I can admit when I’m wrong, and I’ve been doing a little happy dance all day because being wrong in this case is net positive for the many Formerlies who reside north of the Mason-Dixon.

You might recall that I wrote about the first time I was ma’amed a few years back, and how that was one of the first indications I had that my self-definition (as the young, relevant, in-the-know hot chick I’d been for the previous several decades) was just a wee bit out of sync with what people saw when they looked at 40something-year-old no-longer-groovy me. At that time, the good people of the South very kindly rose up to reassure me that the term ma’am, I was told is simply what nice boys are raised to call women who are not obviously teenagers, particularly ones who wear wedding rings.

Here’s how I handled it back in 2009 when a nice young man (yes, yes, that sounds old, but that’s what he was!) working at IKEA in Brooklyn ma’amed me.

I said, “Look, I’m going to give you a tip: I can tell you’re from the South, but up here, women who may still think they’re maybe young–even if they’re kind of not–don’t like to be called ma’am. If I were you, I’d err on the side of “miss,” even if you’re pretty sure they’re married and have kids.”

“Oh, no, I have to call them ma’am. It’s what my mama taught me and my brothers. That’s the way you show respect,” he said. “I couldn’t not say ‘ma’am.’”

“I hear you, but in New York, part of showing respect is respecting people’s vanity, and pretending that they’re not old, you know?” I said.

“I guess I do, yes, ma’am.”

It wasn’t as if I didn’t believe him, exactly, but it still smarted. Ma’am meant nothing more or less to me than “I do not want to have sex with you but if you recommended a brand of butter substitute to me in the supermarket I’d trust your opinion.” Not so much where I wanted to live my life and still don’t.

Fast forward two years later, and I’m spending a week working in Birmingham, Alabama, where I have been ma’amed up, down and sideways several times a day. At this point, I’m more used to it, and, like a boxer who has been pummeled for several rounds, I don’t even really feel it anymore. Please, sir, may I have another? (more…)

Crap.

I finally owned my need for reading glasses for things like the mouse type directions on hair care products and low-light menu reading. I even managed to find a cool-ish pair that doesn’t make me feel like I’m about to turn into a Columbia professor’s poet wife wearing her specs on a chain of chunky “ethnic” beads over a flowing batik blouse. I crack the requisite getting-old jokes when I search for them before reading my kids Harry Potter, and, as they’ve been trained, they chime in that I’m not, in fact, old.

In short, I’m rolling with it. Bumpily, but I’m rolling with it.

Until just now, that is. I was in the shower, and endeavoring to shave my pits, when I realized, I CANNOT SEE MY OWN ARMPIT HAIR BECAUSE MY ARMPIT IS TOO CLOSE TO MY FACE! You can’t wear reading glasses in the shower!

Just what in the good gosh golly goddamn are we supposed to do? I mean, really!

The other night, a bunch of us were out at Souen, this superhealthy, macrobiotic restaurant near Union Square, which has been serving patchouli-scented, hummus-eating healthy people since the early ’70s. This was at the request of my friend Julie, who is a vegetarian. The food was good (I had some garlicky greens) and as much as I love a good cheeseburger, I got really into that feeling of filling my body with something indisputably healthy. My dish was so tasty–truly tasty, not just tasty-for-healthy-food tasty–in fact, that I had fantasy flashes of revamping my life so as to incorporate more kale.

It was all good until dessert. Julie got some kind of soy-based pudding thingy with cacao in it, which didn’t taste like pudding but wasn’t horrible, either. To me, the best thing about it was that it wasn’t good enough to compel you to finish it, thus making it low calorie.

Jen, however, ordered the cookie of the day, which was the driest, nastiest amalgam of pressed gains that had ever been baked at 350 degrees, with sesame seeds sprinkled on top where by all rights there should have been pretty artificially dyed pink and turquoise sprinkles or at the very least chocolate chips. It is pictured above. She took one tiny piece and shoved the plate away disdainfully.

We all took a crumb and tried it. If you looked around the table at that moment, you’d have seen five sour-faced women sliding their tongues along the roofs of their mouths like toddlers who were given strained spinach in lieu of the expected apple sauce. (more…)

Me and my friend Julie and our kids were on the subway home from an outing, when Luke, who is five and unused to riding the subway (being from LA and all), wedged himself in a seat between Vivian and a man.

“That man is old!” he proclaimed. “Hi, old man!” Julie shot him a look and explained to me that they play a car game at home in which they pretend to be talking to the people they drive by, and that she’s not sure that Luke gets that when you’re not in a car, people can actually hear you. That would be because he’s never not been in a car (being from LA and all).

The guy he was referring to was maybe 60ish, and good humored. He smiled to himself. Desirous of diffusing the awkwardness, I said, “Lucas, old people don’t like being told that they’re old. Especially mommies.”

