Selfies get a bad rap. We’re labelled vain, attention
seeking, or shallow for taking and posting them. But in a world where women
over age 50 are considered well past their prime, invisible, and probably shopping
for Depends and compression hose; documenting and celebrating my middle-aged face
and body feels affirming, positive, maybe even a little revolutionary.
And because I have the right kinds of friends, there was the usual scattering of likes and “you’re so beautiful” comments. My mom jumped on to the thread with her predictably joy-killing vibe. “You’re kind of cute, but you’ve never been beautiful,” she commented.
My friends reacted with shock and horror. Some of them knew
she was my mother. Some of them just thought she was a random rude person hanging
out on my timeline. I laughed and deleted her comment and all of their offended
responses.
The funny thing is, I look a lot like my mother. Just as my
youngest child looks a lot like me. So when my mother says “you’re not
beautiful” she’s saying “I’m not beautiful.” Her red hair, freckles, and cute
little round nose come from her father’s side. When I say “her father” I mean
the man who impregnated my grandmother, a man whose name I do not know, a man
who vanished into the past when my grandmother refused to leave her husband to
go with him. But my brunette grandmother with the aquiline nose and her
dark-haired, patrician husband never would have produced a child together who
looked like my mother, who carried in every flaming red hair on her head the evidence
of her mother’s guilt.
My mother was a toddler when my grandmother’s husband volunteered
for the Army and went to war. He didn’t need to. He was over-age and had a good
career with the phone company. He had to get waivers in order to be allowed to join
up. He went off to serve in northern Africa. I don’t know if he wrote her
tender letters or any letters at all. But at the end of the war, he came home,
a stranger in a dark uniform, resumed his career as an engineer, and spent the last nine years of his life looking for the bottom of the cocktail glass. I have a picture taken on a winter’s day; he still in uniform and my
mother standing next to him in a snowy suburban yard, neither of them smiling. I
have no pictures from my mother’s childhood of her smiling. I’m not sure she
knew how.
I never met the grandfathers and great-grandfathers and
great-uncles of my maternal line. They died before I was born. My grandmother,
always old to my eyes, never again to my knowledge had nor sought romance in
her life. She lived long and alone, occupying herself with career and hobbies and
travel and friends. And I was raised by a woman who hated her body that was
shaped like mine, who cut her beautiful red hair into an unflattering bob or
pulled it back into a plain ponytail, who wore matronly dresses or boxy suits
or chambray shirts, and who was constantly dieting and failing to lose weight. She
dressed me in shabby hand-me-downs, jerked my strawberry blonde hair into
braids so tight they made my head hurt, and sent me to school in boxy brown
loafers and ridiculous pinafores covered by an ugly brown corduroy coat. Never
mind that everyone else was wearing bell bottoms and rainbow striped
tee-shirts.
I wasn’t ugly. But I sure felt ugly. I look back at the
pictures and see a sweet, perfect, heart-shaped face, pale and lightly
freckled, surrounded by a halo of blonde hair. I see my young body, strong and
lithe, graceful in every pose. But I felt none of those things that I see now.
And when puberty hit, with all of its longings and weirdness, my insecurities
made me grateful for any attention, even from a guy who was wrong in every way.
Luckily, I outgrew that phase and outgrew him and found the confidence and
strength in adulthood that I’d never imagined I’d possess.
When I look at my child, now grown to an adult, I see in their bright red hair and the shape of their face and the sprinkling of freckles on their pale arms my own youthful beauty, the beauty I never knew I had. And I see my mother’s face as it should have been, with smiles and laughter and confidence. I want them to know how amazing they are. Every morning, when I kiss them awake, I tell them they’re beautiful. Every day, when they haul the wood or carry the hay or dig up a flower bed, I remind them that they are strong. And I hope that when they look in the mirror and see my eyes looking back at them, they see the love in those blue eyes. And beauty.
