Cindy La Ferle insists that midlife is an exciting time for women. A veteran columnist in metro Detroit, she's widely recognized for her award-winning essays on home and family. These days she'll tackle almost any topic. Whether she's reinventing her empty nest or rehashing her political views, she believes the personal is universal -- and that the best is yet to come.

The Wrinkle Wars
by Cindy La Ferle

"This is what 40 looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?"
-- Gloria Steinem

   Several years ago, the Olay company sent me a T-shirt that reads: “Love the skin you’re in.” The promotion works -- like a sticky song on the radio -- because I never did get that catchphrase out of my mind.
   Most of my girlfriends and I have decided that drugstore creams -- including Olay products -- work just about as well as the hundred dollar anti-aging potions sold in better department stores. And we should know. We’ve tried them all.
   None of us are superficial women. We have college diplomas and graduate degrees, husbands and families, and careers or vocations we enjoy. But we’re still not sure what to make of the changing faces in our mirrors, so we keep on searching for the elixir that guarantees its promise of eternal youth. No matter how far we've traveled, we still regard aging as our final frontier. A cruel adversary to be conquered at any cost.
   Which is odd, really, since advertising copywriters keep telling us that "we're not getting older; we’re getting better."
   So why can't we visit a drug store or cosmetic counter without being reminded that our faces and bodies need to be altered, repaired, firmed, smoothed, exfoliated, or lifted entirely? En route to a bottle of aspirin or shampoo, we pass beauty aisles stocked with retinoids, beta hydroxy acid peels, and other chemical formulas designed to dissolve our encroaching wrinkles and tell-tale age spots.
    Women's magazines only serve to support the notion that we're seriously damaged and need to be fixed. (Of course, magazines are all about selling products, so who's surprised?) Look at all those "mature" fashion models whose careers have been resuscitated to appease our aging demographic: They barely look a day over thirty-five. The message to middle-aged women is that it really doesn’t matter what we’ve achieved through education, experience, or sheer perseverance. If we don't look years younger than we are, well, we don't look good enough.
The battle wages on     My husband tells me that men have aging angst too -- although cosmetic issues don’t boggle them quite so much. He's cool about losing his hair and leaving what’s left in its striking shade of gray. I think he looks terrific and, yes, dignified.
    Then again, guys are comfortable with looking “dignified,” and I suspect it’s because we give them full permission to ripen. We don’t marginalize older men the way we marginalize older women. Most guys get on with the natural process of aging -- and some of them actually seize the real privileges of maturity.
   Not long before Paul Newman died, his weathered face graced the cover of a national business magazine. The photo stopped me in my tracks at a local newsstand. I was immediately struck by the depth and wisdom reflected in those famous blue eyes. And it occurred to me that aging is elegance when it’s allowed to tell its own truth.
   Years ago, as a college student, I worked at the cosmetics counter of an upscale department store in suburban Detroit. I’ll never forget a customer in her late fifties (I’ll call her Mrs. Smith) who haunted our counters twice weekly for the ultimate anti-aging cream. She remains an eerie icon of the woman I don’t want to become.
   Married to a wealthy businessman, Mrs. Smith was terrified of aging. She’d had several facelifts and other surgical procedures, yet she looked like a sad marionette, a caricature of her younger self. Chronically disappointed, she often came back to the store to return the creams that “didn’t work.”
    Ever so tactfully, we all tried to explain that cosmetics could enhance maturing beauty -- but they couldn't totally reverse the handiwork of Mother Time. But Mrs. Smith didn’t love the skin she was in, and I swear she kept our whole department in business that year.
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Copyright 2009 by Cindy La Ferle. This essay was excerpted from Cindy La Ferle's award-winning essay collection, Writing Home, distributed to bookstores by Wayne State University Press. Cindy lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, where she writes about women's issues. She teaches writing workshops at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. For more information, visit Cindy La Ferle's home office: www.laferle.com