Since I was a little girl, my family has taken a holiday to Cornwall every spring half-term. I remember the long car journeys well: three generations of the family’s women — my grandma, my mum and me — packed in next to one another on the back seat. Once, when I was about eight, my mum handed me a sandwich, and I remarked: ‘What are those weird things on your hands?’
I was referring to the visible pores, which were such a contrast to my own alabaster-smooth skin. My mum looked mortified, while my grandma laughed and said: ‘They’re nothing — look at mine!’ Now I have my own two children, I’ve continued the tradition of going to Cornwall.
Last spring’s trip was particularly poignant, because my grandma had died shortly before we went, leaving my mum and I very aware that we had moved up a generation. And, sure enough, on the journey down, my seven-year-old daughter Darcey underlined the point by telling me: ‘Your hands are like net.’
I looked at them and saw the same pores and lines I’d once seen on my mother’s hands. Then I looked at my reflection in the rearview mirror and thought: ‘It’s happened.’
In that moment, I realised that however much I try to halt the ageing process with creams and potions, diet and exercise regimes, it will defy me and happen anyway. It’s happening now. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
But being happily married and having children has taken away a lot of the insecurities women have when they’re young, when we endlessly analyse our looks, worrying about every split end in our hair, because we want the people we fancy to fancy us back.
If it means being settled and content, getting older can be a relief.
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