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Grown Kids Are Confessing Online That Their Mom Has "Old Lady Smell."

I'm 68. I'm a clean person. I shower every single day.

But most of my sense of smell went during Covid, and it never came back.

At 2 a.m. I was on a forum where grown kids talk about their aging moms.

Hundreds of posts.

Grown sons and daughters, all writing about their own mothers.

I kid you not, I found my own family in post after post. I read until my eyes burned.

Then, about forty posts down, I found one I'm almost sure my own son wrote.

I turned the iPad face down on the quilt, like it could see me.

I pulled the covers up to my chin. My husband, Ron, was snoring right next to me.

I lay there in the dark with tears running into my ears, biting my lip so he wouldn't hear.

A son in Indiana. This is what he wrote:

Skylights.

My son Mike lives in Indiana with his two girls.

And every time I stay over to babysit, he hurries up to my room and opens both skylights before he thinks I've noticed.

I noticed. I just never let myself think about why.

Now I knew why. The dreaded old lady smell was on me.

My greatest fear, other than dementia, has always been being a gross old lady.

And maybe I already was one, and I was the last to know.

How would I even know?? I can't smell a thing.

I just lay there staring at that post.

Was it Mike? I'll tell you.

But first I have to tell you what I found out over the next few weeks. It changed how I start every single morning.

And every woman our age should hear it before a grandchild tells her she smells.

For a Year I Told Myself Mike Just Liked Fresh Air

I used to be the grandma everybody piled onto.

My granddaughters Ellie and Grace fought over who got to sit next to me in church.

My younger son, Danny, picked me up off the ground at the front door every single time. Like I weighed nothing.

The hugs didn't stop all at once. It just got a little quieter every year.

I had an excuse for everything.

I was mortified.

And what on earth was going on?? I am the cleanest woman I know.

But I'm Clean. I Have Always Been Clean.

So I did what any of us would do. I wasn't taking any chances.

Be honest. How many of us have bought the persimmon soap? (I bought two bars.)

That Saturday I drove to the drugstore with a list.

I came home with two full bags and a feeling I hadn't had in months. I was finally doing something.

I still have the receipt.

I took a second shower before going anywhere. And before I saw the grandkids, I always sprayed on one of my best perfumes!!

For about a month, I felt better.

Then Danny's little girl said it again.

Same table, same Sunday. "Nana, you smell funny."

The whole table went quiet. Danny shushed her.

Kristen reached behind my chair and cracked the window. In February.

The cold air hit the back of my neck. Nobody looked at me.

I said "excuse me," went down the hall to Danny's bathroom and locked the door.

I pulled my blouse up to my nose. Nothing. I tried my wrist, and still nothing.

I sat on the edge of the tub with my hands shaking so hard I couldn't get my purse open.

Then, through the door, I heard Kristen whisper, "Somebody has to tell her."

And my son Mike said, "Not me."

I sat on that tub a long time.

$284.90 of soap and perfume. Not one bit of difference.

And the people I love most had just decided, in a whisper, that I'd never hear it from them.

In the car, I asked Ron, "Do I smell?"

"You smell fine, Jude." He didn't take his eyes off the road.

Ron is 70. He can't even smell the roast burning.

And if he could, he'd never say it.

On Wednesday, I texted Mike.

"Fine" is just what you say to your mother.

That was the day I quit asking the people who love me. I needed the one person who would never lie to me.

So I Asked the One Person Who Wouldn't Lie

When I was a little girl, I couldn't wait to get out of Grandma Rose's musty bedroom and into the sunshine.

Oh dear. Now I was Grandma Rose, and everybody knew but me.

So I called Marlene.

My sister is 72. She would tell you about the spinach in your teeth at a funeral.

She has never once said "you're fine" to make anybody feel better.

She was at my door by eight the next morning. I made a whole pot of coffee and never touched mine.

"Marlene," I said. "Don't be nice. Do I smell?"

She didn't answer right away.

She took a long sip of her coffee, set the cup down, and looked at me for so long that I started to hope.

Then she put her hand on mine.

I wanted to crawl under the table and stay there.

But she wasn't finished.

"Not dirty, Jude. Older. I get it some mornings too."

"The only difference between you and me is that I can still smell mine."

Then she told me the thing that explained my whole year: every window, every quick hug, every bar of soap with a bow on it.

Why We Are Always the Last to Know

"Bear with me, Jude," Marlene said. "There are two locks on this."

"Two reasons a clean woman can go a whole year and never have a clue."

Lock #1: You never smell the house you live in

"Jude, when you walk into my house, what's the first thing you smell?"

"Coffee," I said. "And that dog."

"I don't, because I live there. My nose quit reporting it years ago."

She tapped my arm. "Everybody says you get used to your own smell. That's true."

"That's exactly the problem."

Your own body is the house you never leave.

I thought about Grandma Rose in that musty bedroom with the curtains drawn. I bet she never smelled a thing in there.

And I had spent sixty years thinking she just didn't care.

Lock #2: After 60, the nose goes quiet

She set her cup down. "And the second lock is worse."

Only fresh noses catch the smell, like a grandkid, or a son hurrying upstairs to open a skylight. I still didn't know if that son was mine.

"So what's actually happening to us?" I asked.

Marlene tapped my arm. "The smell shows up out here, Jude. But it's made in here."

I looked down at my own arm like it belonged to somebody else.

"You can mop the floor all day," Marlene said.

"If the sink's still dripping, the floor's wet again in a couple of hours."

"Your shower is the mop. The drip is inside."

That's why I could shower at seven, and Mike still opened the skylights at nine.

