The Face-Scape of My Life - Visitor's Story

by Rosa Livingstone
(Burnaby, B.C., Canada)

I came up to wash my face the other night and put my "More" Magazine back in its esteemed spot; on the toilet seat cover. That’s another story completely.

Fresh from reading about the virtues of being over 40 (and not a cougar), I pinned my hair back to prep for removing my makeup and looked at my face, this face that will soon be 43 years old. And I looked closely at those lines that I’m taking to see Dr. Botox some day in the not-so-distant future. Those lines that I’ve begun calling “Enemy Lines�. But, perhaps because of the over "40 Warrior Woman" glow that still courses through me, I saw these lines in a different light, for the first time since they began to creep stealthily to bury furrows on the nearly flawless landscape of my face. These lines spoke to me suddenly, like long-lost friends. They represented not only the woeful experiences but the belly-laughing, tears streaming, snot running moments that I’d experienced on this journey of my life.

And I must have laughed a lot for the creases around my mouth to be so deep. The crow’s feet around my eyes are not as pronounced, so these tell me that although I laughed a lot, it wasn’t always from my soul.

The brow lines speak to me of moments when I worried, agonized, thought heavily about the multi-tasking areas of my life – career, kids, health, friendships. But I laughed a lot too, say those lines around my mouth.

And to my astonishment, I realized that wrinkles and creases (yes, I can at this moment say the “W and C� words) are the road map of my experiences so far. They represent the highs and lows, the loves lost, the battles fought and won. All those moments I’ve lived over the years. And I think of my female matriarchs, who aged gracefully into their twilight years, and the moments I thought to myself how lucky I’d be to age as peacefully as they had.

I can fight these enemy lines or embrace them in friendship. To erase them would be the equivalent of destroying my memories, memories that shaped who I’ve become and I happen to like that person a lot now. So I’ll nurture this new friendship, taking care of the landscape of my face.

And perhaps Dr. Botox can wait indefinitely because I’m sure that I have much more laughing and living to do, creating new roadways on the face-scape of my life.