"What the hell happened to me?"
I used to be invulnerable to age. Birthdays bounced off me like bullets off Superman. I would stand, fists on hips, and laugh at them as they ricocheted off my rippled abs and rattled around on Time's floor.
At thirty-nine, I looked as though I had just walked off the stage of my college graduation. My flesh was taut as a tambourine's skin, my muscles marble-firm, and the one or two gray hairs that had ventured out knew to stay hidden beneath their less traitorous brethren.
Immortality, my destination.
Three brief years later, my mirror showed lines around my eyes like cracks in cheap porcelain. My facial skin was melting earthward. Once-exuberant muscles now lay back with their feet up, swaddled in softer tissue. Someone had run chalked fingers through my hair, and, in a bitter irony, my forehead now encroached on my hairline while new hairs sprouted from formerly unfollicled parts of my body.
What caused this strange, sudden collapse? What phenomenon changed the laws of my Universe?
The answer leaped into my brain later that day when my two-year-old daughter, Emily, ran screaming into the bedroom during my afternoon nap. I am going to share that answer with you now:
We have been invaded.
Children are not human. They are alien beings sent here from some jealous, less upscale planet--possibly Neptune. They sap our life-force and transmit it to their home world by some unknown means (possibly screaming, which I'm sure can be heard at least that far). Nighttime feedings, colic, potty training--these are only a few of their weapons. Those previously inexplicable temper tantrums now resolve into focus: more life-force sucked from us, and another ache or wrinkle left to mark its passing. This is the true reason why single folks can stay out dancing until 2 a.m. while we parents fall asleep during Leno's monologue. (Well, one of the reasons, anyway.)
There is no predicting when the invasion will end; reliable sources tell me it has been going on for at least two generations. At some point, our children will evolve into normal humans, but my sources warn me this doesn't happen until well after the teen years.
Ultimately, it makes no difference, as you know if you are a parent. This war is already lost. I don't care that these creatures tugging at our pant legs form the beachhead of an interplanetary invasion; nor that every swallowed Lego, every sandwich in the VCR, and every goldfish "taken out to play" motivates me to make another payment on my cemetery plot.
Because when Emily clomps around the house hunched over in her "dinosaur walk," or carries my earplugs away because she "loves ta stwish 'em," or just falls asleep in my arms, I realize something else:
Immortality--who needs it?