Looks aren’t everything

I was a game to them. One of those little egg-shaped key chains with the creature you care for by beeping its buttons in the right order. You learn to feed it after each playtime to get it to nap. You can’t go too long between baths. After awhile the attention afforded to trial and error is no longer necessary and you can care for the creature on autopilot. (Remember the kids who would see how sick they could make it and still keep it alive? Are they okay?) I don’t think my parents understood the why of anything that they did for me as a child, which caused them to make some interesting choices. I think they did their best. Wait, do I?… Yes. I think they did what the could. They have their own challenges.

I remember my mother being very concerned with my appearance to the world. She was bothered by my acne, my unkempt eyebrows, and my buckteeth, you know, on my behalf. I started having my brows waxed at a young age. I didn’t really understand why they needed to be waxed, but I understood it was disgusting to leave them as they were. So every few weeks I sat back and had my eyebrows wrangled in a woman’s basement salon while my mother and all her friends gossiped behind the chair. They’d talk about their dumb husbands and all the people they didn’t like while I focused on the stylist leaning over me wielding the popsicle stick covered hot wax. She was the nicest person in the room, and she ripped my hair out by the root. After the pain subsided, everyone agreed my eyebrows were beautiful. I liked looking beautiful. I was relieved I didn’t look disgusting anymore.

Again at my mother’s insistence, I endured years of orthodontic procedures. Dental work elucidated most of my childhood. Have you seen that jumpy timelapse video of the inside of a woman’s mouth throughout the span of her braces? Her teeth shift awkwardly around each other until they eventually fall into a neat line. That’s how I remember elementary school. Retainers, braces, bands, and wires vexed me at every meal. Once, the janitor and I searched through the cafeteria trash cans together until we found the retainer I mistakenly threw away with the other items on my lunch tray. What a kind man. I only hope I cleaned it well. I am grateful my mouth no longer looks like a jumbled box of chiclets, but I’m also relieved the gap between my front teeth returned after a few years.

Acne was middle school. It hurt my mother to look at my face. That’s how she would phrase it. I understand now how she meant it, but the self I was in middle school? She may as well have called my Quasimodo. Clearly, I was hideous. I had large, red patches on my face and shoulders. My hairline was riddled with painful bumps. My smile was flawless, but I was too insecure to use it. My mother told me I should keep my skin clean to get rid of the pimples, so I developed a nightly ritual that over time became compulsive. It did eventually get better. Was that because of my rigorous face washing or did I age out of acne? It’s hard to say, but I was sure the cleansing didn’t hurt. I kept that up for decades. I took everything my mother said seriously. She was doing her best to keep me safe from the harsh world and it’s judgement. I believed she had my best interest at heart. She also told me if I snapped my fingers while I walked I would die like a specific boy she knew growing up who had died because he snapped his fingers. Do I think this anecdote had basis in historical reality? No. Did I when I was a child? Let’s just say, I wasn’t going to be the one to test it.

I’ve worked hard to unravel the significance my mother placed on conventional beauty. That started when I became a mother myself, especially when I had my daughter. I could not find one thing wrong with her appearance, and I never wanted her to find one either. I intentionally stopped making comments about my own appearance or the appearances of other people. It was difficult at first, but it was also freeing. Over time I started to see the world differently. When I look at old photos of myself, I know it’s me, but it also isn’t me. Sometimes I feel disgust for the version of myself in the picture, knowing how much I cared about the way I looked. Sometimes I feel envy. I don’t view my own beauty in the same way anymore. A few years ago I stopped wearing makeup all together. I leave my house without mascara, breaking one of my mother’s cardinal rules! I dress for comfort instead of fashion and no one cares. Or at least they don’t tell me. My life is about substance.

I tweeze my eyebrows though. She might be right about that.