Which prompted my daughters’ usual chorus of “You’re not old, mommy!” which, although all three of us know it’s an obvious attempt to stroke their poor vain mom’s varicose veiny ego, we all laugh about, because, well, you have to laugh or what the hell else are you going to do? Get all lifted and injected, like a Real Housewife of Beverly Hills? And of course at 44 I am not old old, at least not as old as I hope to be someday.

Earlier in the day, when the kids were off playing, Julie and I were talking about the word fat. Many kids, including Luke and my girls when they were younger, blurted out “That lady’s fat!” in front of some fat stranger, and not inaccurately, either. And yet our instinct is to slap our hands over our kids’ mouths and apologize for them.

I’m not entirely sure why, exactly. Apologizing assumes “old” and “fat” are insults, which is in part what makes them so. One time, after an incident like that, Sasha, who was maybe three at the time, said, “But why can’t I say it? She is fat!” The best I could come up with is, “It’s not polite to talk about other people’s bodies.” But that’s not really an explanation so much as another way of saying, “Shut the ef up before the lady gets mad at your mommy.”

Fat, like old, is just an adjective, and often an apt one, in describing a person. It’s not even inherently pejorative, like disgusting or despicable, and yet saying it, even if it’s the God’s truth, is not OK. I’m not sure what to call these presumed insults (who would want to be old? who would want to be fat?) that should, in my opinion, be stripped of all their associations and used like the words green, smooth or shiny are–neutral and not value laden. What would happen to their meaning if we did that? After all, maybe the guy Lucas sat down next to was a cancer survivor, and glad to be old because that meant he didn’t already die.

So yeah, Luke sat down next to an old guy. Not ancient, Not even elderly, if we’re working on shades of meaning. But was he young? No. And neither am I. Old may be pushing it, but when I am, feel free to point it out.

Photo by Ed Yourdon CC

My best friend Julie is in from LA and we went to this little Thai place near my house. We’ve been friends since we were 14, and would be locked in conversation even if we saw each other every day, as we did when we were roommates in our 20s. But since we haven’t hung out in forever and are both going through divorces and all they entail, we had to take turns eating our tofu with peanut sauce to allow the other to say her piece.

A frequent subject back then was men what to make of their silliness. We spent hours dissecting the precise way they said, “Hey,” when they passed us in the office, or why they’d say they’d call and then not do it (”I mean, then why say it?!?”). It all seemed to matter so much, as if we decoded their bizarre boy behavior we’d unlock the secret to heterosexual happiness.

The subject tonight, two decades later, was men and what to make of their silliness, although it wasn’t nearly as urgent as it seemed back then. By now we know there is no secret to romantic happiness no matter whom you’re attracted to, just a bunch of human beings with various body parts wandering around the planet doing their best and as often as not accidentally hurting one another. As rotten as our recent experiences have been, though, we spoke of these male creatures with a lot more forgiveness and appreciation of all shades of gray, perhaps because we’ve got more grays ourselves.

About a third of the way through dinner, the waitress came over and informed us that “a gentleman” would like to buy us a drink. (more…)

A little piece I did for HuffPo…

Stephanie Dolgoff

My husband and I have split up, and although it was my decision to leave and it remains the right one, it sucks. We were married almost 10 years and have two daughters, so it was a hideous outcome to arrive at after trying so hard not to. Divorce was the less sucky of the two sucky options I saw before me, but that fact doesn’t mitigate the suckitude one iota.

That divorce is hard is not news. It’s like when people say marriage is hard. It’s obvious, a tremendous understatement, and yet when it comes out of someone’s mouth, everyone clucks and nods in empathy and truly seems to know exactly what the speaker means, even though they were told nothing. It’s so outrageously, undeniably true and universal that it requires no explanation, no elaboration, for people to instantly relate and silently run their minds over their current apparently intractable struggle. When you’re going through a life changing personal matter that you’d rather not discuss, lazy, somewhat cliched distillations like that can come in mighty handy. “Divorce is hard” is my go-to summary when well-meaning people ask me how things are going and I sense that they don’t want more than a fleeting peek into my emotional life.

READ THE REST AT HUFFINGTONPOST.COM

You might need to sketch out a diagram, but see if you can keep up: A 35-year-old model’s un-made up face was used as the “before” picture for an Origins anti-aging product, allegedly without her permission. The “after” image was then doctored to show the supposed benefits of the product, which is aimed at 40- to 65-year-old women, who [the company is betting will be] willing to raid their 401Ks to pay for whatever will make them look, well, like they are still in their 30s.

But the woman in her 30s, in real life a former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model named Caroline Louise Forsling, looks like the “before” picture. Only through the magic of photoshop can even she look like she’s “supposed to” look, which is to say, in her 20s. Not for nothing, Forsling probably looks better than the average woman in her 30s to begin with. That’s why she gets to be a model. Oh, and did I mention she’s Swedish?

