33

On my thirty third birthday, I was the first to wake up.

Hub and I have the world's most comfortable bed.  Lying in bed awake but unhurried was once a common experience.  Now, it is the most precious of luxuries.  For a few minutes, I had nothing in the world to do but feel the fresh air on my face, listen to the birds singing their hearts out for neighborhood supremacy, and watch our trees dance in the early morning light.

I am a product of these modern times, and whenever the girls aren't clamoring for me in the morning, or whenever Hub bounces out of bed to respond to them first, I tend to wake up and go straight to my phone, checking the weather for the day and reading through my social pages.  But on that particular day, my phone was downstairs.  Instead, I stared at the fine golden hairs and beauty-mark constellations all over my arms.

I see my age in the patch of white growing amongst the brown above my right ear, and in the texture of this tanned arm-skin.  My arms look now the way my mother's arms looked when I was a child: darker every day in high summer with a dense web of very fine lines that flex and stretch with the muscles beneath them.

I came to appreciate the modern miracle of high SPF a little too late in life.  I basked like a lizard in a red lifeguard suit all through my teenage summers and puffed up with pride over my nut brown limbs and blond streaked hair.  Many of my friends paid a lot of money to color their hair like that.

I've always loved my skin.  It's thick and soft and smooth without much effort.  Now that I'm into my thirties, I can tell I'm losing collagen.

"Where do you think they get collagen?"  Hub asks, when he wakes up.  We must be on the same wavelength this morning.

"Rat tails."  I tell him.

He laughs, but it isn't a joke.  I used to order the stuff for my lab.  "Rat tail collagen"  It says, right there in the catalog.

"How do you think the fancy ladies with their lip implants would like that?"  I laugh.

They can extract collagen from any number of animal parts.  Rat tails, cocks combs, pig knuckles.  I don't know what they pump women full of at the aesthetician's office, but I know it ain't vegan.

It's no matter to me.  I may buy a firming cream or two, in my moments of vanity, but I won't be going under the needle any time soon.  Nor will I be dying this hair of mine.  Though I could use a mole-scan.

My skin has been good to me, and now that I'm a legitimate grownup, I try to be good right back.  I slather on the water-babies right alongside my girls.  I wear a big straw hat.  More and more often, now, I choose a seat in the shade.  And though part of me wishes that I could have that plump, 20-something skin back, another part of me loves these mother-arms.  All these little lines connect me to my own mother, to Grandmama, and all my mothers' mothers.

When I finally roll out of bed, Hub makes us all french toast and I enjoy an entire day of Elsie's hugs and Lucia's surprising and delightful wishes, "Happy birthday!"