By Melanie Dale
@melanierdale

My husband gave me a nose hair trimmer for Christmas. That’s how you know you’re middle-aged. The worst part was I had already bought one for myself a few weeks earlier.

My favorite book when I was little was Old Hat, New Hat. I loved the too lumpy too bumpy hats and that the bear tried on all the hats only to discover he preferred his old one. When I read the story to my kids when they were little, I’d emphasize the words at the end.

“New hat?” Shake my head no.
“Ollllld hat.” Smile and nod.

They’d grin with me. Sometimes old was better. I feel that way about the same old sneakers I’ve bought probably ten pairs of at this point.

We chose the neighborhood we live in for many reasons, most importantly because it has a summer swim team. I grew up swimming on my neighborhood team and wanted that for my kids. Every morning we’d make our way to the pool and I’d sip coffee with my friends while we watched our kids do laps and practice relays. One by one, our kids grew up enough to ride their bikes to the pool themselves, and our poolside mom group grew smaller.

My son started on summer league and now swims year-round and for the high school team as well. My girls eventually chose other things, but all three swam on the team each summer, up until the C-word shut us down.

When we emerged from our hibernation a couple years later and the team cranked back up, I looked around the pool and realized something had changed. It may have happened gradually, but because we’d missed a couple years for King C, the change was jarring. My eyes darted from face to super fresh face of the moms helping their swimmers into goggles and caps and I thought, “New moms.” Then I looked inward. “Olllllld mom.”

I didn’t smile and nod. I was horrified. Had the plawndermic stolen my youth? Was it my StUpiD cAnCeR JouRnEy? I remembered when Lindsey Lohan switched bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis in Freaky Friday and looked in the mirror and screamed, “I look like the Crypt Keeper!” Did someone press fast forward on life?

No, it was just the regular procession of time swimming along. For years I’d felt new and young and inexperienced and looked to the older moms with their teens and know-how. I never noticed when my kids started putting on their own goggles and biking themselves to the pool and becoming teenagers, and I never noticed that I was the old mom.

Old mom!
OLLLLLLD MOOOOMMMMM!
(echo echo echoooo)
(flock of birds flies off)

I looked closer. Their skin was glowier and they didn’t look tired at 8 a.m. and they didn’t have bags under their eyes and their boobs still had elasticity. One mom bent down to help her kid stretch on a swim cap then stood back up without even making an “oof!” sound.

I didn’t know to appreciate being a young mom when I was one, and by the time I realized I was old it was too late.

All my friends who started out together when our littles were still barely making it across the pool in the six-and-under age group have grown up together alongside our kids. Now when we get together, instead of talking about kindergarten and naps, we commiserate about our own fluctuating hormones and weird chin hairs. (I don’t have nose hairs anymore. Merry Christmas to me.)

Two seconds ago we were discussing sleep training our kids, and now we share tips for stringing together more than two hours of sleep for ourselves. Our kids all sleep through the night, but it doesn’t matter because between our bladders and night sweats, we don’t anymore.

We were just slathering our littles with sunscreen and now we’re comparing which sunscreen has the right amount of shimmer to smooth over fine lines and make our skin look more hydrated. Jamie Lee Curtis doesn’t look like the Crypt Keeper. She looks like hashtag aging goals and the older I get, the younger she seems.

Last year my husband and I had season tickets to the theatre with two other couples, and we always tried a different restaurant for dinner beforehand. One month as the waiter passed out menus, several of us exclaimed that the restaurant was too dark to see the menus. No matter how hard I squinted, I couldn’t see the words. My friend laughed and handed me her readers and suddenly the words leapt off the page.

Oh. It wasn’t too dark. My eyes were officially too old.

We’re losing our ability to see up close, and one day on a walk with my friends, I brought up the problem of armpit shaving. “Can you guys see your own armpits anymore? They’re just blurred out for me, and I wonder if I’m missing spots when I shave.”

They admitted they can’t see theirs either, and we agreed to look out for each other and say something if we see long hairs trailing out of each other’s pits.

You know you’re middle-aged when you’re making a pact to help each other with pit hair. But seriously, what are we supposed to do? Wear our readers in the shower?

Our kids don’t need us at swim practice anymore. They’re driving or in college or married. We meet early at the pool for our own swim practice, which we call Hot Girl Swim Club. The one rule of Hot Girl Swim Club: no one swims alone. And we aren’t. We have each other, friends now for so long that it’s an honor and honestly, kind of a joy to age together. Our kids grew up together and so have we. We strap on our goggles and caps and do laps and talk about whatever we want because, and this is the best part, we have no one who needs watching except each other.

New moms? Ollllld moms. I smile and nod.

Melanie Dale is the author of four books, Women Are Scary, It’s Not Fair, Infreakinfertility, and Calm the H*ck Down. She’s a writer for the TV series Creepshow, a monthly contributor for Coffee + Crumbs, and her essays are published in The Magic of Motherhood. She has appeared on Good Morning America and has been featured in articles in Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, The Bump, Working Mother, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the Los Angeles Times. To get out of the office, she spent the last few years shambling about as various zombies on The Walking Dead. She and her husband live in the Atlanta area with three kids from three different continents and an anxious Maltipoo named Khaleesi.

Photo by Jennifer Floyd.