FN Blog - Seven heads are better than one!

I have been many things and have done many more, but there is one thing I never thought I’d ever be.

Forty.

There, I said it, and JR will have a heart attack when he reads this.

As recently as my newfound singlehood around four years ago, JR was my partner in crime not only in living it up in the busy social circuit, but also in the devious, meticulous, strategic scheme to hide our age. For the record (and so as not to incur even more ire from him), he is much, much younger than I am.

You couldn’t blame me. Not that I was really looking, but all the men my age or older and still in circulation were either gay, married, philandering or highly dysfunctional. Where else was I to look for prime specimens but below my age bracket? And so, fearing that Samantha moment in Sex in the City where her strapping young lover says, to her horror, “Your wrinkles are so cute—why, how old are you, forty?” I had to devise ways to delude them.

Besides religiously ingesting mass quantities of moisture from jars and tubes, I connived with my wing man JR to keep our secret guarded by all means. We got so good at it, I refused to reveal my age to anyone, not even to his 11-year-old niece Celis, smart as a whip and inquisitive as hell. “I can’t understand why you won’t tell me your age,” she said, clearly annoyed, “when I told you mine!”

“Bangs are cheaper than Botox” was my motto, and still is, so some variation or another of a fringe will be here to stay. (And well, I have a wide and broad airport landing strip of a forehead that needs ample coverage). Trust me, it works—just check out the society pages, and using a Sharpie, draw bangs on all the matrons’ foreheads and see how much younger they’ll look.

“Never, ever bob your head and break into a dance step when you recognize an 80s song,” was JR’s, and he would quickly chastise me with a stern “Sssssst!” when I’d launch into Cycling Punk or Metallic Gigolo upon hearing some New Wave ditty.

“Sorry, reflex action,” I’d mutter, clasping my hands together to stop myself from carbon-dating my fossil of a self. Instead, I practiced saying “What song is that?” even if I knew the lyrics by heart from years of listening to 99.5RT back when Jeremiah Junior was the DJ.

“It’s SM, not Shoe Mart!” I’d hiss to correct him, and we subsequently traded new terms for old things: trainers, not rubber shoes; music store, not record bar; club, not disco; KFC, not Kentucky. I glared at him when he blurted out, “Eh Walkman lang naman yan!” when he first examined an iPod, which he refused to buy for the longest time, but cannot live without today.

As you can imagine, 2007 was the year I had been dreading for the last 10 years.

Wasn’t it bad enough that I had to turn 30 in 1997? In all the photos where my friends are happily shoving a cake blazing with 30 candles in front of my face, I look petrified and catatonic. That was also the year that people, officemates and strangers alike, started calling me Ms. Myrz. Ms! I begged them to drop the Ms., but no one did. Form of respect daw. Respect for elders, I suppose? Well, imagine how I feel now.

You see, in my mind, then until now, I am still 21, wide-eyed and innocent, eager to experience what the world still has to offer, despite having undergone enough challenging life experiences to make me jaded and bitter, cynical and sore.Two years ago, I finally had my dreaded Samantha moment with my own strapping younger man, AW. He said, after it was established that we had a definite, intense connection,”Don’t you think I’m too young for you?”

It shocked me, but later I learned that I had gotten it all wrong—he thought that his youth, not my age, was the detriment. And so, I finally uttered what I vowed I would never say, only because you never get the answer you like:”Why, how old do you think I am?”

And he said, “42?”

I didn’t know whether to slap him or fall off my chair.

He was a bit disappointed to learn I was younger than that, because he thought fortysomething women were hot, especially me, his biggest crush for almost a year. I had four years to live up to his ideal.

AW is now the love of my life, the kind of man I didn’t think they made anymore, who bestows appreciation, even adoration for all of me—gravity-afflicted parts, accordion creases, wobbly bits, and all.

I still struggle from time to time, but it’s AW’s love and devotion that is finally helping me come to terms with myself, my true age included. If he could love me for all my (imagined, says he) flaws, and saw much, much more than only those, why couldn’t I?

So, who am I? “You are your age” doesn’t always have to ring true, and in the end, you are as young as you think you are. But if you’re comfortable in your own skin, and truly happy with yourself, cute wrinkles and all, there’s no reason, really, to have to hide your age. And yes, in my case, older does mean wiser. It’s like I already have the answer key to most of life’s big questions—but I still want to take the test.

On my 40th birthday night, AW whisked me off to Tagaytay to treat me to a memorable night at a luxurious suite in a cozy country inn. I was delighted, but I wanted to kill him when he told Sherwin the manager it was my birthday, dreading any forthcoming surprises such as Scary Blazing Candles on a Cake, Part 2. So I had to be firm and made it clear to him: “Please, please, absolutely no candles on a cake!”

And so, after settling into our beautiful suite and taking our seats at our romantic table for two:

and dining on caviar-laden oysters fricassée, among other sensual delights: Sherwin couldn’t help himself, and gave us some free dessert: Ms.!