all the other moms are getting botox

by Leigh Cuen

I made a pact with my best mom friend, Linda, that we’ll get facelifts and injectables together in a few decades (if our bank accounts cooperate). She heard it’s cheaper in South Korea or Colombia. At least, that’s what she told me while we were getting ready to visit a gallery in San Diego to see a new exhibition of art quilts. I was curious about fabric arts and Linda was always down to try something new together.

“It’s only $7,000 in Seoul or Bogotá,” Linda said as she pulled on black leggings. “My boss seemed like she might be excited for me when I asked about a promotion,” Linda smirked. “But, then again, she has so much Botox and filler it’s hard to tell if she’s actually excited.” I almost snorted.

It was a winter day so sunny that we only needed light jackets and sunglasses. I buttoned my jeans while we gossiped, casting my gaze out the hotel window at a pair of ducks floating across the bay. Palm trees swayed in the cool breeze. Leafy shadows danced across our balcony. The echo of the waves against the shore hummed to us like a lullaby.

I applied my mascara with deliberate strokes and tried not to fixate on the fine lines around my eyes. Nothing strikes fear into my heart quite like seeing my mother’s wrinkled neck and then viewing my own reflection. In the year after I gave birth, I noticed my own relationship to the mirror changing, shifting as sleep deprivation, new motherhood, and economic trade-offs altered what beauty maintenance meant in my life. It takes hours of coordinating childcare and family favors in order for me to make it to the gym once a week and to the hair salon four times a year. This trip to the quilt exhibition with Linda? It took us months to both coordinate childcare.

Linda has lines around her eyes that match my own, even though all the other moms are already getting Botox. I know this is mathematically untrue, since a quick internet search showed the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery estimates only 2.5 million American women get Botox every year. I looked this up on the way to San Diego because it felt like Linda and I know so many women who now casually talk about spending more on their faces than their cars. Even when I go to a beauty salon in a quasi-rural, relatively low-income area, women in their 20s are evangelizing the necessity of regular injections.

It’s the MILFs, especially, who are normalizing  ungodly expensive (and potentially risky) beauty maintenance at an even faster rate than egg-price inflation. When I corner women who have the breezy confidence of ageless creatures with skin like freshly ironed silk, asking how they afford routine injectables in addition to daycare or the landlord’s latest ransom note, they let out a little sigh. “It’s not cheap,” they admit, especially vixens without husbands. “But it’s the only way to avoid ever getting wrinkles.”

My bank account was bleeding out from aesthetic inflation that day when we went to San Diego, even without needles. So there I stood in the hotel room, clutching my moisturizer like a talisman, wondering if the memo went out while I was busy aging: Am I letting myself go if I don’t dream of impersonating a vampire?

My eyes slid over to Linda, a veteran nurse, and I wondered if, like me, she’s waiting because she’s nervous about the fine print risks like muscle weakness, facial paralysis, vision problems, trouble speaking and swallowing. (Forgive my love of oxygen and water, although I think both might be desirable in old age.) As a journalist with an obsessive personality, of course I’ve been reading up on this during late nights of wrestling with breastmilk, phone in one hand and pump in the other. Apparently there’s a whole field of science, called psychodermatology or psychocutaneous medicine, devoted to the connection between our minds and skin, because, of course there is. Once I knew that I couldn’t stop scrolling through articles about it. Skin is our way to connect with the world and define reality. (“Pinch me,” we say when life feels too good to be true.) When your face flushes if you get angry, or get a compliment from your crush, that’s the brain-skin connection. I’d like all my bullshit to stay connected.

Even though I’m terrified of the potential side effects, not getting Botox has its own horrors. With the weekly hours of exercise and wax and makeup and manicures and hair-coloring touchups and skincare rituals of my pre-baby life now out of reach, Botox and fillers seem like the only fast way to stay sexy. Linda and I have settled on just looking like villainous swamp creatures most of the time, at least compared to the stay-at-home moms at the morning dropoff. Still, we relished the minutes we could spend with the mirror (and no screaming children) before leaving the hotel that morning for the quilt exhibition.

