An Ingestion of Beauty
My mother likes to joke that I sucked the life out of her.
She says this every time she looks in the mirror and notices a darkness underneath her eyes that in her mind didn’t exist before, or whenever she’s wearing short sleeves and her underarm fat jiggles when she points, or when she hears a creek in her bones and feels stiffness in her joints. At the tiniest sign of aging, she’ll furrow her brow, pause, smile away any negative emotion, and roll her eyes at me. “This is all your fault. You sucked the life out of me,” she’ll say.
My mother is a very beautiful woman. The kind of beauty that elicited comments from my male friends when I was in high school. The kind of beauty that made my own awkwardness growing up doubly apparent, the kind of beauty that men stared at whenever we were at dinner or walking on the street or just existing in spaces.
I did not take after my mother. I was not very beautiful, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. My natural features were asymmetrical, my body’s proportions were off, and I carried myself with a lack of confidence that exacerbated these elements. When I was ten, I used to climb into my mother’s bed and cry and cry and cry at my misfortune. “When will I be pretty?” I would ask her, blubbering in a way that upset me even more, since I knew that I was an ugly crier.
“There are different kinds of beauty in this world, my love,” she would respond, dodging my question, petting my hair until I calmed down. “You don’t have to be beautiful if you don’t want to.” But underneath her words, I could hear a level of internal satisfaction that she didn’t have this plight. She reveled in my ugliness.
I can recall the exact moment that our dynamic shifted. My mother and I were on a beach vacation together. I was 13, and I was newly going through puberty. While the two of us were laying on beach chairs, a man came over to talk to us. I thought that he looked to be about 30, which probably means he was actually 20, and as he approached my mother straightened up in her chair.
“Hey,” he said as an introduction. His wet, dark blue swim suit trunks hugged his body. I pretended not to notice.
“Hi,” my mother responded. I turned my attention back to my book, settling into my routine of ignorance whenever something like this happened to us.
“Sorry, I was talking to her,” he said, and grinned at me over my book. I felt my body go hot under his gaze.
My mother scoffed angrily, and shooed him off. “She’s 13.”
He shrugged, and left. He didn’t look embarrassed enough by this realization. As he walked away, my mother looked at me. I was expecting a face of pity, or a general face of concern, but when she looked at me, I saw an expression from her that I had never been on the receiving end of. I saw it storm in her brown eyes, and apply its influence over her features. Jealousy.
The older I got, the more her beauty was traded for mine. As my boobs perked, hers sagged. As my spine lengthened, hers shrank. As my hair thickened, hers thinned.
She reconciled with this in different ways. She started getting botox when I turned 16. She got her boobs done when I was 20. She got lip filler when I turned 25. But nothing changed the way that she looked at me, with a sickening envy and accusation.
When I became pregnant, I noticed her watching me expectantly. Would my belly give me stretch marks? Would I satisfy my cravings and overeat?
The day I turned 30, my water broke, and I started going into labor. My child was going to share my birthday with me. My mother was with me in the hospital room, gripped my hand and stayed with me as I excreted every bodily fluid. When my child finally left my womb, the nurses cleaned and handed the child to me.
“It’s a girl,” the nurse whispered, and every woman in the room smiled.
“A girl,” the room seemed to breathe.
My mother looked at me. “A girl,” she said.
As I looked at my daughter, some of my hair got in my face. I turned to my mother, held my face up, and closed my eyes. She gently pushed the hair to the side, but some of the hair strands slid off my face and into my mother’s fingers.
When I opened my eyes, she was holding one of the strands up to me, noiselessly.
It was gray.
