Mirror, mirror on the wall
There we sat, my daughter and I, playing a card game.
As she considered her next move, I studied her for a long moment: dark curly hair piled atop her head in a messy bun, big glasses framing her brown-green eyes, full eyebrows.
“You have the rosiest cheeks,” I said. She reached to touch her face as if to brush away the pink.
“Do you know how pretty you are?” I asked. She looked up from her cards and smiled, thanked me, and then waved me off.
“Your turn,” she said. And we resumed the game.
Do women in the full bloom of beauty know that about themselves? Do they appreciate the machinations of biology and age that render them so effortlessly lovely?
Do they even need their mothers to remind them?
That moment was fodder for conversations with two of my best friends. We talked about the ridiculous, ubiquitous beauty of women in their twenties.
“Were we ever that pretty?” I asked, proposing that skin care and nutrition and evolution have progressed in the past 40 years.
None of us could remember. One friend said she was always “plain and tall.” The other, a cute and petite blonde, said she never gave her looks much thought.
Me, I thought about it all the time: how I fussed with my hair; how I begged (without luck) to be allowed to wear a bit of mascara and lip gloss to junior high; how I worried about skin breakouts. (To this day I can’t eat a piece of chocolate without stopping to think about that.) How I wondered if I’d ever grow into my huge forehead.
Back then, my only references to my looks were the mirror (which lied), an occasional Polaroid snapshot (also a liar), and comparing myself to other girls my age, a form of self-torture that accompanied me well into my twenties. To purchase a copy of Glamour or Vogue magazine was to buy into a media machine designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. The message on every page? We’ll tell you what beauty is, and girl, it’s not you. Now, buy this product.
My friends and I agreed we had no memories of our own mothers telling us how pretty we were. Such grand compliments would have been thought absurd from that generation of parents; they exercised restraint so as not to inflate their children’s heads.
I knew a girl whose mother told her she was pretty enough “for all general life purposes.” She recounted this the freshman year of college when some dorm-mates and I were talking about life. Our conversations always turned to our looks — mostly about our permed hair and, of course, our bodies. I’d like to have back the time I spent hating my thighs. (I’d like to have those thighs back, too.)
If I were to see a photo of the four of us there in my dorm room, I would see healthy, slender bodies, shiny hair, rosy cheeks, bright smiles. Behind those smiles were the silly doubts that have plagued young women for centuries. It mattered less how smart we were, or how hard-working, or how funny. Together in the distorted hall of mirrors, we couldn’t help but to compare, and criticize.
“I’m sure we were pretty,” I told my two friends. “I just wish we knew it at the time.”
At the card game with my daughter, I wasn’t going to let the moment pass.
“You are just the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” I said.
“Thanks, Mommy,” she said. “It’s your turn.”