“Is it weird that, even having everything we used to want, families and careers and loving partners and enough money not to worry about the damn groceries, it still doesn’t feel like enough?” I asked Linda in a voice that halted and stuttered. It felt blasphemous to say it out loud.

“You’re asking why becoming a mother didn’t fill you with eternal serenity? I think that’s normal,” Linda answered.

We enjoyed a few minutes of comfortable silence, the type that can only be shared with intimate friends. After a while, I sighed and turned to face her.

“Getting way hotter would help,” I said.

“Definitely,” she agreed.

When Linda and I wandered through the quilt exhibition in San Diego, it struck me how I would also describe some of the artists themselves as beautiful, although nothing about them could be described as tight and perky. Beauty is as much a feeling as it is a visual experience. And there is so much to look forward to in the decades after fertility, if we’re lucky enough to get there, like the creativity that comes with financial freedom.

When I returned home to Nashville, I invited my mom to a quilt exhibition at Frist Art Museum. Though I was no longer breastfeeding, I still spent hours up late at night unable to return to sleep after a midnight tantrum, and I’d used that time to gather as many facts as I could about quilting. I discovered that there are more than a dozen museums across the country dedicated to quilting. The nonprofit Studio Art Quilt Associates, Inc. represents more than 4,000 artists and collectors, mostly mature women. The Modern Quilt Guild has 18,000 members, including many from New Zealand, South Africa, and France. The deeper my research went, the more it started to feel directed, like a rough dirt path rather than random scrolling.

The Frist exhibition featured the fiber artist Bisa Butler, whose arresting quilt portraits of Black people are often so expansive they conquer entire museum walls. I stood next to one such piece, dwarfed as it towered above me and stretched in both directions, then watched a video of this mother-artist describing her artistic process for the piece "To God and Truth.” This quilt recreates an 1889 photograph of the Morris Brown College baseball team. I loved the light blue polka dot sky and the neon-colored fabrics used to illuminate the shadows of the players’ faces, green and orange and fuchsia. Butler’s beauty struck me as well. She had graying hair and perfectly arched eyebrows, and her voice sounded like a marble column, unshakable, tall, and independent.

“She’s a mother too! Two daughters! She’s in her 50s,” my mom squawked, loud enough to echo across the whole gallery. “Shhh, Mom, just watch and listen,” I whispered.

When I texted Linda about the museum, she humbled me as swiftly as a kick to the knees. “You’re so lucky to have support,” Linda texted me back, referencing the husband at home while I pondered art quilts and my mother, who drove me to the museum then would relish watching my son afterwards while I wrote about the damn quilts. My writings about quilts were an unpaid hobby project, hard to justify even to myself. Yet there I was, wrinkling my nose at my mother’s skin, regardless of the money she spent putting me through private school instead of spending wads of cash on Botox and a neck lift. There I was, admiring quilts and films while shushing my own mother beside me, a supportive woman who had only been eager to share my pleasure. I texted back a “100%” emoji and thanked my mother out loud for giving me the day off parenting.

No one looking at the gallery video and exhibit would call it glamorous, but I felt more captivated in that moment than I ever have by the sight of a gorgeous pop star at a concert, or any other spectacle of womanly beauty. “Give me a minute, I’ll catch up,” I told my mom, after thanking her. She wandered on to the next exhibit. The stitches mapped a scene I’d never seen before, although the baseball portrait still felt familiar somehow. Maybe it was just years of seeing my brother’s baseball paraphernalia? I couldn’t say. Standing there, a hollow wind seemed to echo in my chest, a rare moment of quiet after months of postpartum noise. Beyond my late-night research, I didn’t yet know much about art quilts, but I knew that many of them were made by hands much older and steadier than my own. I stood there simply breathing.

