I want my money back. Even more than wanting my money back, I want to quit getting sucked in.
I was leafing through a magazine and saw a full-page ad for a moisturizer claiming it yielded better results than similar expensive creams costing $200, $300 and $400.
Amazing, I thought. Maybe I should get this.
Then I realized I already have it. I purchased it a month ago. I don’t know what a $400 cream will do, but this little baby didn’t do anything.
It’s in a drawer along with a new lotion I saw advertised on television that will erase lines and wrinkles from your neck. I’ve had lines on my neck since I was 7 years old. I just learned they’re called necklace lines. I would have preferred the jewelry.
I bought the neck cream for a few bucks at the grocery. Threw it right in the cart along with the lettuce, onions and chicken like it was a staple. It probably should be.
My neck and décolletage or decoupage or whatever you call it have not noticeably improved.
The commercial says 90 percent of women saw noticeable improvement in two weeks. How is it that I am always in the 10 percent that never sees improvement?
If we all saw the age-defying results that all the creams, moisturizers and wrinkle-erasers promise, nearly every woman would be walking around looking like a 20-year-old.
So, your 20-year-old son says to his 20-year-old girlfriend, “Meet my mother. Yes, she does look your age, doesn’t she?” How confusing.
As much as we’d like to turn back the hands of time, it’s not possible. You might be able to nudge the second hand a notch or two, but beyond that it’s virtually impossible. Not even with a sledge hammer. A scalpel and a plastic surgeon, maybe, but not a sledge hammer.
Not long ago, one of the grands was sitting next to me and I felt her staring at my face. Finally, she said, “Grandma, did you know you have lines on your lips?”
She said it with the same sort of alarm I would use asking if anyone else heard the smoke detector going off.
I ignored her.
“Well, did you, Grandma?”
I continued ignoring her.
She got right up in my face, pointing with her soft little 6-year-old finger, and in her sweet little voice said, “And you have lines here and here and here.”
Who needs a magnifying mirror?
And yet I still slather on the creams, hoping against hope, working to preserve what is left.
We took four grands to a small museum recently. An elderly woman working the front desk asked if they were my kids or my grandkids. I knew better than to let it go to my head, which was a good thing because in the next breath she told me to park my bicycle outside.
I didn’t have a bicycle. I had a stroller. And a baby was in it.
I rest my case. And my face.
