Personal Blogs

I have a friend whose home is surrounded by wildflowers. She raises chickens and ducks. Her garden is planted with beans and squash and tomatoes and herbs. Each morning she watches the sun rise over a mountain range that can only be described as majestic. Her kids wear daisies in their hair and have their own little strawberry patch. Neighbors can swing by and pick up a box of eggs - each one comes with a pretty personalized stamp. 

(Now, if she were painting this picture she would tell you about the mud that gets dragged into her home by her dogs and kids. She would tell you about the deer that come and eat everything as it sprouts. She would tell you about the frost that destroys her first plantings meaning that she has to start over from scratch again and again. She would tell you that despite having an abundance of home-grown home-raised produce one of her kids would still rather eat just frozen processed chicken nuggets for every single meal, and that despite seeming to live in an idyllic rural haze, actually her kids do still occasionally draw on the walls with marker pens. She would tell you how hard it is to keep things alive in the high altitude dry summers and how hard it is to have to shovel snow day after day through the long winters just to get from her front door to her car.)

Depending on which version you read her life is either perfect or not perfect, and since both accounts above are real, we could conclude that perfect and not perfect are simultaneously true. It’s all very ‘Schrodinger’s Cat.’

“But, ah-ha,” she would say, “even in the ‘perfect’ version I have found something that is missing from my life.”

“How could this be?” We might reply. “You have flowers and sunrises and you are connected to the earth - surely you have everything you could ever want or need.”

“In my whole adult life,” she says, “I have never had a doorbell.”

And so a doorbell has been ordered. It is arriving tomorrow. 

We all know how a doorbell works. Someone (maybe a friend, maybe someone making a delivery, maybe someone who wants to buy a box of eggs) presses the button, there is a ring inside the house, and if the homeowner is home they open the door (or maybe they take a sneaky look through a window to see who it is and then decide whether to go ahead and open the door, or whether to crouch down and hide, pretending they are not home, because they really don’t want to deal with whoever is on the other side of the door at that moment - some people might do this, I’m not say I ever have, I’m just acknowledging that it is a possible scenario, maybe, for other people, or something…). A doorbell in itself is a simple, familiar thing. It won’t end up transforming my friend’s life - having someone knock on the door ends up achieving the same result (and in her case, her dogs, chickens, ducks and an old-lady turkey all raise the alarm with much excitement whenever a car pulls into the driveway, so the doorbell is actually going to be drowned out by the canine-poultry chorus that announces any new arrival anyway). The real excitement lies in the waiting. In wondering what having a doorbell is going to be like. Expectation. 

This morning I used a hair mask. It cost $3 from the grocery store. It is not fancy. I have used it before. I know how it works (or doesn’t). The results are typically minimal. I used it anyway. And as I sat with my hair covered in what is basically just a conditioner in a sachet for 2 hours I wondered if this might be the day that my hair ended up being softer and shinier than ever before, the sort of hair that turns heads. As expected, now that it is rinsed off and my hair is blow-dried, it is just as it always is. No better. No worse. 

Also this morning I baked homemade bread. I added yeast to warm water and watched it bubble up. I added flour, salt, oil etc and mixed it just like I have mixed bread before, and although I knew how it would (probably - I never really know with bread - I tend to oscillate between it being ok and it being bad) turn out I wondered if it might just be the most spectacular bread anyone had ever made. After 2 hours (same amount of time as the hair goo - honestly a coincidence - there was no intention in that) the bread was ready and we ate it, and as expected it was completely fine, but no-one’s life was changed. 

But still, I’d had hours of anticipation, and actually sometimes that is the real treat - the wondering. And so I hope my friend feels all the doorbell anticipation feels. In fact, I almost hope the delivery gets delayed a day, just so she can extend the happiness of looking forward to it, of wondering what life might be like post-doorbell. It will probably be the same as life post-hair mask, and post-bread. No better. No worse. Not perfect, but not not-perfect either. 

But in all of this, one thing emerges as being actually perfect. Perfect anticipation, perfect execution, perfect reward of satisfaction when the job is done. As I'm writing this my oldest child is picking up a new batch of eggs. They will taste delicious. But an equal joy (ok, a greater joy) will come from the moment when he brings them home. He will put them on the countertop and say "Mum, the eggs are here." And I will open the boxes (I buy 3 dozen at a time - these boy children will not stop eating) and I will take a few minutes just to stand and look and admire. 

Egg stamp, you are spectacular.

It turns out that most of the people I know in America are making use of some kind of cosmetic enhancement procedure. Some of them have undergone surgery - boobs, tucks, noses, cat eyes, things involving suction - but most of them are indulging regularly in treatments that are administered with needles and syringes. Botox, Baby Botox (which is not, as I had first assumed with a deep horror, Botox that is given to babies, rather it is just a smaller dose of Botox, the idea being that it is a more subtle way of paralyzing your face, rather than a very dramatic way of paralyzing your face), and lip fillers being popular options. 

