Katy McDermott

(Deep breath… Happy place… Exhale slowly…) My name is Katy, and I’m 46 years old. I’m also a member of the growing Denial Demographic, and a “person of interest” to the medical profession.

Turning 40 was the catalyst for a number of “you’re going to stick that where?” medical tests. To add insult to invasion of privacy, these tests are not cheap. The speeches from my doctor went from standard (“a healthy diet and regular exercise are important for better health”) to scary (“you need to lose weight and exercise more NOW if you don’t want to be on heart medicine for the rest of your life.”) I quit smoking last year, now eat salads more often than I eat pizza, and absolutely have to get at least 7 hours of sleep a night.

Basically, I’ve made a 180-degree turn from my college lifestyle.

This fact is brought home to me by a certain 21-year-old. She lives with us, but I seldom see her, because she’s usually still asleep by the time I leave for work, and she’s usually dressing for the evening when I’m retiring for the night, a slave to the insistent 5:30am summons of my alarm clock.

She can eat whatever she wants too – sugary cereal straight from the box, chocolate-chip pancakes on weekends, fat-laden lattes every day – and she still weighs about 100 pounds. Loving her doesn’t make me any less annoyed by this…

I wonder how much money I’ve spent over the past few years trying to lose the pesky 10, 15, and now 20 extra pounds that have been among the dubious gifts of middle age. I’ve bought diet books, exercise equipment (Ab Roller, anyone?), workout DVDs (ha!), gym memberships (double ha!), special low-carb meal bars, sugar-free candy (what’s the point?), and clothes designed to camouflage my ever-thickening midsection.

This has probably run into the thousands of dollars by now.

Then there are the self-indulgent self-pity purchases. The logic behind these doesn’t hold up too well. It starts with the reasonable “I work really hard. I’m finally earning a decent salary. I can start putting away money for retirement at last.” But wait! Somehow, it morphs into, “I work really hard. I’m finally earning a decent salary. Why don’t I buy that fancypants SUV or book that Caribbean vacation I’ve always wanted?”

See what I mean? See how quickly this kind of thinking can get out of hand – and make your budget go off the rails?

We also have vanity. Vanity is extremely expensive. We’re caught between the party-til-3:00am-and-still-look-perfect-for-that-8:30am-class resilience of our 20s and the everyone-has-wrinkles-at-this-age acceptance of our 70s. We still harbor fantasies about those bodice-ripping novel covers, but our bosoms are now sagging rather than heaving, and Fabio never ran his fingers through a mane of iron-gray curls…

Enter the colorist, the aesthetician, and for those who can afford it and are willing to accept the risks, the plastic surgeon. Surgery scares me, but recently I did cave and visited a dermatologist’s office for a “skin evaluation.” They had a diabolical machine that “x-rays” your skin, then shows you what’s going on beneath the surface. Horrifying. Here’s how it went:

Dermatologist: See there, there, there, and there? (points out multiple spots on my face) That’s sun damage.

Me: Those are freckles.

Dermatologist: No, I’m afraid that’s sun damage.

Me (with fingers in my ears): I’m telling you, they’re freckles! I’m Irish! They’re natural!

Dermatologist (less patiently): Sun damage.

Me (finally remembering all the hours I spent slathered in baby oil at the shore in my youth, trying desperately to find the tan that always eluded me): Oh.

If I didn’t want (or, more accurately, couldn’t afford) to inject fillers or Botox into my face, it seemed I’d need to start taking care of my skin. Taking serious care of it – I tried buying generic eye cream at a drug store (hey, it was only $15.00!), and developed a rash that made me look like a raccoon after a hard night’s drinking. (Silver lining: I had vivid, livid proof for my husband that I was allergic to the cheap stuff.)

After the drug store eye cream disaster, I went to a makeup and skincare superstore. (Were there this many superstores 20 years ago? Is the fact that I remember a world without them simply further evidence of my age?) To say that the 16-year-old salesgirl saw me coming wouldn’t be quite accurate. She took one look at my panicked expression and started calculating how much skankwear at Hot Topic her commission would buy.

I learned a lot that day. It seems that the more words in the name of a product, the more expensive it is. Skin-Enhancing Intensive Super-Hydrating Facial Serum for Day with SPF 20? Yeah, here are five $20s – I won’t wait for change.

Then the salesgirl said the magic word.

Anti-aging.

Hallelujah! Price is no object! I’ll take three!

(Told you she saw me coming. Probably added black leather jeans to the cropped t-shirts she was already getting.)

As she was ringing up my purchases ($138 for a tiny tube of moisturizer – what hath my dermatologist wrought?), she threw a handful of samples into the bag. There were little packets of skin-smoothing night cream, fine-line-reducing “facial revitalizer,” and a product simply called “Heel Repair.”

“Heel Repair?” My heels are deteriorating too? What’s next – “Earlobe Rejuvenator?” “Five-Minute Forearm Fix?”

“Heel Repair.” Sheesh.

I won’t be buying that, but you can bet I’m going back for more anti-aging moisturizer the second I run out.

My name is Katy.

I’m 46 years old.

And I’m fighting middle age like a toddler fights bedtime.