#71, Botox
It hadn’t been my plan to take Alice with me to get Botox, because my plan had been that I would tell no one. But when you take the week before Christmas off, and you have a Botox appointment scheduled for 10:30 AM Wednesday with Dr. Holly Happe and when your 5-year-old gets sent home sick on Tuesday, and when she’s mostly better on Wednesday morning but still needs one more day out of school, and when it would cost $100 to cancel the appointment, and when you really want to see what it would be like to get some damn Botox before Christmas — well, plans change. Hence me saying to Kevin “I’m going to keep her home with me one more day, but I will need to bring her to a doctor’s appointment with me.”
“This is a doctor’s office?” Alice asked suspiciously as we walked across the lawn of a well-kept Tudor home in Newton (“a private & discreet location with no signage on the street,” down a little stone path to the back entrance of the house (“Just come to the rear entrance [down the driveway] and you will see our sign and the entrance between the two buddahs [sic]!”)
“It is a kind of doctor’s office, yes,” I said.
“If they give you a lollipop, can I get one too?” she asked.
“They don’t usually have them at the grownup doctor’s, but we can get a treat at Target after,” I said. “This isn’t going to take that long.”
“I think we might see a deer!” she said and my heart broke a tiny bit — previously she’s only seen deer deep in the country at my parents’ house but because this house had a manicured lawn edged by trees and a little brush that was enough, in her mind, for it to be “the woods” where you could see all kinds of nature and were we maybe not getting out enough and her school doesn’t have enough recess and Kevin’s fall project was literally gassing the rats in our city yard scrap* — but whatever, I decided to postpone adding it to my list of things to feel bad about, and here we were.
A brief interlude here to explain why I was getting the Botox: Because I wanted it. Why Newton: Because Dr. Happe had really good Yelp reviews and because if I was going to go some place for cosmetic enhancement, it might as well be a rich suburb, not Cambridge where I’m sure you can get Botox somewhere but municipal law requires you to read a scholarly paper on women and anti-aging culture before you’re injected. What fun would that even be?
***
During the Botox, Alice accepted Dr. Happe’s (pronounced “happy”) compliments on her unicorn leggings and watched an episode of Creative Galaxy on the iPad. “Am I too—” I asked Dr. Happe, sitting down. I was going to say “Am I too young to get Botox” but come on, I am 34 and, having read quite a few posts on millennial blogs, I knew I wasn’t too young according to, you know, the impossible standards to which we hold ourselves in this crazy time etc. and so instead I finished with, “old to get Botox?”
“No, I have young millennials coming in,” she said. “You can’t treat a wrinkle you never get,” I have been puzzling over since. It means — if you start getting Botox, you will never need it? I think.
“What was wrong with you?” Alice asked as we were leaving.
***
“So am I supposed to be able to guess where it was?” Kevin asked later, after I had revealed to him where we had gone, knowing that if I didn’t, Alice certainly would. (“We went to someone’s house and Mom got shots in her face.”)
“Like this place in Newton?” I said. “Do you want to see it on Yelp?”
“No I mean.” He gestured to my face.
Oh. Ha. Right. Like, I looked no different. Okay, so here’s the thing, which I hadn’t known beforehand but which frankly made me love it even more. Botox doesn’t kick in the first day. You may start to see the effects around the third day, and it takes 14 days to see the full effect.
This means that every day after you get it, for at least two weeks, you wake up looking a tiny bit better, a little less tired. For the past couple weeks, every time I have looked in the mirror I look a little bit better than I remembered. It’s highly unlikely that anyone except me notices, and yet I can’t think of a higher recommendation I could give it than this.
It’s fairly common that I go, “That wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.” Raising kids gives you some opportunities to think this (cross country flight with kids), as well as “Well that went much worse than I thought it would” (taking the kids out to dinner alone) and “That was as bad as I’d imagined” (family stomach bug).
But “even better than I thought it would be” is rare. Is “better than I thought it would be” just the inverse of “not as bad as I thought it would be”? They’re not exactly the same, I don’t think.
***
Last Sunday, a few days after Christmas break had ended, we went to dinner at our neighbors’ house. Their kids are slightly older than ours, five-and-a-half and three-and-a-half. The other mom and I were sitting on the floor sorting through Calico Critters — which, I learned that evening, are called “Sylvanian Families”!!! everywhere outside the U.S. — and she mentioned to me that this had been the first Christmas break since having kids when she wanted it to go on a little longer, instead of just being immensely relieved to go back to work. While that had not quiiiite been my sentiment this time around, I almost knew what she meant; I was on the border of having that feeling. I could see how the kids being another year older would tip me over into wishing the vacation with them would last a little longer.
I can already see how days of “even worse than I thought it would be” and “as bad as I’d imagined” are starting to be outweighed by “not as bad as I thought it would be” and, very occasionally, “even better than I thought it would be.” How — God willing everyone stays healthy and safe etc., etc. I feel compelled to add, as if I am cursing my Sylvanian Family by acknowledging that things are not a total disaster at the moment — I am gradually becoming one of those people who is out of “the trenches” or “survival mode” or all the various dramatic phrases people use to describe parenting very young children.
I’m not ready to be looking back, I worry. I’m not ready to not be in the thick of it. It isn’t time yet. I can’t just, like, get Botox and go to yoga! I think glumly, insanely, considering the fact that I have a job and my children are still quite young and still incredibly needy and a day still does not go by that I don’t touch someone else’s poop. But February will mark a year since I started thinking about a third and I don’t think I’ve stopped since.
“You can’t treat a wrinkle you never get,” Dr. Happe said. What else could you say? “You can’t complain about a child you never have.”
But I could, I think.