Hi dear reader, thank you for being here. Right now, I have a summer sale, so when you sign up to become an annual paid subscriber you can enjoy 40% off one year of Rarely Written. Paid subscribers get access to my paywalled posts, the subscriber chat, all of my archives (perfect for holiday reading), plus, paying for a subscription is a lovely way to show your support to a writer like me on substack who is starting to call this their full-time gig! Thank you, your support is greatly appreciated.
A little departure from my usual output on here, but also, perhaps not, because everything is connected, and I try to write whatever is on my heart and mind and then see what comes of it. You seem to like it, so here goes.
I have a funny relationship with beauty and the ways we can enhance it. I oscillate between a peaceful acceptance of what God gave me and how life changes what that looks like depending on the season, and also an acute awareness of the increasingly more accessible ways I can somewhat artificially improve on what I’ve got. I’ve dabbled in botox and other some other injectables before, I’ve highlighted my hair since the tender age of 12 (thanks Mum), which might now also need to be for the purpose of masking my first greys. I’ve also had a clever little semi-permanent shading technique on my eyebrows that mean they look done no matter what.
I can’t do any of that right now, because I am pregnant, and as we all know — pregnant women cannot do anything. The interesting thing is, however, I also don’t want to. There is something about pregnancy that allows me to see inner beauty more vividly than outer beauty — both my own and that of others. The changes I watch my body go through at quite a rapid pace serves to remind me that its OK, glorious even, to let life change you throughout the seasons. I watch in complex awe as my belly swells to make a temporary home in which a whole new person can take form, whilst the fractal-like wrinkles around my eyes deepen and become ever more obvious. My first instinct for the latter is to wonder when I’ll ever be able to correct them, because even after your baby has left your body, you might choose to breastfeed and therefore any interventions like botox stay well off the cards. My second instinct is to celebrate them whilst they’re allowed to be here. They are an outer emblem of all the joy and anguish etched across my heart since losing my first child and now growing my second.
The global beauty chain Sephora has opened a store just opposite the yoga studio I do most of my teaching. Post pay-day, I naturally had to check it out. I actually left empty-handed, but not before having a really good look.
My first thought was — when did beauty products become so expensive? I know that what is sold in stores like that is for all genders, but the vast majority of shoppers were women like me. The cheapest perfume bottle I found was a sample — 10ml — and that retailed for £28. I remember getting those for free with magazines when I was a teenager, and I probably used them up in less than a week, if that. I’m not a financial expert, or even that good at maths, but in this instance, I would borrow the phrase the kids use, that the math ain’t mathing.
I’ve read about the concept of women’s wealth tax, and there are stats that back it up — especially personal care items, which cost women 13% more than the same products intended for men, especially items which could easily be sold as unisex, like razors. I also pay about four times the amount to have my hair done as my husband does — yes, yes, I do have more hair than him, but still, that is quite the inflation, especially considering that I will spend on average 12.6 hours of my time cooking and cleaning per week against his 5.7, which, along with the global female population means that my unpaid care and housework amounts to about £10 trillion, or 13% of the global GDP. Women in my age bracket (35-44) also have less free time than our male counterparts, so the old adage of “time is money” clearly doesn’t apply to us in the same way.
My second thought was — why are there so many products that supposedly do the same thing? There was an abundance of perfumes specifically for your hair, each one promising to make it smell like a different luxury holiday destination — be that Mykonos, Dubai, or Portofino — all places I can’t afford to go to right now, but at least I can smell like them? Or rather, only my hair can smell like them. There’s a different smell for my body, it seems, but can I wear both at the same time? What is the appeal of that? Will I smell like I am rich, or, a la Mean Girls, a “baby prostitute”?
There was also a cream for my eyes, which drew my attention, given the aforementioned lines and indentations. But it wasn’t just one cream. There’s one for de-puffing, one for fine lines, one for dark circles — aren’t these all part of the same picture? Does the skin around my eyes know what specific ailment it needs to offer up to be healed by these supposed miracle workers? Most of them contain so many unpronounceable ingredients anyway that I am sure they are out of bounds to me during pregnancy. There are some who flout the suggestions around pregnancy restrictions, however, and they are probably labelled bad mothers. You are condemned for ageing during your pregnancy, and daring to do things like gain weight, but you better believe you’ll be demonised to the ends of the earth if you so much as think of engaging in the now dangerous vain ideas that you’ve spent your whole life being pumped full of.