It’s common for art quilters to be mothers who started sewing as a domestic chore or hobby, many without higher education. There are certainly quilters with formal training, but this subculture is more focused on the artworks themselves and remains open to self-taught craftswomen. The discipline is still too young and niche to embody many of the traditional art world’s nepotism and snobbery. Since visiting these two exhibits, I’ve become sincerely convinced women get hotter with age. The stereotypes about frumpy women in ‘mom jeans’ with ‘mom haircuts’ and every other pejorative the word ‘mom’ conjures are used to demean lower and middle class women who prioritize putting their limited resources towards their children’s health. I asked the AI chat app on my phone: What does scientific research say about what age women are most likely to be happy?

It turns out that researchers at the University of Melbourne found in 2017 that post-menopausal women become happier as they get older. Women in these studies were more optimistic after 60, with higher self-esteem, a sense of freedom plus clarity of thought. A lot of the women visiting these quilt exhibits alongside me were around that age, chatting and smiling with friends quietly as they observed the displays. Most quilters come from generations before Botox became default beauty maintenance. Although it was before my time, my mother had already graduated from law school by the time quilters were considered true artists.

After seeing a few exhibits, I started reaching out to fabric artists and asking for interviews for a creative writing grad school project. Most ignored my emails, and it took Herculean efforts to squeeze phone calls into my short lunch breaks at work. The few quilters I got on the line recommended history books that I ordered with the zeal of a woman whose credit cards were barely short of maxing out from all those anti-wrinkle creams and facials.

I read that American quilters got their first collective ego boost when an art critic named Patricia Mainardi praised the genre in Feminist Art Journal in 1973. It all snowballed from there. It wasn’t long until magazines and museums popped up across the country, such as Fiberarts Magazine in 1975, then Quilters’ Journal in 1977, followed by the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles opening that same year, on the heels of an art quilts exhibition at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Arts. Here’s what I love about the history of art quilts: No one is racing the clock. There isn’t any rush among quilters to make a mark on the art world before turning 40, as if women turn into pumpkins when the clock strikes midnight on their birthday. Most of modern art’s legendary women, like Marina Abramović, had to choose between homemaking and having careers. Not quilters.

For example, self-taught quilter Rosie Lee Tompkins, a maid from a family of sharecroppers, became one of the genre's rising stars when she garnered her own solo exhibition at the San Francisco Craft and Folk Art Museum in 1987. She was 51 years old. While I was getting my first newspaper bylines in 2020, a New York Times art critic finally recognized Tompkins as "one of the great American artists” creating "the century’s major artistic accomplishments.”

Maybe I’m fascinated with Tompkins’ work because I’m terrified that only young, pretty women can become successful artists. By the time an artist reaches menopause, she’s either already made it or flopped, in most cases. If I spend my youth raising a son, will I have missed my chance to gain any artistic recognition by the time he’s grown? Probably. But studying quilters like Tompkins (a mother of five) gives me hope there may be a few lucky outliers or a pixie dust solution I could wield myself.

These days, art quilts sometimes sell for tens of thousands of dollars each, which I find deeply satisfying since for most of history women’s skilled labor wasn’t valued with paper and coins.  When I asked Linda about seeing more fabric art exhibits, we had no shortage of options. Our only limitations were, of course, childcare and funds. We do, after all, need to at least try to save up something for those international facelift trips.

Another aspect of the quilting world that I adore is there’s no imperative for quilters to achieve fame or fortune at all. Every once in a while an ordinary grandmother will submit a heart-stopping quilt to a show, garner well-deserved respect from her fellow textile artists, then return to her quiet life without chasing anything more. Is there anything more enviable than being creative and skilled yet not needing fame or degrees for validation, no metaphorical pinky finger in the air? These grandmas are the ultimate baddies.

Among the mothers who answered my emails, and eventually got on the phone with me, was Kathleen McCabe, one of the quilters with pieces on display at the exhibition I visited with Linda. I asked her about motherhood, art, and maturity.

“Can you tell me how you became an artist?” I asked. It’s not uncommon to meet a quilter who started her artistic practice after 40, launching a second career that continues to evolve for the rest of her life. That was the case with McCabe, who often spends more than 500 hours on a single quilt.

