The Pain of Growing Older

As I grow older, I sometimes curse the aspects of aging that my mother never warned me about. In my 20s, it was the fact that gravity took over my butt. All of the sudden, skinny as I was, I had developed a butt. I suppose if I’d thought about it logically, I would have realized that gravity pulls things downward, toward the Earth, but when I was around 24, I was quite perturbed to find gravity having its way with my ass.

In my late-20s, it was chin hair. Who would think that a woman would have to check for coarse, often dark-colored chin hairs every morning, then yank them out with a pair of tweezers? Plucking eyebrows is bad enough. Chin hairs are ridiculous. These are stiff little hairs that you can feel if you gently run your finger beneath your chin, and once I discovered them, I became obsessed, yanking and plucking them every single morning and night. And should I miss one, I play with it all day long, and race up the stairs as soon as I get home to eradicate it. My sister has strict instructions to check for and tweeze any chin hairs before my funeral.

Body hair kind of repulses me anyway, so it’s a good thing I’m not one of those hairy women. If I were, I would spend hours every week eliminating the offending follicles.

Now that I’m well into my 30s, one of the things I wish my mother had warned me about is enlarged pores — although I’ve read enough about the condition that I was prepared for the early signs. I’ve always had beautiful skin, with the occasional blemish and some problems in the summer. Once I started noticing the pores on the apples of my cheeks becoming slightly larger than they used to be, I took preventive action almost immediately. It was off to the aesthetician for me, and I fell in love with microderm abrasion and chemical peels. I daresay my skin is more luminous now than it was in my 20s.

Nothing, not even Mom, could have prepared me for what I consider the worst part of aging thus far: gas. For quite a few years, I worked with a friend who was especially prone to gas. In fact, she jokes that the second thing she did out of the womb was fart. She kept a healthy supply of Gas-Ex in her desk drawer, which came in handy when I started a medication that I would take long-term, and the resulting gas was like nothing I’d ever before experienced but have since come to know intimately.

Throughout the last couple of years, I have come to realize that if a medication’s possible side effects include gas, constipation or weight gain, those are the side effects I will definitely suffer. Now, imagine my life when I tell you I take multiple medications that could possibly cause any or all of these side effects. I ought to just buy a large amount of stock in the company that makes Gas-Ex.

The women at my workplace tend to be one of two age groups: under 30 or over 40. I am the lone 30-something. I am on my own when it comes to finding my way through chin hair, gas and weight gain. In a recent meeting, the topic turned to aging, and I looked at the under-30 group and said, “You’re young. You have no idea about the gas yet.” The girls laughed, while the other side of the table, the over-40 group, nodded sympathetically and agreed.

The problem with gas and aging is that there’s not one trigger you can always count on. I may be one of the lucky ones in that I have identified that medications — just about any medication — will usually make me flatulent. But that’s only one of potentially thousands — maybe millions — of triggers. Sometimes onions make me gassy, but sometimes not. Same with garlic. Occasionally odd things sneak up on me, like popcorn, cottage cheese or nuts. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what could possibly have caused my suffering. Other times I know that the meal before me is definitely going to cause problems later.

This is the case with Greek food lately. I love Greek food. I eat it at least once a week. And for the last three months I have paid dearly for that love. I have no idea what it is in the chicken souvlaki and Greek potatoes that does it — maybe it’s the tzatziki sauce — but something definitely inflates me with stinky air. In addition, about 60 percent of the time, Greek food also gives me heartburn lately.

The problem with Greek and other food is that I have no idea when it might turn from delicious to painful and embarrassing. Sometimes the bloated, gassy feeling strikes about an hour after eating. Other times, it could be the next day. This makes it incredibly difficult to identify exactly what is causing the gas. I suspect that once you get older, everything causes gas, and you just have to carry Gas-Ex with you everywhere you go.

I recently mentioned to my mother my displeasure with her failure to adequately warn me about the pitfalls of aging. She smiled sweetly and said, “There’s more. There’s much more. But I’m going to leave it all as a surprise.”