Lately I’ve been feeling uncharacteristically down about my reflection in the mirror — it comes in waves. Confidence and self-assuredness are not shields against every creeping doubt. Sometimes there are simply days when I’m like, “I feel ugly! Let me be!”
I’ve tried to dissect this feeling many times before. The usual self-talk comes to mind like, “Who cares? You’re just a body! Everyone has one!” Of course, there’s also the “Beauty is fleeting, what matters is on the inside!” And don’t forget the “Don’t let the corporations define the way you feel about yourself!”
These thoughts clash with other ones like, “Whatever, I’ll feel better when I get a haircut.” Or “Pillow Talk by Charlotte Tilbury makes me feel good, sue me!” And naturally, “It’s my life, I’ll feel cute if I want to!”
It might be cliché to say things like the wrinkles under my eyes are a map to my memories and my smile lines are proof of a life full of laughter, but those sentiments do often feel true. And it feels a whole lot better than to say they mean nothing at all. Sometimes perceived imperfections mean nothing. Other times marks of living do indeed tell a story. As someone whose body was born with a critical defect for literal survival (like a giant hole in my heart), I’ll take the agency to utilize every poetic musing that comes from a stretch mark.
The perception of beauty of an outer self is one I will never actually know. Only you ever will. My reflection isn’t me. A trip! We are obviously more than our skin, but the skin is the first thing you see of me. You don’t see my heart or my thoughts or my desires. You just see my brunette hair, framed around my oval face.
In motherhood, I have not felt much like a desirable being. I’ve read a lot of writings about beauty being a soulless pursuit with no specification to the receiver or what specific element of beauty is worthy or not. I recently went to a bachelorette party and a tall Australian man tried to lay it on thick at a bar. I texted my husband, “I still got it!” I was once a single woman thinking about what it would mean to one day become a wife and a mother — I got a little jolt to the past while I sipped my water thinking about my daughter and my husband and how much I missed them. It was a zip of fun for the sake of it, a little nod that I could be seen as floaty by someone outside my home, a subtle reminder of personhood separate from being needed in a strange, superficial way.
Beauty and desire are also not synonymous concepts. I don’t want to feel beautiful just to be desired. Sometimes it’s just about beauty as an essence in the same way I might stare at a moody painting of a night sky and cry. Beauty is a spectrum of feelings about pleasure. Pleasure is the taste of a ripe tomato in mid-July. Desire is me wanting to eat it. Beauty is the fullness of the shape that grew on a tall green stem in my dad’s backyard garden.
I’ve seen a lot of beautiful things in this life, and everything my daughter does makes me a witness to it all. A baby taking her first breath. A father holding her for the first time. These things are beautiful, and they have nothing to do with the “beauty industry,” which has apparently hijacked every discourse about beauty itself. I rounded a hiking trail in Washington several years ago that opened up to a field of fuchsia and gold and periwinkle wildflowers at the base of Mount Rainier. It was beautiful and absent of desire, or sex appeal, or self-esteem because, well, it’s a volcano.
A mother crawling out of a postpartum spiral is allowed to feel beauty within herself and about herself without the pressure to justify which category of beauty is worthy of meaning or not.
I am the freest I have ever been as a mother. I have never met a version of myself that feels as right as I do right now. Still, my body and my brain are new to me. Things crack and crinkle and flare and wrinkle and sometimes I wish they didn’t and other times I welcome the natural destruction because there’s a peculiar peace to breaking down and climbing out renewed. When I became a mother, I didn’t really have a choice.
It’s a beautiful thing to feel so alive.
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