I tried to imagine what my life will look like after my son is grown and the mortgage paid off, but all that stretched out before me was a sea of empty blackness. So I listened carefully, the phone pressed against my ear as my son hollered beyond the wooden office door. My mother chased him down the hallway.

By the time I reach what everyone calls 'ripe old age,' as if women were peaches left too long on the counter, retirement might be a fantasy. Yet I still clutch the dream with both hands. Sure, the economy is spiraling into chaos and I’m spending heaps of money on my neck skin, but it could happen, someday, I might not have to work quite so much. At least, as of today, it’s great to see thousands of mature women from modest means making money by traveling to art shows, giving educational workshops and making historic exhibits across the country after their children are fully grown. Maybe I don’t need to dread aging? I asked McCabe if she’s happier now than when she was younger.

“I can define myself today more as a person rather than being defined by my roles, wife or daughter or mother. My expectations and opinions of myself aren’t shaped by responsibilities to other people. Now it’s myself that I please or disappoint. I can take risks,” McCabe replied, adding that being a professional artist after 60 feels light years away from her younger life, when she had fewer resources for nourishing her own body and spirit.

She loves using photographs of her children and grandchildren as inspiration for her quilt portraits. For the cheeky portrait of her grandson in varying shades of orange that Linda and I saw in San Diego, titled “High Voltage” for the fact he was clearly toddling toward an electrical box with a high voltage warning, she ironed hand-cut pieces of fabric into a strategic web before sewing the cloth mosaic together. That quilt made me smile because it reminded me of my own son, who constantly endangers himself with various electronics (despite my vigilant efforts).

I typed as she spoke, trying not to be distracted by the veins already mapping my age from my fingers down to my wrists. Had I applied sunscreen that day? Hands can age faster than faces because we routinely wash away protective sunscreen. I chided myself, then jerked my attention back to the phone and the wisdom I’d begged from a stranger.

I knew that if I texted this to Linda she’d roll her eyes and offer some type of polite acknowledgement, but then snicker about my habit of spiraling into obsession to distract from my own insecurities. So I asked McCabe even more detailed questions, determined to find a fact so impressive that Linda would consider it perfectly reasonable that I, a journalist who doesn’t sew and doesn’t get paid to write about quilts, skipped lunch in order to ask an artist about an exhibit I saw months ago.

While I don’t sew or consider myself a visual artist, I loved learning about the history of quilts as much as I admired the artworks themselves in both the San Diego gallery and at the Frist. McCabe’s path to museum exhibitions reminded me that it might be possible to be an artsy heroine with thick silver hair many years after I’ve paid for my son’s (hilariously expensive) education. She doesn’t look young, but her happiness makes her radiant. The simplicity of confidence paired with high cheekbones is elegant AF.

In terms of what could be considered my chosen art, which has very little to do with fabric, I’ve written fewer poems and stories since my son was born. Collapsing into bed after a long work day is now my routine. I’ve also spent less on my hair, skin, and waist than I did before the birth of my son, all of which decreases my sexual capital in an economy where, frankly, I need all the capital I can get my stubby-nailed hands on. Cutting back on work outside the home, to focus on the proverbial domestic queendom, costs me cash upfront, plus a potential fortune in unearned raises and opportunities later. On one hand, the extra money I’m not earning could’ve paid for a petrified forehead. On the other, when I bask in the brilliant warmth of my baby’s smile, I still can’t imagine ever regretting that trade-off.

When I look into his stormy blue eyes, caress his wispy golden brown curls, pinch his chubby knees, I’m certain no mountain or ocean or canyon could ever be as striking as this beautiful boy. I don’t want to miss one minute of these short years. If my love of art is a worship of beauty, truth, deeply emotional experiences, and triumphs over unique yet timeless challenges, then nothing could be a more profound source of artistic inspiration than raising children.

