Another selfie?

Falling in love with yourself

I take them. A lot of them but I don’t always post, and I do some deep research with the zoom. Scrutinizing, studying, investigating who the f*ck that is there. Sometimes I trace my fingers over my wrinkled forehead or remember when my hair seemed less grey and wiry, but mostly I am looking into the eyes of that woman and wondering.

It is awfully embarrassing to admit my fascination with my own face, staring deeply at the physical facets of myself hoping to learn more about who I was before I got here. I examine my sloping eye lids, the turned down corners of my mouth. See the laugh and smile lines all over my face and joke to myself I should have done less of all that. I watch the teens analyzing themselves in the mirror from all angles and I shudder at the conversations I imagine them having. Whether they are tearing themselves apart or getting lost like baby Narcissuses in the glory of their brand newness, I am intrigued.

“Please, baby girl,” I often said to my own, “I hope you realize how stunning you are, how you radiate from the inside out.” I wonder if by saying it to them, the 14- and 17-year-old me might hear it and rewrite the history. I have watched enough sci-fi to know that you can’t talk to yourself in the back pages of your timeline but what if I just dropped a kind, attentive word now and again? What if I gazed upon myself and said out loud, “Oh, you gorgeous thing! You are going to be some woman!” Would I have even believed it?

I know that my right side is better than my left. I wonder if it is because I am left-handed and do the strange maths that are required to figure such a thing. I wonder if the women who tilt their heads and pose with a strong left jawline and gaze at the outside corner of their left eye are righties. I wonder if their moms or dads noticed those little quirks about them. I imagine that they must have. I tell mine that I love their pretty, little faces. It’s not a lie. I do.

I think of their faces and their squishy baby bodies often and their batted eyelashes and little noses and long necks craning to see into their futures. I think of how effortlessly beautiful they are, but also how kind and generous and creative and sensitive. I think about how incredible it is to be responsible for such a life and also how common. I consider how a mother might look at her own child and numb rather than exalt in this delicate balancing of the divine and the human. Then I look at them again and stare in wonder. Awe.

The youngest makes duck lips, holding her arm extended and tipping her head. The elder opens her eyes wide and looks like a sweet piece of candy. They are trying out themselves, discovering how they see themselves in the world, and imagining what the world sees in them. I want them to remember how I have looked at them, since they were the tiny tinies, falling in love with their faces and their everything. I want them to see the evolution of themselves as part of this extraordinary experience of being human, to marvel at every moment, and to be more forgiving when nothing makes any sense, and to come back to, to know they exist, their faces.

I don’t ever remember my skin so clear or my eyes so bright, but I do remember inhaling, pursing my lips like a kiss or a whistle to suck in what would be a whimper before tears escaped. I never wanted to make a sound, my voice always sounding like it was on the verge of cracking, the scraping of vocal cords even when I whispered, such a challenge it made me feel like I would cry all the time. I would watch myself in the mirror, trying to learn what my face looked like when I was me out in the world, believing that when my face crumpled into itself like a ball of paper, I must be too frightening to approach. All crying is an ugly cry. Even babies were told to shush or quiet down.

My mother has a preternatural stillness to her. Her hazel eyes hooded, her wide, high cheekbones, and slowly developing smile made her such a delicate and ethereal beauty. She told me that she never felt pretty because her older sister was the pretty one. Everyone always marveled at her seductive grey eyes and her tawny skin. That my beautiful, untouchable mother declared herself unimpressive, and that she never made any mention about what she saw when she looked at me, was a mindfuck.

What I knew was that I was nowhere as lovely as she, that my father handled her with kid gloves and tenderness, and me with tension and spite. I thought he might be raising to me to be the best little boy because he’d lift me off the ground by my arm and tell me to dust off. He’d tell me to get back into whatever had thrown me off or out. It was the 70s and if you weren’t a girlie girl in pink and bows and twirly skirts, you fell into the unisex, suburban, punk-ass swarms of boys and girls all in high knee socks with stripes, short shorts, tanks or t’s. You might learn that you were pretty when boys started letting you tag them out in kickball or when someone said you looked just like a favorite star on one of the few tv shows we all watched. And if that didn’t happen, you might go home and have your parents grab your face and stare into your eyes and tell you themselves.

