A Heartbreaking Girl of Staggering Beauty

I know exactly the angle at which my face looks best in photos. Or at least I thought I did. My chin is tilted slightly down and to the right. I smile, but not too big because my natural smile shows too big teeth and a lot of gum. I believe that this pose conceals, or at least mitigates, many of my flaws- the bump on my nose, my crooked right tooth, and my weak chin. I feel bad that I know this. I wish I didn’t care. Funnily enough, people often tell me that I’m photogenic, which I take to mean, prettier in photographs than I am in real life.

After the birth of my daughters I’ve become concerned about how my self-consciousness may affect them. I’ve been considering how much time and energy I’ve wasted worrying about the way I look and wishing I were different. In a culture that exerts such enormous pressure on women and young girls, I want to be part of their remedy not the poison.

I want my girls to be soccer players not beauty queens. If they must date, I hope they date boys who love them for their minds and strongly held opinions. I hope they have friends with tangled hair, dirty jeans, and make-up free faces. I hope they discover beauty and fashion late enough that it gives them amusement and pleasure, but in no way affects their sense of self. In short, I want them to be nothing like me.

As a teenager I cared inordinately about the way I looked. I know that’s fairly typical for an adolescent girl, but I think I was worse than average. My Halloween costumes reflect my obsession with ultra-feminine ideals- a cheerleader (MSU), a Miss America contestant (Texas), a southern belle (seriously, I wore an old hoop skirt from my mother’s prom dress) and many early years as a fairy princess. True, the pageant contestant was done with a hint of irony. I played it for laughs. But I secretly longed to be one of those impossibly shiny and immaculate girls.

I was a ballerina from second grade to my junior year in high school and there are many pictures of myself that I find painful to look at in overdone make-up and tutus. I’m not sure who to blame for this. My mother, a professor, feminist and civil rights activist among other things, wears almost no make up and questions the morality of pedicures. My best friend growing up was an extremely bright and levelheaded girl who was not particularly preoccupied by boys or appearance. Actually, in hindsight I’m not sure how or why she put up with all my silliness. I’m not sure why I did either. I was fine looking growing up- pretty enough to have dates to all the dances with boys that other girls liked. Pretty enough to attract sufficient male attention and the occasional jealous look from other girls, but I knew I wasn’t one of those heartbreakingly exquisite waifs on the covers of magazines. I had plenty of other things going for me- I was smart, a good dancer, funny and friendly, but it worried me, it niggled at me this lack of perfection. 

Why did I want to be beautiful so badly? Why was pretty enough not good enough? I still don’t really know, but when I’ve tried to look at it honestly what I come up with is power. To simply walk into a room and be special before doing anything else, saying anything else seemed enormously desirable to me. I suppose too, like lots of girls, in spite of everything else I could do, none of it seemed as valuable as being spectacularly gorgeous. I’ve come some distance from the ferocious longings of my adolescence, but I still feel it as a lack, a little ache where my beauty should be.

When my daughters were about seven months old my friend Mia took a photo of my baby Rose and me. Rose’s face is leaned against mine and I am holding her close, smiling wide at the camera. We are sitting on our sunny front porch and we are beaming. In this photo I’ve forgotten everything I ever thought I knew about how I look best and, actually, I look fantastic. I mean I look exhausted. My crooked nose and tooth are clearly on display. But I look happy. And this photo does what, it finally occurs to me, photos are supposed to do. It records a moment in time so I can have access to it forever. I remember this day very clearly. It was the first day my old friend Mia met my girls. With every person who met my daughters it was like I re-experienced the thrill of their existence. I felt absurdly proud of their every smile and babble. It was like my heart was saying, “look, this is me as a mother, isn’t it amazing, can you even believe these beautiful people are my daughters?” And Mia is one of those generous souls who loves other peoples’ joy. She is happy to have a little more happiness in the world. It was a clean, bright day that made worry trivial. Now I have this photo of my flawed and glowing face reminding me of what I’ve always known: beauty is not perfection.

Right now in my life as a stay at home mom I often look bedraggled and a little haggard. Sometimes I look in the mirror and wish I had my old problems. But here’s the thing, for a very long time my imperfect face was the only one my daughter Eva wanted to see. Everyone else made her howl at the moon. My voice was the one my daughters wanted to lull them to sleep. And I sing a lot. Ever since my girls were born I sing them little made up songs. I don’t have a voice- and that’s putting it kindly, but babies don’t care, they are soothed just as well by the hoarse and the tuneless. For months I have been singing them the same tune. It is one I couldn’t place, though I knew it wasn’t my own. I was humming it to people asking them if they recognized it. No one could name it. Then one day recently I heard it on a classical music for children CD I was playing to the girls in the car. And I am struck when I find out the title by the accidental enormity of all my good fortune. I am struck by how in spite of my haplessness and superficiality I have stumbled on so much grace. It turns out that this song I have been whispering in my babies’ ears all this time is Ode to Joy.

Body Language by Devon Brenner

At the seminar the speaker

tells us that any message

is only 3% the words

and the rest how you say it,

the pallate of tones painted in the voice

and the pacing of the breath,

the angles of the shoulders,

the semaphore of hands

carry the message, she reports

in even tones,

with good posture and eye contact,

and as I sit here struggling,

no—tussling, no—grappling with line

breaks and white space

and the spider’s web a metaphor weaves

it’s the words I savor

now he’s spoken them

all three of them,

whispered

against my body

late into the night.

