I Feel Bad About my Neck

My elbows are starting to look odd. I thought I would notice other things first, say an age spot here and there, or that the sarcastic line along one eyebrow was finally deep enough to insert a coin. But it is the elbows that I’ve begun to notice, with their extra little flap, as if with age a purse is no longer enough and now I require storage intermittently along my body. 

A girlfriend told me some years ago that aging had snuck up on her, something that I doubted very much as I had been there during the uncomfortable afternoon that her children had to explain to her what the acronym “MILF” meant because a young friend had used it in reference to her. “It’s true,” she’d said, “I was waving the other day and after I stopped the skin on my arm just kept going.” And it was then that I flashed back to a church dinner that she’d been encouraged to speak at and, not wanting to be cliché and write about her husband, she’d gone with an ode to finding her first nipple hair. I doubt that even in another fifty years I will be that cool.

For my last birthday, my 27th, my mother had called to wish me an almost thirtieth. At the time I’d laughed it off, but after I hung up I’d been sad for days. And then I sent her a copy of Norah Ephron’s I Feel Bad About my Neck for her birthday. I don’t know if I’d call this a victory, but neither of us spoke about it for a long time afterwards.

I find that with a lot of Ukrainian women our necks are the first thing to go, the skin at our throats suddenly swaddling us in old age like an ever present scarf. I’ll be standing in front of the mirror in the evenings noting a line that bisects my neck that wasn’t there a couple of years ago and wonder if within the decade I’ll be using it to store an extra set of car keys. I’d defer to my mother and my genetics on this one for a peek into the future, but a thin line marks my mother’s neck where her thyroid was removed and you notice nothing else. She is almost gleeful about the scar, shrugging it off and saying that it’s a great conversation starter. “I like to tell people I got into a knife fight.”

I’d like to be comfortable with myself, regardless of my age, and I think often of one friend’s mother who I’d very much like to be at fifty. There had been no pub near her little town and she’d thought to open her own watering hole. “Aren’t you a bit too old for something like that,” one of her girlfriends had asked when she’d brought up the idea.

“Why? At this point I could attach rags to my breasts and clean tables as I go.” She’d looked over at me then, sizing me up. “You’ve got a long way to go before you can multi-task like that,” she said. It was, and still is, the oddest and greatest compliment I’ve ever received.