Just this week in therapy, I was spiraling about how to know the “right” thing to say to your kid when you come from a background that you’d rather not repeat. What if my instinct to do the opposite of what my parents did isn’t what they need? What if that’s my brain’s way of justifying my behavior to make me feel like a better mom than I actually am? What if I’m f*cking them up with too much love and acceptance? What if I’m I supposed to tell them it hurts me to look at their face so they start a nighttime cleansing routine? No, that can’t be right. It is a spectrum though. Never saying anything negative to your children is not realistic. Some things are hard to accept, but it’s better to hear you need to start wearing deodorant from your mom in the deodorant aisle than it is to hear it from the kid you have a crush on in math class.

Delivery matters. I try to choose my moments and my words carefully. I can acknowledge after some time with two teenagers, that I fail to always accurately anticipate how my words will be received. I misconstrue the impact of the criticism. Even though I know this about myself, I can be too impatient to consider it. When I take an extra moment to listen to my words from the recipient’s perspective they resonate differently. My curious barrage of questions about my son’s friends came across to him as a critique that he was too dorky to have any. That was not what I meant by the questions at all, but as soon as he objected, I understood how he’d heard them. I stopped asking so many.

I’m a fairly literal person. I don’t say things I don’t mean. Occasionally, something I say comes out wrong, or I misunderstand some facet of the concept I’m discussing at a rudimentary level and make a statement based on an inaccurate, or ignorant assumption, but I think a lot about the words I use and how I intend them. I pride myself on it. This goes double for my own children. From my experience, I understand how critical words to my kids can be. Parents have the power to build their child’s reality. That’s not a responsibility I take lightly. I don’t want my kids to grow up in a world that restricts their potential to my conception. I want them to believe they can be more than even I imagine them to be. I want them to feel limitless.

I make mistakes just like my mother, and her mother, and her mother’s mother. My words can hurt in a way I can’t take back or smooth over. I can only sit and know that I’ve said them, and that’s hard to do. It’s uncomfortable to know that despite my most well-intended effort to always say the right thing, I can still miss the mark and end up harming who I love most. And because of the enormity of my role in their lives, the harm I cause could be long-lasting. Sometimes I overthink it. When I am in my head considering and reconsidering the words I speak to my children, I (the self that still tweezes her eyebrows so as not to look disgusting) am hidden from them. My obsession with the perfect exchange with my child requires I hide the imperfect parts of myself. I’m not all there with them. They aren’t getting the whole truth. Letting go of perfection frees me to offer my entire presence to my children as a flawed human being who wants to help them, but is still puzzling life together herself. And so is everybody.

I let my kids in on the secret that no mother has all the answers in life. We’re all providing our best guess for the path to happiness, and mine is just that—a guess. There is no one right way to exist here and you can only feel it out for yourself. Part of the process is making mistakes you can’t erase. If instead of hiding my errors, I am my whole flawed self with them, I acknowledge I can be wrong. My children are granted permission to doubt me. That doubt is a gift in itself. Maybe mom is wrong on this one is an opportunity for a broader worldview. I can promise my children I never intend harm with what I say, but I also give them permission to doubt my words in favor of what they feel in their own hearts. That’s what I wish I had growing up. I wish I was taught to trust myself.

I’m working on building that trust now. And let me tell you, it is slow going. I do my best to follow my intuition without second guessing. To be fair, our parenting has produced outstanding kids so far. That’s the data I’m interested in. Are they happy? Healthy? Do they know it’s important to be kind? I think we’re heading in a positive direction. From the trials I’ve run, I’ve found that good parenting is loving acceptance of everything about my children while being honest about what I know of the world. Generally, people dislike pungent body odor, for example. Good parenting is telling your kid that deodorant would help with the B.O., patiently listening while the kid declares they choose to smell, and saying “Okay. I love you, Stinky.” as they head out into the wild. The world will tell them what they need to know. Good parenting is politely informing them the deodorant is under the sink when they change their mind, swallowing the I told you so. Good parenting is loving your child for their bushy eyebrows and crooked smile so when she opens herself up to the world’s reaction, she’s free to decide for herself if the response is disgust or delight.