Ava has become fascinated by her reflection. Because of this, lately, I’ve been spending more time looking in the mirrors around the house. It could be that I haven’t been getting much sleep lately (my fault: gaming on the weekends; during the workweek, pre-dawn anxieties about not fulfilling my mother’s prophecy of becoming Prime Minister of Canada) but I think my own reflection is finding it more difficult to hold the pretence that I am still young and beautiful. This is something that photographs of me had given up doing long before I turned 35. In regards to photos, I’ve come to expect that no matter how much effort I put into posing, I’ll always end up looking like the victim of a kidnapping. I’m surprised I haven’t taken to holding the front page of newspaper in front of my chest whenever anyone reaches for a camera.
Until lately though, I could always blame my god-awful appearance in photos on simply being unphotogenic, like a recessive gene. But now that my daughter has me looking at my haggard appearance in the mirror twenty times a day, my reflection is unable to keep up. It just doesn’t have the energy to lie to me anymore. Sure, there are still a number of ways I can position my head which make me look 25, though all of them are simply variations on something I like to call the “jaw-jut”, which tightens the skin around the lower half of my face and temporarily smoothes out my ever-growing set of truckers’ jowls.
My mother says she is always surprised that when she looks in the mirror, she expects to see an eighteen-year-old looking back at her. While some my say this is one of life’s small tragedies, I am going to go out on a limb and say that my situation is slightly crueller. For years now, my mirror has been hiding the truth that my photographs have been trying to show me. For years, I’ve essentially been acting as though I look like a twenty-year-old. At best, this could mean that I’ve been acting like the energetic jokester who never fails to brighten every workplace he inhabits. At worst, it means I’ve been behaving like the pudgy guy in the office with the pleated pants and ponytail who believes all the women there think he’s cute.
Perhaps I should view this as an opportunity. Maybe by accepting the newfound wrinkles and face-girth my reflection has been working so hard to conceal, can I finally accept – at least partially – my own mortality. Maybe that’s what fresh-faced, button-nosed daughters are for: to encourage you to look and accept how quickly time moves.