There’s an ad that’s been dogging me online. It starts out with the words, “My mom has been aging in reverse…” and then I scroll past as quickly as I can.
Despite my efforts to flag aging and dieting ads as unwanted in my profile, they come for me. They aim to seduce me. As I wrote in my book, they intend to “swindle me” with a story of the possible permanence of youth. But sometimes they just plain sting.
I see in this ad a picture of a mother and her daughter. I see how the mother’s face has aged beautifully, and how her daughter’s is taking the same shape. It’s like seeing the past and future versions of a person at the same time. And I feel a stab in my gut.
What would my mom look like now? What would she have looked like if cancer and its treatments hadn’t ravaged her body for twenty years? What will I look like? Why am I even asking this?
And yet it’s another almost imperceptible loss. We look to our mothers for a sense of what’s to come. Tell me, Mama, what was it like the first time you saw that I had surreptitiously shaved my legs, leaving razor burn behind? Did you laugh and ache at the same time, at the growing I was doing before your very eyes?
Yet here I am, meeting and greeting milestones for myself and my children without the wisdom of a mother in my ears. So, no, I can’t say that my mother aged in reverse. She didn’t even age naturally. Cancer stole that from her. But in her cancer days and in her dying she taught me far greater lessons than which wrinkle cream to use.
She taught me that this, even the missing her and the wishing her here, can be light and momentary by comparison.
But wait, why do I feel the need to tie a bow on this already? There is no bow for some of our griefs, for some of the little, unexpected ways they dog our days and interrupt our scrolling. This is me simply taking a thought captive and studying it for a while.
I see things every day that remind me she is not here. I miss my mother, and I also miss being mothered. And this ad, the feelings it triggered, was just one of the ways on one particular day. And it won’t be the last. I am living in an age when women think we have graduated from “toxic diet culture” only to have fallen headlong into distracting, consuming anti-aging obsessions.
And it is on this front I wish I had my mom’s example before my eyes now, her voice to ground me and remind me that I don’t need to cave and contort.
I can age bravely. Something she never got to do. Her memory can make me see, even now, what a privilege that is.
I am tempted to tinker more with this essay, which I wrote a few weeks ago and never had the chance to share. But I’m leaving it. I want to capture what it felt like, in one moment, on one day, to really grapple with the “gospel” of anti-aging that feels so pervasive these days.
I have written about our need for a theology of wrinkles for TGC (one I need to wash over me regularly). And last week, I sat in a room with hundreds of other women for a panel discussion on The Wisdom of Wrinkles at The Gospel Coalition Women’s conference in Indianapolis. You know you’ve been spending too much time online (and this includes Marco Polo, which filters our faces) when it strikes you how not-airbrushed real people are in real life, how refreshing that can be.
As Jen Wilkin said during the discussion, “Your perception of how you should look is shaped by where you cast your gaze.”
Maybe, the panelists suggested, we should regularly meditate on the faces of older saints we know (or just imagine having to tell Mother Teresa about your skincare routine) as an antidote to the airbrushed and now AI-generated images we are constantly being served. What if we focused more on who we’re becoming than on what we’re afraid of losing as time goes on?
Later, Wilkin added this zinger: “Every decision I make is influencing what my daughters… and friends think is normal.”
The conversation was both convicting and refreshing, a call to stewardship rather than idolatry when it comes to our bodies. A reminder to regularly ask of the latest cream or supplement or procedure, “What am I expecting this to do for me?” And, like anything that flirts with becoming idolatry, “Can it really do what it promises?”
In Other News 📜
I had a blast at the TGCW conference. I am an extroverted writer—which I’m told is rare, but tell me there are others? I will find people to talk to on the way to the bathroom and fail to actually go to the bathroom… for hours. This time, I got to go with friends from my local church who reminded me to actually go to the bathroom and, at night, to go to sleep, despite my puppy levels of excitement about so much human interaction. I even got to do a book event with my favorite book aficionado and her favorite bookstore, Naughty Dog Books in Nashville, IN.
I am a journalist by day for the Bay Journal, and an article I wrote for them recently won a regional award, first place in feature writing. The article is also sort of, kind of on my book topic—about the trend of green burial practices—and I’ll share it here in case you’re interested. Drop a comment if you’ve heard of or want to discuss green burial!
If you are a writer, editor or curious reader, I have a new podcast to recommend. The Writer’s Circle by Will Parker Anderson covers topics like writing newsletters, article pitching, book marketing and, of course, books. Will is an acquisitions editor at a Christian publisher and a great interviewer. And it’s nice to have the voices of other writers and editors in my ears now that I’m back to that oh-so-solitary writing life.
"I miss being mothered" 😭 such a thing. Beautiful Whitney