Body Wash

Some days the soap doesn’t work in the shower—

the shampoo just won’t lather,

and after, you still feel tacky

as if, instead of water, you rinsed with grape jelly

or shellac. There’s no reason for it,

it’s the same soap, the same water

at the same temperature,

(too hot for your last boyfriend)

the same fiberglass insert

with the same bar of Ivory melting in the corner pocket,

the same chamomile conditioner.

It just won’t work,

and you dry off and dress and nothing’s right

the skirt of your dress is too short

hitting above the knee as if you were still 28

instead of at the knee—you’re in your 40s.

And your sandals give you blisters

before you’re finished making the toast

and maybe the toast burns

while you’re changing shoes,

and there’s dried egg on your plate

it won’t come off, even with a scrubby.

And all the while

as you grumble about the crumbs in your bra

and how much trash is left in the car—

old tissues and gum wrappers—

it isn’t the soap

or the shower

or the toaster

or the trash.

It’s that third set of pictures

they took of your left breast

and the waiting for next Thursday

and the biopsy

that makes your body-wash fail.

That makes you so unclean.

Fat, Fear, Love

When my husband left me (for another woman), I lost 25 pounds. I didn’t set out to lose weight. I just stopped eating.

And I cried. I drank too much. I listened to music. I sang at the top of my voice. Linda Ronstadt: “I’ve been cheated, been mistreated, when will I be loved?” The Eagles: “I’m already gone, I’m feeling strong.” My little daughter cried and asked me not to play that music.  And I stopped eating.

A friend told me that her mother said that a man leaves his wife for a reason. I cried and pondered: Was I too serious, too tense, too caught up in school? Was I too attentive to my daughter, not to him? Was I . . . was  I .  . too fat?

Was I fat? I prided myself on the fact that I didn’t look bad in a new bikini when my daughter was six months old. But in taking care of a child and going to graduate school and being poor over the next few years, I’d let my body, well, grow. I wore peasant shirts, elastic waist bands.

At first I didn’t notice weight loss, but then my clothes no longer fit. Friends told me I was too skinny. But I loved my new body. I began to look in the mirror again. Began to appreciate myself. I looked good. I let my hair grow, highlighted it with blond streaks.

My little daughter watched. She learned resiliency. And what else?

* * * * * * * * * *

My father never had an extra pound of weight on his body. Never. He had some sort of internal mechanism, I guess. He ate ice cream every night, sitting watching TV in his big brown recliner. When he finished he’d call the dog to lick the bowl. It didn’t take long for the dog to simply hear the bowl being scraped to come running.

But, if my father somehow perceived (what did he see?) that there was extra weight on his body, he’d stop eating ice cream And in a week or two he’d resume his nightly habit.

I was a pre-teen when I noticed my father’s careful observance of his weight. Both my parents were careful about their bodies. They didn’t use the word dieting, but after vacations my mother would talk about having to fit into this or that. Somewhere along the way, I even managed to put a name to my parents’ attitude toward fat: prejudice.

I never thought much about my weight or my body when I was a kid. But I watched and I listened.

* * * * * * * * * *

When my mother was ill in the years before she died and weighed less than 100 pounds, she once said to me: “I still find myself sucking in my stomach.”

* * * * * * * * * *

My children are all slender. My youngest son, who went through a brief bout of chubbiness in pre adolescence, would—after he became slim—pinch a piece of his skin between his thumb and forefinger and say, “I’ve gotta lose this.”

“That’s skin,” I’d answer.

I think my older son takes a kind of secret pride in the fact that at 135 pounds, he weighs less than his mother, his sister, and his wife.

I asked my daughter recently if she felt an excessive attention to body size, if I made her worry about her body. She generously answered, “Well, no, but you always seemed to be on a diet.”

It’s true. I’ve always been on a diet. I’ve done a bunch of fad diets—Nutri-system, the Scarsborough diet, several rounds with Weight Watchers. I’ve kept up fitness regimes—step class,es, aerobics classes, Jazzercise. bicycling, and hiking.

Self-control and self-indulgence are in a constant battle.

* * * * * * * * * *
I’ve always thought my daughter was beautiful—from the time she was born.

Did I say that too much? Too little?

* * * * * * * * * *

I watch my daughter with her little twin girls. She’s never been happier, she tells me. They make music, read books, take walks, have picnics, sing songs, play hand and toe games.  

When John comes home from work the four of them have dance party time, all of them laughing and bouncing to the music, before settling in for bottles and stories and bed. I watch a little jealously her fulsome expressions of love to her husband and children, the bright ring of family she’s constructing.

My daughter fusses about the stubborn remaining pounds after the babies are born. “Give yourself time,” her husband reassures, supports.


* * * * * * * * * *
John’s father died when he was twelve year old. Emily’s father left when she was four years old.

“He’s afraid I’ll die; I’m afraid he’ll leave,” she once told me.

New at the Korner Keg

She is efficient and strong behind the bar.

Last night she was a customer, got drunk

and got hired.  Apparently, she's pretty funny

when she's drunk.

She tells my friend, over the whoosh of glasses

being washed, that she got fired

from Kohls.  She was selling cosmetics and

well

who knows why they let her go.  "Funny, I thought

that was one thing I was actually good at."

She glances to her left...

"Wake up, Robbie, we can't have you sleepin' at the bar"

and the old gent ruefully rubs his eyes to comply.

She draws three beers in about ten seconds, places them in front

of the right customers, and makes change.  "I never tended bar before"

she laughs, as she turns back to us.

I know better than to ask for white wine.  Bourbon's what I drink,

anyway, And when she places it in front of me I want to say,

I'd be proud if you were my daughter.

You are good at landing on your feet.