Please, Somebody Tell Me.

It used to be that I only worried about spinach in my teeth, mascara smudges around my eyes, or the occasional booger in my nose. As my eyesight weakens, I now have to worry about stray hairs to be plucked and the disaster that is old lady makeup. I’m sure you’ve seen the grannies with their uneven lipstick application or the too heavy blush. They just can’t see what they really look like anymore.

My mother used to have a lot of stray eyebrow hairs. As a child, I wondered why she didn’t just pluck them out. They were so clearly renegade hairs from her otherwise lovely, shaped brows. At the time, I chalked it up to her being too busy with work and trying to corral ten kids. Now, I’m starting to understand that it was probably a combination of that and just not being able to see the hairs.

I was shocked after finally deciding that I needed to take a look at my own eyebrows using a magnifying mirror and reading glasses. Oh my God! I couldn’t believe how much I’d been missing by using only the magnifying mirror. For the longest time, I didn’t think I had a problem with hairs on my upper lip. Now I could see them all hanging out there, looking like a modified Fu Man Chu.

My partner teases me about the fact that I now seem to have reading glasses in every room of the house and in both cars. I need them. I can barely read the directions on a pasta box much less read a map without help. I’m even wearing glasses now to read bedtime stories to the kids. It’s amazing how much of the detail I’d been missing.

Now that I can see my face more clearly in the mornings, it has me wondering. How painful could a chemical peel really be?