i remember when my mom went to school with me on a field trip in the fifth or sixth grade and she had to forcefully argue that she was actually my mother, and not my teenaged sister.

she would have been in her late 30s.

and, then she got shadowed by all the girls in the class, who couldn't quite get over it, and interpreted her as a teenaged sister, anyways.

i have fifty year old aunts that could easily pass as twenty something.

and, my grandmother managed to make it to 75 without looking a day over 40.

my mother has actually become the exception, due to her habits. heavy tobacco & alcohol use, plus a heroin problem leading to years worth of methodone addiction, have let her age in ways that almost nobody else in the family has.

but, this is a place where genes matter. and, i can expect to at least look young, for quite a while, still.