Stephanie Dolgoff - My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches from Just the Other Side of Young

T here were certainly signs that something momentous was taking place, but initially, I saw each as an isolated incident:

Beginning a couple of years ago, salespeople in trendy boutiques, who used to swirl around me like bees over a puddle of orange soda, could no longer be bothered. Evidently they saw me as someone who wouldnt (or plain shouldnt) buy their skinny jeans, spiky heels or strappy little camis that are ideally worn without a bra.

Friends arriving in New York City asked mea lifetime Gotham denizen and supposedly glamorous member of the fashion and lifestyle mediawhich were the cool places to hang out. I couldnt think of one that hadnt been shuttered during the first 90210 era or that wasnt now a Starbucks.

I began to have to wear makeup, or at least a decent tinted moisturizer, to get that same Im not wearing makeup look that I used to get by, well, not wearing makeup.

One time, in a Pilates class, the instructor had us lying on our backs, pressing our shoulders into the mat. She then told us to raise our arms straight up, at a 90-degree angle from the floor, and then reach to the sky, lifting just our shoulders. We all did: The bones of my shoulders followed my arms vertically a full four inches toward the ceiling. But the flesh surrounding my shoulder bones remained splooged out on the mat. My skin and the thin layer of adipose tissue that normally traveled with my bones and muscles had clearly decided that Pilates was for losers.

And the real piercing car alarm of a signalwhy this didnt catch my attention I have no ideacame one morning after too much coffee, as I was rocking out in the kitchen to One Way or Another, a Blondie song seared into my neuropathways since adolescence. I was horrified when I realized it was the sound track to a Swiffer commercial, blaring from the TV in the other room. I found it especially humiliating that there was a Swiffer, at that very moment, sitting in my broom closet. Whats more, I had recommended it to friends (!!!). I thought about that: I feel strongly enough about a cleaning implement to have recommended it to friends. It didnt seem like that long ago I wasnt spending enough time at my apartment to need to clean.

I began to feel vaguely uneasy, but the reason hadnt yet gelled. Things were going quite well, and my life was more or less exactly as Id set it up to be: I had lived my lunatic 20s, throwing myself into my career, scaled many magazines mastheads and then calmed the eff down and gotten married in my mid-30s. My husband and I had wonderful twin little girls, I had a great job, good friends, and we all were healthy and solvent. There was no crisis. And yet something was off.

I just didnt feel like me.

And then, finally, one day just after my 40th birthday, all became blindingly clear.

It was early in the morning and I was on the subway, on my way to work. A sexy stubbly man next to me leaned in and asked me for the time. I braced myself for the pickup attempt I felt sure was to follow. Eight-forty, I replied tersely, careful not to offer even a hint of encouragement in my tone.

And then nothing. Nada. Bubkes. He may have said, Thanks. I dont remember. I do remember that he went back to his book. Apparently, the sexy stubbly guy who asked me for the time simply needed to know the time. He wanted information, not to have sex with me. Imagine!

I was shocked. Shocked! And internally embarrassed. Just who the hell did I think I was? Well, Ill tell you who I thought I was! I thought I was who I had always been: a hot chick, damn it! Big hair, big boobs, big personality, a young woman who (not so terribly long ago) had reason to adopt a slightly defensive posture when men asked her superficially innocent questions on public transportation. (In fact, I met the man who is now my husband on the subway.) I was hardly a supermodel, but hey, even if I wasnt a particular persons type, it seemed to me that my general appeal was irrefutable. After a few decades of believing this about myselfand usually being reacted to as if it was sobeing an attractive young woman simply became part of what I was and how I navigated the world.

But in that instant, an energy-saver bulb reluctantly flickered on over my head, and I got it. Boy, did I ever get it. I was no longer all that, perhaps no longer even a little of that, whatever that is. No wonder things didnt feel right! I didnt feel like me anymore because I wasnt me, at least not the me I had always been.

Im not talking about one guys opinion, of course. In retrospect, all the indications that my head-turner days were receding in the rearview were there (in addition to the aforementioned, fewer men who drink 40s on apartment stoops made vile sucking noises as I walked by; and I was maamed on several occasions when I was not in the Deep South). Together, along with all the other signs that had nothing to do with my looks, it made sense. Over the last few years, while Id been busy working and having twins and not sleeping and getting peed on and eating and yelling at my husband and maybe not taking such good care of myselfand oh, yes, that pesky passage of time thingId become a perfectly nice-looking 40-year-old working mom doing the best she can. Which is totally not the same as a hot chick. That in itself is not a problem. The problem was that my self-definition had yet to catch up with the reality of what the world saw when it looked at me.

Lucky for me, I had my then-four-year-old daughter Vivian, at home to give my self-definition a good frogmarch forward. That very same evening, she snuggled close to me on the chair-and-a-half in her bedroom while I brushed her hair after her bath. Abruptly, she turned to me.

Mommy, what are those? she asked, her face just millimeters from mine, so close that her eyes were crossing. She was fixated on my nose.

What are what, honey?

Those. Those round things. Wed been over this. That Japanese book, The Holes in Your Nose, about nostrils and boogers and which body orifices you might stick your fingers in and which you are firmly discouraged from sticking your fingers in, had long been a favorite in our house. I reminded her that they were my nostrils and that she had them, too.

No, not those. Those smaller ones. Some of them have little hairs growing from them.

Sigh. Vivian, of course, was referring to my pores, which in the last couple of years had been expanding like crop circles on my face. Id hoped no one had noticed the little hairs. I can only see them in the 15 magnification mirror I masochistically keep in the bathroom.

I felt that familiar wave of not shame, not humiliation, exactlyyou can hardly be ashamed of your pores in front of your childbut of what Id imagine a toad would feel if he were cognizant of being dissected: laid bare, with the cool, objective, curious eyes of a scientist seeking data. This same scenario had repeated itself many times in the last year with little variability, except regarding which of my previously unremarked-upon flaws was being scrutinized.

So I did what I did the time her sister, Sasha, pointed outentirely without judgmentthat my belly looked like a tushy on the front of my body, or the time she said that there were bumpy blue worms under the skin of my legs: I chuckled wisely and said something mature about how bodies are fascinating and change as they get older and went and got the 15 magnification mirror and showed Vivian her own (invisible to the naked eye) pores. I then explained the function of pores in cooling the body. Vivian was riveted. I was proud of myself for being such a good mommy, for recognizing and acting on one of those teachable moments you read about in the parenting magazines.