There is, of course, nothing that makes Botox and loving relationships, or a creative life, for that matter, mutually exclusive. Yet acknowledging the tradeoffs felt shallow or ungrateful, as if being a professional loudmouth Feminist with a capital ‘F’ was supposed to make me confident enough not to crave external validation or fleeting pleasures beyond my already considerable privileges. Nope.

After interviewing McCabe, I thought back to that bright winter day in San Diego, seeing Linda again for the first time since she visited my newborn. As we strolled from the museum to nearby art galleries, I finally gained the courage to voice my own insecurities about how motherhood had changed my life.

“Maybe someday I can afford to prioritize art again, but there are just so many fucking responsibilities,” I told Linda. “Is that it? Hoping you don’t croak before the mortgage is paid off and the kids are grown?”

“Pretty much,” she replied. We both laughed until our cheeks hurt.

Until then, I close my eyes and remember our last adventure together in San Diego. Linda and I both wore black that day, although our unkempt roots with streaks of grey were obvious. Our lips were practically naked under just a sheen of slick balm. Linda has a million freckles on her cheeks and is prone to throwing back her head in sudden bursts of boisterous laughter. She’s a tall and curvy nurse with a decade of high-pressure emergency room experience that trained her brown eyes not to miss a single detail. When we ventured outside the resort, we saw a lone yellow butterfly visiting a fuzzy purple flower.

Several fluffy and well-groomed dogs pranced around their Botoxed owners on the sidewalk. The women walked as if stomping down a runway. Their plump, glossed lips were all set in a uniformly tight line, hair blown out smooth and freshly bleached, no hint of roots. Literally every single one of them was wearing black Lululemon pants.

There’s nothing funny about women taking pride in their health and self-expression. Looking good is, if we’re being honest, how a lot of us get the attention we need to make money. That’s not cynicism, it’s just reality. Since my time and money are both finite, I have to ask myself how much I’m investing in my body’s aesthetics compared to other facets of my ever-changing self. Having boobs is great but being a woman is beyond exhausting.

In contrast to the dog owners in San Diego, the women at the quilt show had frizzy hair and wore floral patterns or denim. They smiled easily, swaying as they moved, the skin around their eyes crinkling as they asked us how far we’d traveled to visit the exhibit. Their lack of performative posturing set us at ease. Linda and I spent the day strolling through galleries, giggling with the luxurious peace of women who didn't care how anyone else perceived us at that moment, together. “Check out this quilt!” Linda pointed. “Oooh, that’s a good one.” Later on, the sunset was a creamy orange, slow and warm.

If David Attenborough’s voice broke the silence, the narrator would say: Here sits the millennial basic bitch in her Frida Kahlo socks and Lululemon leggings, staring into the sunset while pondering whether beauty goes beyond skin-deep youth. Observe how the white wine in her glass dwindles as her urge to yammer grows ever stronger. The aging female feeds on useless chatter with a friend as time continues marching on, regardless of what the yapping females may have to say about it.

Whether or not I end up someday getting Botox like all the other moms, the outcome of spiraling into a quilt art vortex for a few months is that now I’m actually excited about getting older. As both Butler and McCabe showed me, knowing oneself is sexy as hell. Watching my family mature while embracing all that life has to offer, at each stage, is worth every wrinkle I may be lucky enough to earn. I was so reactive and ignorant in my 20s. I wouldn’t want to stay frozen in that phase forever.

Change is always happening. Stillness is only a seductive illusion. We are all piecing ourselves together, decade after decade. Aging is not the end of beauty, but rather allows its deepest expression.

BIO: Leigh Cuen is the music editor at The Tennessean. Her writings have been published by Forbes, TechCrunch, Vice, Playboy, Business Insider, Earth Island Journal, San Francisco Public Press, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, Salon, Al Jazeera English, The Los Angeles Times, History Today, The Jerusalem Post, World Literature Today, Poetica Magazine and more. She won The Nomad Review’s Best Essay contest in 2025 for her piece “Wild Horses.” Follow her work via leighcuen.substack.com.