Reflecting On Earned Milestones

By: B. Aviva Preminger, MD, MPH, FACS

This week, I am moving two of my children into college. Even writing that sentence feels slightly surreal. One is heading to Harvard and one to Emory, and within the span of a few days, two bedrooms will become quieter, two enormous piles of dorm supplies will disappear from my house, and we will cross one of those invisible lines that separates one stage of life from the next.

There are certain milestones you know are coming for years such as kindergarten, bar and bat mitzvahs, high school graduation, and college. You prepare for them, photograph them, complain about the logistics surrounding them, and then suddenly they arrive. Somehow, nothing makes you feel your age quite like your children getting older.

As a plastic surgeon, I spend a great deal of time talking about aging. I discuss fine lines, skin laxity, changes in facial volume, eyelids, necks, breasts, and abdomens. Patients will sit in front of the mirror and point to something that has changed and say, “This makes me look old.” This week, however, I have been thinking that perhaps the mirror isn’t really what makes us feel older. Milestones do.

A wrinkle appears gradually. A child leaving for college happens on a particular day. One minute you are buying diapers and figuring out car seats, and somehow, impossibly, you are standing in a dorm room making a bed with extra-long twin sheets and wondering whether your child knows how often towels actually need to be washed. You look at the young adult standing in front of you and realize that the years you thought were moving slowly were actually moving incredibly fast.

There is a strange contradiction in middle age. Internally, most of us don’t feel dramatically different from the person we were at 30 or 35. We still have ambitions. We still get excited about new things. We still make plans for what we want to do “when we grow up.” And then life occasionally hands us indisputable evidence that quite a bit of time has passed. I can tell you that two children going to college at once definitely qualifies as one of those moments. It’s hard to deny your age when you carry boxes into the very same Harvard freshman dorm you once lived in and move your 19-year-old daughter into her new room on the very same floor on which you once lived as a college freshman (yes—this was quite the coincidence). In that moment, you are forced to confront the reality that a lot of time has passed since you attended college.

Perhaps that is also part of what brings patients into a plastic surgeon’s office at certain moments in their lives. It isn’t necessarily that they are afraid of aging. Often, they are simply surprised by it. They look in the mirror and feel that the face looking back at them has gotten ahead of the person they still feel themselves to be. They aren’t necessarily asking to look 25. In fact, most of my patients specifically tell me that they don’t want that. They want to look rested. They want to look refreshed. They want to look like themselves.

Good plastic surgery shouldn’t erase the evidence that you have lived. It shouldn’t attempt to turn back the clock to a life you have already outgrown. The goal, at least as I see it, is not to remove the milestones. It is to help the outside remain in harmony with the person living inside it.

Many milestones are actually worth wearing proudly. The lines around our eyes may come partly from aging, but they also come from years of smiling. Changes in our bodies may reflect pregnancies, children, weight fluctuations, illness, stress, and simply decades of living. The face I see in the mirror today isn’t the face I had when my children were babies. but I wouldn’t trade the years between those two faces to get the old one back.

But that doesn’t mean I have to love every wrinkle. There is room for both gratitude and vanity, acceptance and intervention. We can appreciate the privilege of getting older while still coloring our hair, using Botox, applying sunscreen, exercising, having surgery, or doing whatever makes us feel our best. Wanting to look good is not the same thing as wishing our lives hadn’t happened.

This week, as I unpack boxes, make dorm beds, and inevitably discover something important I forgot to buy, I suspect I will feel a little older than I did last week. But I also hope I remember what a privilege that is. Getting older means getting to see what happens next. It means watching the little people we once walked into nursery school walk onto college campuses on their own. It means seeing them develop ideas, friendships, independence, and lives that increasingly belong to them rather than to us. It means recognizing that while one chapter of motherhood may be ending, another is beginning.

Plastic surgery can soften a line, lift what gravity has lowered, and sometimes make the reflection in the mirror feel a little more familiar. But it can’t and shouldn’t erase the milestones. Those are the things we earned. And as I leave two college campuses this week, probably crying behind very good sunglasses, I may feel older. But I also suspect I will feel incredibly lucky. n

At Preminger Plastic Surgery, we are committed to educating our patients and providing personalized care tailored to their unique needs. For those considering plastic surgery, we offer guidance every step of the way to help you achieve your aesthetic and wellness goals. Dr. Preminger is a board-certified plastic surgeon with degrees from Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia.

For more information or to schedule a consultation, please visit premingermd.com or call 212-706-1900. Follow us on Instagram @premingerplasticsurgery.