Thanks for reading Rarely Written! This post is public so feel free to share it.
And this brings me on to the third thought I had, whilst (window) shopping in Sephora.
Will any of this work?
Look, it’s a high-end store, and these are premium prices — surely the majority of them ought to be able to deliver on their promises? But what are they promising? And what will I feel once the promise has been made? Making my forehead smooth won’t make me a better mother. Concealing the bags and lines that have come to frame my eyes that have spent years expressing so many emotions won’t bring my daughter Ruby back. Wearing two perfumes won’t cover up the scent of inadequacy that seeps from my pores because of the messaging I have digested and metabolised since I was a young girl that I can never have, do, or be enough. I will always need more. None of these products will take away the ache of being alive.
I’ve been and looked younger than I am now and I’ve been desperately sad. I feel younger now than I did then and, despite the tremendous sadness that permeates every facet of my life because of the indescribable pain caused by the loss of my first child, I experience joy on a deeper level than I knew before. I only get to feel joy like that because I endure grief of a similar magnitude. The lines around my eyes are evidence of the tears I’ve shed — more in the last year than in my whole life, but they are also markers of the laughter my face crumples into when I realise that, in spite of everything, I am OK.
My body has been smaller than it is now (obviously) and there’s a part of me that longs for that lithe frame, which was shaped thusly mainly because, at the time, it was growing back an organ after I donated a segment of my liver to Ruby, which I, perhaps naively, believed would give her a longer life than it did in the end. I remember my frame and wilting face drew looks of concerns, and even comments from friends who weren’t scared to call out what they saw and call it what it was — a relapse into old, disorderly eating patterns. A lot of my restricted eating back then was guided by my constant state of hyper-vigilance, and at least some of it was also in response to my own belief that, if I was thinner, I was better, and perhaps even a better mother and advocate for my vulnerable daughter.
Now, as well as a growing womb and belly, my body is all over softer and more padded. Pregnancy is the greatest gift, and a tremendous physical feat that still blows my mind even though I’ve been through it once already and everyone does it all the time. And yet, I am still critical of my body for gaining weight, for looking different than it did a year ago. I’d love to tell you that those thoughts take a nine month holiday, but for me, they don’t. And I know that once baby is here, I will feel the white-hot pressure to lose the padding, even in a time where I will still need it too, not just the baby that it lovingly cushioned for the best part of a year.
Before I left the store, I passed an aisle full of body lotions — some of them specifically targeted at pregnancy, namely the reduction, maybe even the complete denial, of stretch marks. I already have decades old stretch marks on various, admittedly more hidden parts of my body from puberty. Maybe their relative secrecy is why they don’t bother me. Pregnancy stretched me once again, and it will do so more this time. Motherhood stretched me permanently — it grew my heart to twice its size in terms of its capacity for love, kindness and understanding. If you opened me up now, you’d probably see the markings of that astronomical stretching. I don’t need to do away with those marks. They are there because they made the muscle of my interior being bigger so that it can accommodate more love — both the giving and the receiving of it.
Maybe I don’t think about those marks — lines, tears, and indentations of love, because they are simply a part of me now. Maybe because they are on the inside, and not up for debate by the aesthetics jury, that I don’t worry about how they look, and I only celebrate what they have given me instead. They can’t be seen, but the growth they have created in me can be felt.
I wonder if I can learn to look at my face in this way now when I look in the mirror? Can I see the lines and softer skin around my eyes as evidence of having had them opened fully to the truth of life? How they have borne witness to all its brutality and all its beauty, without filter or fiction? Maybe I can trust the way my body is growing now, and not only that, but trust it after it has delivered this new life, to return, or not return to something more familiar in its own time.
Of course, it will never actually return to what it was before, and no pill, potion or intervention is capable of doing that, no matter what promises they make, because they can only change what is on the surface. They don’t account for the fundamental, tectonic-plate shifts of your soul when it goes through one of life’s larger revolutions, be that birth or death. I know this for sure, because I have seen what happens when the body has changed all that it can, and then can do no more — when the soul has become simply too big and too free to be contained by its weary edges. Then, it dies. They all do. You can put off the physical evidence of it with all the creams that money can buy, but you can’t change the inside.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.