I have never known a woman who looked in that same mirror, announced, “Damn. I’m perfect!” and walked comfortably out the door.

We have an entire inspection process to complete first.

Is my hair too flat? Are my boobs even flatter? When did that happen to my neck? We pull the skin beside our eyes toward our ears to see what a brow lift might accomplish, although by the time we’ve pulled everything where we’d like it to be, we look as though we’re standing in a wind tunnel.

Then we turn sideways, suck in our stomachs, and announce that we’re giving up carbohydrates starting tomorrow. There is nothing we can do about today.

We try standing up straighter. We turn to the other side. We wonder whether the lighting is making things worse, or whether the lighting is the only thing keeping us from calling a plastic surgeon.

By the time we’re ready to leave, we’ve identified seven things that need improvement, scheduled three imaginary procedures, and started a diet we have absolutely no intention of following through with.

Meanwhile, our husbands have glanced in the mirror, decided they look fantastic, and are sitting in the car wondering what’s taking us so long.

I’d love to know where men get that confidence and whether it’s available without a prescription.

I remember how early girls learned to dislike one another, and how rarely the explanation had anything to do with what someone had actually done.

If a girlfriend didn’t like another girl, the evidence was often presented as a physical inventory. She’s fat. Her hair is fried. Her eyes are too big, her teeth are too crooked, and did you get a look at the shirt she’s wearing? As though the distance between someone’s eyes had anything whatsoever to do with her character.

I don’t remember boys looking at another boy and saying, “Did you see how flabby his arms are?” or “Did you see what those jeans did to his butt?” A man could be losing his hair, developing a double chin, and still pass a mirror with the unmistakable satisfaction of someone who considered himself quite a catch.

Because here’s what happens when you’re a girl listening to other girls pick someone apart. You don’t simply learn what they think is wrong with her. You begin wondering what they’re saying about you when you leave the room.

We weren’t just hearing what other girls thought was ugly. We were being handed a list of things to criticize about ourselves.

Some of us have been carrying that list around for decades.

Of course, technology has now given us the ability to correct these alleged shortcomings before anybody else gets a chance to notice them.

A girlfriend took a photograph of us one evening, and I spent the next week asking her to send it to me. When it finally arrived, she had applied so many blurring filters that I couldn’t tell where we’d been or what I’d been wearing. I did, however, have the complexion of a newborn baby.

It was a remarkable achievement in dermatology, although I had apparently lost my nose in the process.

I wanted a photograph of two friends enjoying an evening together. What I received looked like an advertisement for a skincare product that hadn’t yet been approved by the FDA.

And the funniest part is that I understood exactly why she’d done it.

We have cameras capable of photographing the rings of Saturn, yet apparently the greatest technological achievement of our generation is making a woman look as though she’s never had a pore.

We’ve become so good at erasing the evidence of aging that we’re beginning to erase the evidence of living.

The laugh lines from the years we spent laughing. The creases around our eyes from squinting into the sun. The faces of women who have loved, worried, worked, celebrated, and survived things that never made it into a photograph.

All airbrushed into the complexion of a baby who hasn’t even learned to hold up her own head.

And for what?

I wonder how many wonderful photographs are sitting in somebody’s telephone because a woman didn’t like the way she looked. How many pictures of mothers with their children, friends on vacation, or families gathered together will never be printed because somebody decided her arms looked too big.

Imagine explaining that to your grandchildren someday.

“Yes, darling, we had a marvelous time in Italy, but unfortunately there are no photographs of me because I was concerned about my upper arms.”

I suspect the grandchildren would be considerably more interested in knowing whether we ate the pasta.

Here’s what really gets me. When I look at photographs of women I love, I don’t see the things they’re trying so desperately to conceal. I see their expressions. I remember what made us laugh, what we talked about, and how happy I was to be there.

Nobody who loves you is studying your face with the same hostility you bring to your bathroom mirror.

I wish we could remember that before deleting another perfectly wonderful photograph.

Because I have a terrible suspicion that one day we’ll look back at pictures of ourselves from this very moment and wonder what on earth we were complaining about.

Show a woman a photograph of herself twenty years ago and she’ll tell you how wonderful she looked. Ask her what she thought of herself when the photograph was taken, and she’ll probably remember exactly which part of her body she was trying to hide.

We’ve spent an extraordinary amount of our lives wishing we looked like women we used to be, even though we didn’t appreciate those women when we were them.

I’d rather not spend the next twenty years making the same mistake, and I certainly don’t want to reach the end of my life with a telephone full of photographs in which I look thirty years younger and absolutely nothing like myself.

I’ve been thinking about all the women who have written to me over the years, sharing stories that are sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, and occasionally so personal that I’m astonished by the trust behind them.

I’ve read about women surviving things they never imagined they’d have to face, beginning again when they thought their best opportunities were behind them, and finding reasons to laugh when life had given them precious little to laugh about.

And not once have I finished reading one of those messages and wondered what the woman who sent it looked like in a bathing suit.

We can recognize the beauty in another woman’s courage, her humor, her generosity, and her determination to keep going, yet stand in front of our own mirrors and become preoccupied with a wrinkle.

I wish we could see ourselves as generously as we see the women we admire.

I’m not suggesting we suddenly fall in love with every inch of our bodies. That would be a rather ambitious undertaking for someone who was recently pulling her face toward her ears to see what a brow lift might accomplish. However, I would love to see us become a little more affectionate toward the women we’ve spent our entire lives being.

We’ve been so busy deciding what needs fixing that we’ve hardly stopped to appreciate who’s been doing all the living.

So perhaps tomorrow morning, instead of beginning the usual inspection, we could try something different.

Look in the mirror. Take a good look at the woman standing there. Remember everything she’s carried, everything she’s survived, and all the wonderful things she still wants to do.

Before you start worrying about your hair, your stomach, or whether your arms have developed a mind of their own, give her a smile.

Let the man in the other bathroom continue admiring himself. He’s had plenty of practice.

You have a little catching up to do.

Wouldn’t it be something if, for once, the woman looking back at you knew exactly what you meant when you said:

“I’ve got you, babe.”