Lip fillers average price $959, with need to repeat every year

Botox average cost $196 per 12-week treatment

Baby Botox average cost $300 every 2 months

The astute amongst you will be wondering why Baby Botox (which uses less product and does not last as long) is more expensive than actual Botox. I agree. This seems odd to me as well. All I can conclude is that cosmetic procedures make little sense, the costs of any and most medical procedures are nothing if not erratic, and I will also absolutely own that the research I conducted to provide these numbers involved a maximum of 3 minutes Googling and me using the first number I found from completely unverified sources. A bonus message here is ‘don’t believe the things you read on the internet.’ You’re welcome. 

I’ve never injected my face (dentist aside - but that has always been my gums not my face, so I don’t think it counts here). I look 44 because I am 44 and that makes sense to me, and my plan is to look 50 when I am 50, and look 86 when I am 86 and so on. You get it. But, being surrounded as I am with other 44 year olds who look like their faces are aging really well, and whose boobs are still lifted up high as the sky even after having 2 or 3 kids, it’s only natural (‘natural’ seems an ironic word to use in context of this topic) to wonder whether I’m missing a trick, to wonder whether a little injection here and there would actually work for me, suit me, be a wonderful self esteem boost (and in a culture that is keenly aware of mental health, surely a self esteem boost is something worth considering?).

I’ve never come close to pursuing this. 

Until yesterday, when I really thought it through. By mistake.

I’d just eaten a slice of pizza (ok, 2 slices) and was drinking a beer. It had been a long evening - a swim event for 400 kids that lasted 4 hours, plus warm up, plus set up, plus clear up, plus a week of begging families to please please please volunteer. Anyway, that was why sitting on a patio at 10pm with pizza and beer, my husband and the swim coaches was a nice place to be. I was considering beer number 2 when I felt a small itch on my upper arm. I put my cold beer bottle on the bug bite to try and calm it but when the itching spread I knew what was going on. All plans of the 2nd beer abandonned, we came home to the safety of antihistamine pills and the relief of a cold shower. By this time the itch (ok, hives - great big massive hives) were widespread. Itching isn’t dangerous. Annoying, yes, but that’s about it. What I did not like at all was the tingling, swelling lips and the numb face. (Spoiler alert - mainly for the benefit of my mother, who is one of my only blog readers, and who will also be panicking at this stage about the impending anaphylaxis - all breathing was fine and remained fine; this entire event happened yesterday and I’m still fine.) Although I know now that I am fine, I didn’t know at the time that I was going to keep being fine, and while I felt confident that no-one dies of swollen lips I knew they can die of swollen airways so this was a situation that needed very close monitoring. So I monitored. 

Mainly what I saw when I obsessively looked in the mirror, searching for signs of increasing or decreasing swelling or any new strangeness, was that the image staring back at me resembled something from a Netflix show I recently watched about botched plastic surgery. My face shape was too smooth and too still. My cheeks just had something fixed about them. It was as if the wrong part of them was somehow propped up. And my lips were held in an unintended duck pout that I was powerless to adjust. I tried smiling once. That was a mistake. No-one, especially me, needed to see that. 

Once the itching stopped and I had allowed enough time to go by that I was happy that I would continue to breathe through the night, I went to bed, hopeful that all would be ok by morning. I was covered forehead to knees in calamine lotion meaning I woke up white and flakey (very white and flakey - I had absolutely believed that my breathing safety was inherently based on being able to wear as many layers of lotion as possible - it was thick), to find the bathroom floor covered in pink splashes and the bedsheets dusted in a fine white powder (by ‘fine powder’ I actually mean lumps). I felt good and I had full sensation in my cheeks. But my lips were still yet to fully come down. They were not ‘lip filler gone wrong’ big, but they were definitely ‘lip filler’ big. 

When my husband got up I was already in the kitchen, coffee mug in hand, and doing pretty well (I thought) at not dribbling, considering these new large lips were creating a new logistics-of-sipping experience for me. 

“Well, we know one thing for sure.” My husband said as he glanced at me while filling his own coffee cup that he then went on to drink from in a boring standard-lips way. “The expensive injections look is definitely not for you.” I mean, he’s right. I’d looked truly hideous the night before and looked only marginally better now, so I supposed I’ll be forever grateful that I had this test run and will never deliberately look this way again. But what if I’d liked it? What if I’d been left wrestling with the idea of ‘investing’ all that money for all the rest of my life in my own face? Good job I didn’t think that. Good job it’s not the plan. Phew! 

(And now I just need to drop in reminders of what a wonderful, thrifty, content to be myself wife I am so when I casually mention the first edition signed copy of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath that I saw for sale in an antique bookstore this week, he won’t be able to help but conclude that this book is tremendous value for money - a lifetime of literary wonder for a mere fraction of the price of a distorted face - an investment, a saving, and definitely not frightening to look at...)