Two Tutus = Midlife Crisis

So I’m rubbing a little styling wax through my hair, defining points around my face, when I see rogue grey hair, like a bit of steel wire that’s gotten tangled in my brown locks. It springs away from head, catches the light, like it’s trying to draw attention to itself. I rub it between two waxy fingers but it refuses to lie flat. It’s not the first, it has a mate or two hunkering down in the choppy layers of a hairstyle that is probably fast becoming inappropriate for my age. My mother urges me to pluck them out, but I’m afraid if I do they’ll grow back and bring friends; an old wives tale, I know, but I’m unwilling to take the chance.

The grey hair is screaming at me. It wants me to stop denying that old age is creeping up on me, and with it, my death. That may sound melodramatic but, until recently, I still had that strange and unreasonable sense of my own immortality that is the saving grace of youth. It’s this conviction that makes the young courageous and stupid, prone to take the kind of life-affirming risks that the middle-aged take out insurance against. It makes you fearless because even though you know that one day you’re going to die, you don’t really believe it.

Perhaps accepting the idea of your own death as fact is an inevitable part of having a child. When I look at my daughter, I see the endlessly repeating cycle of life.  I see that even though I am currently the most important person in her life, one day I won’t be. One day, I will be on the outside of her experiences because she will be in the centre of her life, feeling indestructible. I will be reaching the end and to her, I will seem frail. She won’t want to hang out with me any more because my home will be permeated by that musty granny odour and, worse than that, she’ll look at  me and catch glimpses of herself, forty years down the road. Those same glimpses I occasionally see in her face but, when we stand side by side in the mirror, my features seem faded, blurred even.

So yesterday I went into a shop and bought two tutus, one pink, one black. I didn’t mean to, but the way my knees screamed at me from below the too-cute shorts of the jumpsuit I just had to try on at Cavendish earlier in the day, made me do it. Around my 38th birthday I looked in the mirror and saw my knees had sagged. I don’t remember them sagging, don’t remember the flesh slowly losing elasticity. One day they were knobbly, the knee caps well defined, the next they had puffed out with deposits of fat that concealed the sharpness of bone under what can only be described as a pouch. Now I knew before I tried it on that jumpsuits were meant to be worn by twenty-somethings, and tall twenty-somethings at that, but I thought I might buy one and wear it around the house when I was alone. Standing there in that tiny cubicle it dawned on me that I had totally missed the jumpsuit boat  – even if I wore it around the house or just to do the gardening, the glimpses I’d catch of myself in the mirror would only serve to remind me that my youth was over.

I’ll probably never wear the tutus – I tried them on this morning, pairing them with various blouses to try make myself look more Carrie Bradshaw than Chicken dressed as Lamb, before folding them and putting them in the wardrobe. I tell myself I’ll take them out again in winter, wear them with thick grey stockings and a smart tailored jacket. Maybe I will. Maybe by the time winter comes I’ll have toned my knees and found miracle eye cream to take away the leather luggage I’m stowing under my peepers, but if the last thirty-eight years of religious moisturising are anything to go by, those tutus will never see the light of day.