The Day You Realized You Needed Wrinkle Cream...

When you're young, the thought of being in your 40's seems crazy. You think to yourself, "hmmm, that's a really long time from now." And then you go back to doing whatever it is you're doing when you're young. Like smoking pot. Or having unprotected recreational sex. Or, drinking because you know you won't have a two year old leaping on to your head at 6:00 am the next morning. There's nobody to answer to except for maybe the random vagrant you brought home with you who faintly smells like he wet himself. But, no big deal really, you can kick him out.

But, you're in your 30's now and you're a parent (sweet Jesus, who knew you'd ever be responsible enough to raise actual children!). You're married. You may or may not own a pair of mom jeans and you have definitely said things like, "can we not tell your entire preschool class that your twin is home sick because he drank beer?"

I'll let you guess which one of those things isn't true.

And you're kind of feeling like a grown-up.

(I said kind of)

This prompts you to start purchasing makeup. Not drug store, probably full of things to make your face eat itself Cover Girl. No. We're talking the big bucks. You watch tutorials. You figure out that you can mix blushes (say what?!). You can buy off brands that look just like the expensive stuff, even though it might give you eye cancer. It's crazy!

And as the girl does your makeup at the You'll Have To Sell Your First Born For This Jar of Whale Semen But You'll Look Like A Supermodel counter, she notes (more than once) that you're a good candidate for their Aging Beauty System. Because, "you're getting older."

Uh. Aca-scuse me?

So you go home and you scrutinize. You notice the wrinkles and bags under your eyes. You're developing crows feet and those weird parenthesis around your mouth that used to look cute, but now make you look like an old bloodhound. You poke your forehead. There's a wrinkle between your eyebrows because you squint and frown a lot. With horror, you see that your dimple that was so adorable when you were small now looks like a crater.

Anyway. It's all very depressing if you must know.

You scour the makeup counters. There's a free gift that includes their Holy Grail of Wrinkle Cream in a Lilly Pulitzer bag at one of them if you'll just spend $35 and you're all like, "cool, I can do that." Except nothing there costs $35...unless you want to combine two $25 lip glosses (that's right, twenty-five dollar lip glosses, um...how about no). You find a perfume you can tolerate and discover it's $75. The Holy Grail of Wrinkle Cream is $65 for .00004 oz. Eye shadow? That'll be $45, please.

You scour the interwebz without much luck. Only this time, there are reviews that include things like, "this one burns" or "this one is a miracle cure for wrinkles, and even though I'm living on a corner in a cardboard box using bread bags for shoes in order to afford this cream, I look fabulous!"

Sigh. Thanks internet.

So you go to Target in the hopes that maybe something is affordable. Anything is better than nothing, even if it's $11 Aveeno on clearance. Every "system" is $40, every point two ounce cream is half of that. And then you read the back and the ingredients are terrifying and you think to yourself that maybe you'll just accelerate the aging process instead by drinking hard liquor and smoking six packs a day because that sounds more fun than smearing goo on your face every day, three times a day for the rest of your life.

But just as you're seriously contemplating this drastic life choice, you discover tucked in the back, a little pack of gems on clearance. You snatch it up, take it home and bust it out of it's packaging faster than Charlie unwrapped a Golden Ticket. You dab it on and you wait (you may have giggled because the applicator faintly resembles a penis, but that's life in a world ruled by penises). And you wait. You wait some more.

It doesn't burn.

It tingles a little.

You think, "hey, look at that...no more puffs." And you think you look fabulous for the rest of the day without your dark circles and bags and you smile at the checkout guy who cards you for the bottles of wine you've just bought (just in case you still want to take the Plan B route). You head off to a meeting thinking you are on top of the world, rocking a 25 year old face.

And that's when someone says, "hey, you doing okay...you look really tired."

Yeah. Screw it. I'm going with Plan B.