Worry Lines

Last February, when I had my birthday, I got a facial at the local Aveda shop. Pattie, the woman who does facials at Aveda, has seen me about once a year for the past 10 years, so we always catch up.
This year, as she smoothed my hair off my forehead and attached a velcro headband to hold it in place she asked me my secret.
"How have you avoided worry lines between your eyebrows?" she asked, pointing to her own parentheses just above the bridge of her nose.
I shrugged. I hadn't really thought about it.
Until Friday, when I looked in the car mirror and yikes! I didn't have two parentheses between my eyebrows, I had parentheses plus a dash. That space above my nose, right before my forehead begins is now crowded with punctuation marks.

How has this happened in seven months?

I know I've been juggling funds recently with two kids in college, and, face it, money worries make some of the biggest impacts on our beauty.

Also, this whole teenager, young adult thing is having a huge impact. I used to think if I could just get a full night's sleep that everything would be wonderful. Now I know that bigger worries awaited me than getting the kids to sleep through the night.

But, with two kids away in college, my day-to-day worries about them should lessen. The one child left at home goes to school each day, works out three days a week, picks his girlfriend up from college to spend the evening at our house, and gets home by his curfew on weekends.

Okay, he did have a minor fender bender Thursday night, the night before I noticed these new marks. No damage to our car and nothing to the other car, except a loose bolt on the license plate. But the young man he bumped blew up at Tucker and made the whole scenario worse.

I'm hopeful that these parentheses will fade rather than deepen, as the year of college payments reaches its end in March, and maybe I'll have two months of a line free forehead, before the payments begin again.