Having had my first child at 17, I had grown accustomed these past 2 decades or so of people exclaiming "oh my, I can't believe you have a 2yo, 10yo, teenager", etc..... In those early years, I was truly annoyed at this - in my late teens and early 20's, I saw these comments as an aspersion on my competence as a parent. As time went on, slowly, the irritation morphed into a sad dependence on people telling me what a young mother (ie. young Looking) I was.
Are we not supposed to get more and more comfortable with our bodies/looks as we get older?
I wasn't consciously aware of this dependence until those comments started slowing down.
The first time it happened I brushed it off. But it keeps happening! It started like this:
I declared my status as a grandmother to someone the other day, after which I inserted a little pause. [This pause is supposed to be space for the other person to look taken aback, widen their eyes and say "Holy cow! I cannot believe you are a grandmother! No way!" "Way" I would respond with a slight roll of my eyes to show how fatigued I am to hear this again.]
Anyway, the pause just floated there in between us. Apparently this woman had not been given the script. "Aaawww, " she said "How old are they?" What? Never mind that! How about how old I am, or more accurately how NOT old I am to be a grandmother? Well, she just didn't get it and the conversation alarmingly, just went on from there. I couldn't even concentrate on what she was saying. Blah, blah, blah was all I heard coming out of the mouth of this woman who obviously thought that I looked like a grandmother. OK, so this has happened a few times since then and I now have to come to terms with my age and grandmother status catching up with each other one day soon....like last month.
I wonder if I can approach it the way parents of preemies calculate the age of their babies by subtracting the time from when they were supposed to be born from the time they were actually born? So, I would say: Hi, I'm Suzanne. I am a grandmother, 10 years adjusted."

You know, it's not like I have wrinkles. Wrinkles are supposed to be the hallmark of looking old. Well, in my family, they're not. My mother's 65 year old face has nary a line on it. No, the women in my family don't crease. We droop.
This means that I cannot use an eyelash curler anymore because the thing keeps pinching the skin on my eyelids that is now hanging a few millimetres lower.
My "jowls" for lack of a better term are well, now Here. I don't remember having jowls before. I look like a sad hound dog.
And the freckles!! Good Lord. I know this is sun exposure. 7 years living as a child in the Caribbean + 35 Canadian summers (25 of which was lived in ignorance of the value of SPF) = a face full of "dots" as my children used to call them when they were small. Now they call them Connect the Dots. Smart Asses. There isn't enough concealer in the universe to mask them.

Here is another equation for you: 5 babies, all carried to Belly-Skin Busting term and birthed vaginally in One Screaming Push, that I think put a tear in the fabric of time, never mind my poor perineum = stretch marks from bottom to top, saggy stomach skin and pathetic pelvic floor muscles.
Some of you will say that the flip side to that equation is:
20 years of Excess eating - the 100 Kegels per day that I should be dong - the 3 sets of Ab crunches I should also be doing daily = the stretch marks, sagginess and occasional incontinence.
For those of you, who would say That, I say to you: Whatever........