Forsling is, of course, suing, claiming her career has been damaged because she’s been thrust into this older category (death to a model) and that she has never used the product.

I think we are the injured parties here, don’t you?

Read more about it here and here.

Photo from the Daily News.

Please, tell me I’m not the only one who gets sprayed in the butt on those autoflush toilets. Even if you have to  lie to me, tell me I’m not the only one. It serves me right for multitasking during the sacred act of peeing.

Today I was in the ladies room with my girls, one of whom was asking for a tissue from the next stall. I leaned forward to fish through my bag and sure enough, I get that unwelcome butt shower. It happens more often than not. UGH. Very unpleasant, even on a hot day. So I sat back properly and that action, too, set off the motion detector again! Double butt shower with I don’t even want to think about what kind of germs in the water. Gross! It doesn’t seem to happen to my daughters. Bring on the golden showers jokes.

I could launch into some semi-senile diatribe about how these newfangled toilets are for the birds and is it really too much to expect people to have the common civility to flush manually, that autoflush toilets are one more sign of the nanny state, blah blah blah. But I’ll spare you today, because I like you and I’m trying to shed my grumpy mood. Butt shower didn’t help, mind you. But I’m trying.

I hope you all have a nice, dry day.

Photo by Rev Dan Catt CC

I have this tattoo I got maybe 10 years ago and it got a little smushy looking (it’s on my lower back, so it’s actually not smushy-looking because that body part got smushy-looking, which is always a risk with tattoos) and I went to get it touched up and filled in. I think that may be a Formerly thing–getting tattoos touched up, as opposed to getting tattoos. When you’re a Formerly, it’s all about tattoo maintenance, at least for me. I have no desire to get a new one; I just want the ones I have to not look like my kids grabbed at me with painty hands and I missed a spot in the shower. It hurt every bit as much as I remember, but that’s not the point.

The point is, on the table next to me was this 30something guy with full sleeves, getting an otter (an otter!) etched into the mix of flowers and anchors and what not he had on his forearm. His girlfriend was sitting next to him to keep him company and distract him and they were chatting. There was nobody to distract me so naturally I eavesdropped.

“She writes checks! Like,” and here he slowed his voice down like an old lady and used his free hand to simulate writing with a pen, ” ‘foooorrrty dollars and seventy-five cents,’ like, she writes the whole thing out! And then on the memo line, she writes, ‘groceries!’” Again with the old lady voice. His girlfriend thought that was hysterical.

Encouraged, he continued. “Then she’s all, ‘Wait, I have to write it on the register and deduct the amount from my balance,’ ” he said and looked at her with disbelief. She laughed even harder. “Omigod, like an old person!” she said.

I am not kidding. They weren’t teenagers, either. They were full-on adults, clearly talking about someone who was young enough to know that writing checks, is just, like, cranking up a Victrola to listen to some tunes. Is it just me or are only the elderly writing checks?

Give it to me straight. It’s OK if it is just me you have to tell me that I’m a big old loser and behind the curve on this one. I pay my bills online, but I do write checks, at least a couple a month. I suck at balancing my checkbook and don’t always write things down, but I still think that would be wise. Why is this laughable?

If they’d been kids I’d have dismissed them as ignorant, but he went on to discuss his job and he appeared to be self-supporting. Help me out here. Have checks gone the way of cassette tapes?

From Deadline Hollywood, the announcement that ABC is, in fact, hopefully developing MFHL into a sitcom. There was also a blurb in the Hollywood Reporter. “In development” means, well, folks are psyched on it and maybe there will be a pilot to look at. Fingers crossed, but very, very cool! The husband-and-wife writing team who are cranking away, Jon Hoberg and Kat Likkel, and the director set to work on it, Julie Anne Robinson, so thoroughly get the poignant plight of the Formerly that I feel confident that we’ll be well represented.

So I need a favor.

When I was undergoing IVF, some 9 years ago, I pulled out all the stops to make sure those hard-won embryo blobs stayed up in my uterus where they had been so carefully placed by a team of reproductive medical professionals, implanted, and grew to be the sweet, funny, eye-rolling and Wii obsessed little girls who are right now sleeping on IKEA beds in the next room.

I took drugs, I got acupuncture, I had giant syringes of syrup-like progesterone shot in the muscle of my ass and “faced the fear in my uterus” with the help of a New Age practitioner. I also enlisted everyone I knew to pray for me, even though I am an atheist, because I read a study about devout Christians in Australia and North America praying for women undergoing IVF in Korea doubling their success rates. I have no idea what worked for me, but something sure did.

Just in case it was the prayer, do me the favor of sending some positive thoughts to whomever you pray about My Formerly Hot Life going to pilot. I’m not asking for twins–just one good go at this thing.