I should have felt better. I didn't.

My nose was only going to get worse, and my skin was only going to get older.

I pictured myself at 80. Two showers a day, perfume on top, and Ellie cracking a window every time I walked in.

"So I'm stuck with it," I said. "Forever."

Marlene laughed out loud, right there at my table. "Stuck? Jude, that's exactly what they want you to think."

"Who's they?"

"Go get that persimmon soap out of your shower," she said. "I'll show you. Then I'll tell you what actually works."

The Biggest Scam Ever Sold to Grandmas Like Us

I brought her the $20 bar. She turned it over in her hand and snorted.

"Jude, this might be the biggest scam ever sold to women our age."

Back in 2001, a cosmetics lab in Japan gave the old lady smell a fancy science name. The soap companies took it from there.

They put persimmon in a bar of soap. Then they printed this right on the label, where any grandchild who uses my shower can read it:

And they charged $20 a bar.

It sold like crazy. To women like me, awake at 2 a.m., scared to death of turning into Grandma Rose.

I had two bars in my shower that very minute.

One woman in the forum wrote that her bar was "only good for about 10 minutes." Another said it made her smell like onions.

Of course it didn't work. Soap only reaches the outside, and the smell is made inside.

So the smell is back in a couple of hours, and you go buy another bar.

"You had the right idea, Jude," Marlene said. "Wrong place."

She took my receipt off the fridge, uncapped a pen, and went down it line by line.

I didn't fail. I was just fixing the wrong place.

Then Marlene tapped the receipt.

"Grandma June never bought one thing on this list, Jude. And she never smelled old a day in her life."

Why Grandma June Never Smelled Old

"Remember Sunday supper at Grandma June's?" Marlene asked.

She was Mom's mother. There'd be a roast on the good platter, and Grandma June at the head of the table, making sure we ate every bite.

Even the green stuff.

"She wasn't just feeding us, Jude. She was shutting off the drip from the inside, every single day."

Then it all went away.

Parsley turned into a garnish. The mint dish went in a yard sale, and nobody's kept slippery elm in the cupboard for fifty years.

And the big companies sold us the mop instead.

"That's the whole trick," Marlene said. "A fix sells once. Relief sells every month."

They took Grandma's table away and sold us a mop.

"So what, I eat parsley for breakfast?" I said.

"And bark tea, and green tablets nobody sells anymore? You'd quit by Thursday. I did."

Then she reached into her purse.

Grandma June's Table, in Two Strawberry Hearts

"A little family company still does it Grandma's way," she said. "Same things she put on that table. They just made it easy."

She set a pink pouch next to my coffee. It was Crave Candy, two soft strawberry hearts a day.

It had parsley, slippery elm, the green chlorophyll and peppermint. All four of Grandma June's, in a candy with no sugar.

"Two every morning," she said. "That's your shut-off. And don't you dare judge it before Easter."

Honestly? My first thought was, oh here we go. I already had $284.90 of "just in case" in my bathroom.

But this wasn't one more mop.

It was the first thing I'd ever owned for the inside, and I'd never have to sniff or ask anybody again.

Easter was seven weeks off. Danny would be standing at that same front door.

I wanted that hug back more than anything.

I ordered that night. And then I did something a little sneaky.

I Never Told My Family What I Was Doing

I didn't tell a soul. Not even Ellie, and that child can't keep a secret to save her life.

I couldn't smell a thing to check. I could only watch.

Two hearts with my coffee, every morning.

And at first? Nothing.

The next Sunday dinner, Danny's hug at the door was as quick as ever.

I came home, stood in my kitchen and thought, well, Judy, that's another $40 you'll never see again.

Marlene told me to keep going.

Honestly, I'd stopped believing in any of it by then. But what else was I going to do? Buy more soap?

Then one Sunday I got all the way to church before I realized I'd forgotten the perfume. And I didn't turn the car around.

That spring, Mike asked me to stay the weekend with the girls.

I went up to the attic room after supper, set my bag on the bed, and looked up.

Both skylights were shut.

I stood there and cried a little. Silly, I know, crying over a window.

I waited all night for the click of Mike sneaking up the stairs. It never came.

At Easter, Danny came through the same front door as in Ron's Christmas picture.

He held on. And he was breathing.

That night Ellie fell asleep on me during the movie, with her face right in my neck, the way she used to when she was little.

Which leaves Mike, and the post.

I'd promised myself I'd never ask him.

I asked him on the porch after Easter dinner, dishes still in the sink. I'm his mother, so I can't help myself.

"Mike. Did you ever write about me on the internet?"

He went red, right up to his ears, the way he did when he was nine and broke the garage window.

"I deleted it last week, Mom."

Then he hugged me, a long one, and he didn't let go first.

Like I was his mom again.

Marlene saw us through the screen door. She came out, leaned in for a hug of her own, and held on.

Then she said two words: "There she is."

I quit asking. I didn't need my nose for this anymore.

If You're Where I Was Last Winter

I think about Grandma Rose's room more than I ever thought I would. I dread Ellie remembering me that way.

Somewhere tonight, a grown son is typing "how do I tell my mom."

I'd rather yours never have to.

If I were you, I'd get the three-month box while it's still Buy 2, Get 1 Free.

My family didn't notice till Easter, and I'd hate for you to quit right before yours does.

Two hearts with your coffee tomorrow. Then watch the next hug at your front door.

A year ago Mike was sneaking upstairs to open the skylights. Last weekend he asked me to stay an extra night.

With love from my kitchen table,

P.S. If you have a sister, tell her about this. Mine told me the truth, and it gave me my family back.