On getting older

Last week I was lying around on my bed with my kids, nattering about this and that, occasionally boffing one another with a pillow, and grabbing them for a kiss or a stroke of their hair. These are the times in which you see each other intently; when it isn't rude to stare at someone and drink them in. (I suppose those moments also happen post-coitum, when the intimacy of somebody else's presence makes you see them in another light, and you can revel in the curl of their eyelashes, the purr of their breathing and heat of their limbs.) The children seem to appreciate these sort of listless playfights we have, and of course I also cherish these times: the miraculous softness of their skin; their hair, bed-curled and gleaming; and the rot they come out with, a rag-bag of references, overheard opinions, absurd hypotheses and nonsensical babble. The intensity of their gaze can be ferocious, and they often poke at me, feel my moustache, jiggle my earring, and observe something unbidden about me, and ply me with questions and comments. "You always make that face, why do you make that face?"; "What are you thinking about, you're thinking about something aren't you?"; "Your forehead is wrinkly, it's got all these lines on it" 

The wrinkly forehead comment came out last week, and we then got carried along in conversation, drifting, loosely, about ageing and ageism. I said something that I don't entirely believe, as often happens with the children, because I'm trying to model it for them and wish it into being through them: "Yeah, that's OK though - I'm happy with looking older, that's just what I am!" My older child queried this, arguing that most people would prefer to look younger - "Every adult wants to look twenty-one!" - and the thing is, he isn't wrong. How many times has he overheard people saying that they just got ID'd at Sainsbury's and it made their day? That someone's new haircut makes them look old? How many books and films and TV shows has he taken in, all of the hideous witches and beautiful young heroes? My problem, then: I had to try to voice a position that isn't wholly true, or that is too hopeful, namely that not everybody, actually, wants to look twenty-one, and that we shouldn't chase youth; we should accept the way we change and develop. It's beautiful! Perhaps the kids can hear my lack of faith in that stance - after all, I grew up in the much the same world as them, a world that hates blemishes and makes products to "prevent ageing"; a world where some weird billionaire fuckhead is literally trying to not die by... injecting himself...? with... the blood...? of his teenage son?, I believe?!

I can never remember whether I think that the best utopia would be for everyone to be considered beautiful no matter their shape or size or age or colour, or for everyone to just get less fucking hung up on beauty. 

I say to my kids: "wow, you look stunning!" and I call them gorgeous and beautiful all day long as terms of endearment, as a hopeful corrective to the idea that boys are agents, that they are the see-ers and are never seen themselves, that they shouldn't appreciate beauty and loveliness. Maybe I shouldn't say anything about looks to them at all, but dress them in brown sacking and compliment them only on their intellectual and political engagement with the world. "That observation was very dialectical darling, well done - you strove to consider the whole and the particular." 

When I look at photos of my parents at my age - forty-three, which I am actively trying to feel perfectly OK about! - they seem so settled, and their appearances differentiate them in so many ways from youth culture, in dress sense, hairstyles, their skin, perhaps even deportment. Was that preferable to the situation we have now, where there are far fewer ostensible markers of age, when my children borrow their mothers' hoodies and don't look any different, and young and middle-aged alike use social media, wear Nike, have piercings and tattoos, etc? It's likely that my folks' generation felt cut off and hidebound at that time; that their inner younger person was still questing inside them in some way, and they were disturbed by a demand to be markedly adult and complete at 40. But could there have been greater freedom in not needing to appear young, in being allowed to slacken, un-remarked upon? 

Of course, to a young person I suppose those markers are still there, and they are able to pick out "middle-aged" people like me as easily as ever before, from so many signifiers and reference points; but I believe the lines are more blurred than ever before. This means that the idea of getting old - and more people now get older than ever before - is being erased, or changed. But we will all need to come to terms with ageing: we cannot ward off illness and senescence. 

In the terrible motion picture Barbie, the main character - horrified at signs of her own ageing in a world where every body is perfect and beautiful (the director, Greta Gerwig, is careful to show that this world includes people of different races and one fuller-figured Barbie, but not any old people) - travels outside of Barbieworld, to Los Angeles. There, she sees an elderly woman and, in the movie's most annoying scene, tells this wrinkled, white-haired old lady that she is beautiful. I cannot get over the dishonesty of this scene. The old woman is indeed gorgeous, but coming from a world of plastic perfection in which everybody is young, how the hell could this character have the werewithal to make that assessment? She would be more likely to be terrified of this alien person. I'm surprised Barbie doesn't try to kill her. 

I have become increasingly uneasy about 'work' - as in, "having work done": its normalisation among people I know; friends, colleagues, family. A couple of weeks ago I was talking to my boss about having a clicky jaw (a dentist once said to me, "It's more of a clonk than a click"), and she advised me to get Botox. What? No, my queen. I think I'll just keep having a jaw that sometimes goes click? Meanwhile, people around me get filler and lifts and Botox and hair transplants and go on Ozempic or take steroids: these things have become completely normalised, and for the life of me I can't think of the language in which I should be discussing these things, in order to convey that of course I accept and support everybody's personal decision to do whatever the fuck they want with their body, while staying true to my own conviction that to alter my appearance through one of these procedures would be to tell an untruth about myself in some way, would feel like joining in a big pretence that I consider unhealthy in the distortion of the world that it presents to us. When a loved one says to me: "I really need to lose weight", should my response be "You go girl, that's fantastic, let's see those pounds go" or "But no, no you don't! You are perfect! Do you know that you're perfect?"? 