I wanted to give mine something not afforded me. Stargazing at their magic, seeing light haloing around them, marveling in their beings. When I feel sad because I’ve failed them it is not because I want to be perfect but because I cannot bear to imagine their believing I was closing my eyes to them, turning away because they were too much. So many of us have been raised in codependent families with deep pockets of trauma sewed suit like a manufacturer’s new suit. You have to cut the pockets in order to use them, to release what doesn’t serve and tuck in what will protect you, keep you warm, when you are walking outside alone.

Marching through spring with my hands tucked deeply in my pockets, I’m walking the dog, stealing a moment from the home I have created for my girls and me. Is this what I imagined it would be? I don’t know why not. I don’t know how or why I expected it would be easier, that I would have found a forever love in a man so like my mother lost staring into space but never into my eyes. I don’t know what I saw in my mind’s eye looking at myself in the future. I don’t know what I see when I am looking at myself, snapping pictures, because I never did quite learn how to look. Some days this strikes me as the most horrific thing and leaves me desperate, and others I just feel inescapably sad. I don’t want the girls to see me crying because they know all of this.

I had my own room with accordion style mirrors and would sit on the floor watching myself move from all angles. I would drop my chin or raise my head, suck in my stomach. I was brutal in my assessment. There was nothing I could find in that reflection that was as delicate and demure as my mother, as cool and collected. I felt wild and dark and strong, which I’d loved as a girl and less as a teen. When I skulked awkwardly through the house hoping for a word of encouragement or endearment, I was accused of being moody and sour. Quips were made over the shoulder about my bad attitude and no one wanting to be around me when all I wanted was to be seen. As beautiful or otherwise, just looked after, looked at, cared for.

You don’t really know what kind of parent you are going to be, do you? Sure, we have expectations and fantasies about the things we will do the same or differently, but until you are staring into the eyes of something so desperately in need of you and your love, you just might not even consider the magnitude of the job. Yes, children need to be fed and clothed. There will be a lot of driving and cleaning wounds and applying Band Aids and cooking, endless cooking. But what you might not realize, if you don’t consider, is how often they will look for your gaze, for your reassurance, for your approval. Their first mirror will be the shine or darkness in your eyes. And some days you will have to pull yourself up from your own invisibility to let them know you see them and that you care and that they matter.

As I have mourned my father these past two years, I have discovered a grief that includes not just death but lost memories, dreams that creep up on me of looking to his face for a sign of a job well done, waiting for a whisper in my ear that I look beautiful, hoping for a tousle of my hair or a tug on my braids. My entire life I’d hoped he’d shine his attention on me, tell me he loved who I was and who I’d become without qualifiers. When we’d go to visit, I’d be sure to be well put together, worried about my hair and my skin and my clothes, prepared for his mentioning my tattoos and what I was doing with my life. He’d run straight for the girls and pour into them what he could not into me or what he wouldn’t, I can’t know. But I still run my fingers over the photos of us together looking for trace signs of a glint in his eye, a swell in his chest. I am looking for something I might have missed.

I didn’t expect it from my mother. I have always understood that she could only see herself in the looking glass, that the fairy tale mothers willing to sacrifice their daughters’ peace, even their lives could not see them. The fairest, the loveliest could be none other. In the space where I am still a girl, deep inside, in the place where I am not really sure how to mother them, know only how I would have loved to have been, she doesn’t come.

She doesn’t put her hands on my shoulders, kiss my ears, miss the day when she could hold my entire body in her arms. She doesn’t call or text or reach for me or any other. In her eyes I cannot see myself. Her gaze never dropped to mine. She’d stare off into the world without me, without us, without flinching. It is true even now, as I am middle-aged and pulling bits of the broken mirror from my hair, trying to be the mother for my girls who not only sees them, but searches for them in all of the beautiful places, in art, in nature, in my life.

I have something with my children, now young women, the most beautiful I have beheld, that I could not have imagined. Sometimes we take selfies in the house and send them to one another. We make funny faces and serious faces and scared faces. We tell funny stories and share what scares us and what ails. We hold up the mirror to one another when one needs reminding that ours is a safe place. Their pictures of me are some of my most favorite.

I can hear them in the next room talking and laughing, the dog curled up on the bed listening in. I am lying in bed looking up at the phone’s camera turning my head this way and that way, trying to capture myself in this moment, trying to secure a place for myself in someone’s life, trying to make sure that they can see me and see me seeing them. I probably won’t post it, I am in my retainer and bonnet after all, but I will remember myself here, somebody’s good mother, somebody’s tender heart, a witness to myself in the world. I have proof.