THE FACE OF A TEENAGER

Friday

11 Likes, 2 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "Friday"

My face has decided to break out as if I am fifteen years old. For the last two weeks, I've been using a mixture of ground flax seed and tea tree oil to wash my face with every night. I was going to tell you all about how it's doing wonders for my skin, but I woke up this morning with a giant painful zit in the middle of my cheek. I've sat at my desk all day thinking about how I was going to pop it when I got home from work. It will be the second thing I do when I get home (the first is to let Josephine out and baby talk to her about what a good puppy dog she is). The pimple could be the result of a clay max I used on my face the day before, ironic since it was marketed for acne prone skin. 

Two weeks ago I woke up with large welty bug bites all over my body. There's a bite on my neck that I at first thought was a hickey. I got kind of thrilled about that since I'm forty one years old and I've never had a hickey. It is a bug bite. Not a hickey. Since I was the only one being bit, I decided that I had scabies or bed bugs or both. This was also around the same time that we found two ticks on Josephine and I washed one tick off my body in the shower. I treated the dog with her flea medicine, washed all of the blankets and vacuumed my mattress. I've started coating myself in lavender oil before going to bed. I smell like someone's crazy old spinster southern aunt. Her name is Aunt Myrtle and everything in her tiny bungalow is floral print and covered with lace doilies. There's a vase of dead roses on the side table in the foyer.  

The bug bite thing happens to me every Spring, even before I had a dog sleeping in my bed. If you look back through my Google chats with Talaura, you will come across multiple conversations where I fret about bed bugs and Talaura talks me off my psychosis ledge and assures me that I do not have bed bugs. Or scabies. I am just that blood type that bugs find to be delicious. It might be because I've avoided DEET products for years because DEET on my body produces a wicked itchy rash. My skin has been sensitive since birth. The acne thing though is fairly new. I mean I've been known to get a pimple here and there and I sure do love those Biore strips, but the current version of acne is new to me. Oh, I am fully aware that this is a thing that starts to happen at my age. It is just one symptom of a few others that started showing up about a year ago. 

I know what this teenage brand of acne is signaling and it doesn't include a ticket to prom.