I saw a video of Simon Cowell online recently, and he had had so much plastic surgery that he literally couldn't speak properly. Is that good? Nicole Kidman's job - acting - requires her to use her face, but she can't. Isn't that a problem? An acquaintance of mine has an eyebrow that is now permanently fucked and bombed because of her Botox usage - she said to me, "Do you see how this eyebrow is irregular? The Botox went wrong once." I had noticed the brow, but didn't know about the Botox. How to voice disquiet about these things, without sounding like a priggish little Tory, while affirming everybody's personal decisions? It is an intellectual impossibility. If I consider that our society's disinformation about ageing - that it can be warded off, that a 50-year-old looks functionally like a 25-year-old - is harmful, then it follows that I should consider people engaging in that disinformation to have some responsibility. 

What of my own behaviour and appearance? I'm out here chasing youth like anybody else, I suppose, while angrily telling myself that I'm fine with becoming older, I'm fine with it OK?!! I say to myself: look, here's the answer: just become a gaunt old sexy pervert like Willem Dafoe in your 50s and 60s, and then a gorgeous, raddled old bugger like Samuel Beckett in your 70s and 80s! In reality I worry about it, I feel my body becoming a little less capable already, more tired sometimes; I notice the lines around my eyes when I smile. In a photo a friend shared a few days ago, there's a veritable concertina of wrinkles around my mouth and eyes, melding into one another, as I laugh. I shuddered a bit, but then forced myself to consider, like somebody pushing themselves to run an extra mile, with effort, against the seeming abilities of their body - that, well, that's clearly what I look like, isn't it? 

You know when somebody takes an awful photo of you, and you're dismayed because they haven't stuck to your own rigid knowledge of your angles? We're afraid of the gaze from the 'other', because it exists outside of our own sphere of control. I try to think that this is beautiful, that other people consider us in a wholly different way to our own self-understanding: they hear our voice as it really is, see our face as it really is, not back to front; and I seek to make peace with the way I'm perceived. In reality the thought occurs: can't you see I look deranged here? You thought it OK to share this story of me being so wholly without dignity??!

I suppose I speak from a position of relative privilege: I'm slim, cis-male, white, and able-bodied. My sense of my looks is that I am not too far removed from conventional definitions of attractiveness, although I'm on the dinky side, not particularly ripped, and on the wrong side of 40 for a twinky homosexual. I think that nowadays, although I give off the appearance of youth in mannerisms and certain elements of my attitude, on close inspection people would probably say that I look my age - or, rather, that there aren't many younger ages that I would plausibly be. I don't show up on certain people's dating apps, their age settings consigning me and people in their sixties to the scrap-heap. "But wait!!!," I feel like exclaiming, "I'm 43 but my body is still fairly lithe, isn't that what you're after really in your pursuit of youth? Litheness?!" Like many people I guess I curate my own self-image, picking photos of me that have a flattering lighting; my camera smoothes blemishes on my face. I share good photos of myself sometimes to get a bit of a boost in the old self-esteem, or in some vague sense to keep my currency alive - and I receive a few scattered likes and comments; this is pleasing, but I wonder if I'm also sharing a half-truth about myself, carefully curating an image. 

Once, a couple of years ago, I showed up to the flat of a hook-up, having performed the obligatory exchange of pics beforehand, only for him to open his door, take a look at me, and wordlessly close the door in my face. Insult to injury: back inside his flat, he must have immediately gone to his phone to block me. I looked at my photos again, on the bus home: aren't these photos of me?, I thought. Am I not this person? Did I lie? 

Hang on, shit, fuck - is that all that I'm inveighing against? The natural process of my sexual obsolescence? 

I think to myself that my grandparents - and my parents until relatively recently - would have gone about their lives with, most of the time, barely any idea what they looked like: a brief look in the mirror, of a morning; a handful of photographs from birthdays and weddings; maybe a creaky home video, kept in the attic. My children have now been in thousands of photos, and hundreds upon hundreds of videos; they see themselves in the TV screen at the supermarket check-out, and in the little box in the bottom right corner when we call their grandparents. The other day on the overground, my older child was talking to me, looking at me as he spoke, and then we went below ground and he carried on talking to me while now looking past me, as his reflection had appeared in the darkened window; he was looking at his own appearance as he spoke, mesmerised by his face in action. That must be fairly standard behaviour for kids, discovering their selfhood - and yet I worry that my children are growing up in a world in which they will have an image, will be self-aware and self-conscious; that on top of growing up in a burning world, they may struggle to find their place and grow up, because our culture exists in a state of arrested development, the internet scrambles time, and you have to look good forever while experiencing mental breakdown.

If we're already so pitted against one another, so separated from each other by technology, carefully tending our own little plots of identity, how will we ever grow to accept each other as we age if we can't allow for imperfections, for the passage of time to make its mark on our bodies and minds? 

My next big birthday - still not for a while, thank Christ - will be my 50th, and my children will both be teenagers by then; and the other day I caught myself thinking how fun it will be to dance with them on that day. Maybe we could even do a choreography! I thought: what will I be saying about myself at that point, what will 50 mean? What will I look like, what will I still want, and other Que Sera Sera-style questions come rushing forth. I guess I'll be much the same as now, still a little fearful, uncertain, still feeling that I am only just coming into being, but maybe the kids will see the old bastard in his gladrags, a little more worn and haggard now, and think that passing time on this earth isn't so hellish.