have always been a mess. I work retail. There's no way in hell I'm not going to have pain somewhere at any given time. That's just how it is now.

I write this as an idle observation, really. It just sort of struck me, as I examined my wrinkles, that I am in fact hitting that point in my life where I have to do as my dad always told me to, and make a friend of pain. "Oh hi, Pain," he'd drawl, not-quite sarcastically, "there you are again." No anger, no bitterness. Just... acknowledgement. Acceptance. I hurt. Then we move on.

And I think I'm actually beginning to understand what he meant.

I guess I just hadn't thought it would happen so soon.