Sensitive skin

The other night during dinner, Nathan looked at me and said, “What’s up with your face?” I looked at him for a couple of seconds and debated how to respond because I didn’t quite know what he was talking about.

“Your zits,” he said, “what’s going on there?”

Ugh. As if I could explain that one. Leave it to a man to point it out though. I remember a similar incident with my dad when I was a teenager. I was sitting across from him at the dinner table when he noticed a particularly nasty growth on my forehead and said, ‘That’s quite a big zit you have there.”

I immediately retaliated and said to him, “Really? That’s quite a bald head you have there.”

So I guess I’m a little sensitive about my zits, especially since I can’t understand how I can be 36 years old and still break out like some hormonal teenager.

I did have two glorious zit-free years tough. For some reason they were gone from the time I got pregnant until early last spring. Then pop! pop! pop! they came back like cousin Eddie from the Vacation movies, one moment a happy memory thousands of miles away and the next moment parking his ugly Winnebago outside the house and emptying his chemical toilet in the sewer.

Before I got pregnant they were pretty bad, so much so that I tried Proactiv, not realizing that buying something endorsed by a woman who thinks buffalo wings actually come from buffaloes might not work. While it did help some, the Proactiv didn’t eradicate the zits like I had hoped and didn’t seem worth the expense in the long run.

Then I got pregnant and got sore boobs and fell asleep every night at 7:30 pm, but the zits were gone. They were gone and I saw nary a blemish for nearly two years. Two years! Then some kind of hormonal shift took place and I was right back to where I started, in my mid-thirties standing in front of a mirror popping zits. Yeah, I know I’m not supposed to pop them but I do. And if you have zits you do, too. Don’t even try to convince me otherwise.

It seems the zits are worse now, showing up in places I’d never seen them before. They flare up right before my period, kind of like how dogs and cats go all crazy before an earthquake because they know something really bad is about to happen. I guess the zits are my body’s early warning system.

I’d much rather a siren go off instead.