When Isobel was born, of course I thought she was beautiful. She took my breath away – this tiny creature that I’d help make, grew out of blood and a night of post-marijuana anniversary sex and a lot of McDonalds. She was so tiny, barely over five pounds when I brought her home, but also so developed and her own person. It was hard to think of her as anything more than perfect.
Except for her birthmark – which is only noticeable when a height of crying or breathlessness causes its red angel-kissness to flare up between her eyebrows and over her right eye. Or the bags she’s had under her eyes since she popped out of the womb with the aide of a vacuum and 26 (fucking) hours of labour.
Then around the time that she doubled her birthweight, she filled out some. It took five months for her to stop looking like an angry old man, and she became a blonde, big-eyed, squishy-cheeked baby girl. Gorgeous, just like so many other blonde, big-eyed, squishy-cheeked baby girls tend to be.
Blame it on how I was raised. Blame eating disorder’s skewing – the lack of ability to see much more than individual features. Blame it on a kind of candor that I’m aware other parents don’t have about their children’s beauty. But around a year, JDawg and I looked back at her first 12 months of photos and went, OMG, she’s so much cuter now. Why did we think she was beautiful before, when she was sharp jawed, thin-necked and and always so tired and angry-looking?
I know. It’s wrong.
Around her second birthday, the amount of people that had said she should model, who’d complimented her eyes and her face and her vive stood out like a sore thumb. Of course, I still thought she was beautiful – that was genetically ingrained. Of course I told her she was, called her beautiful as a nickname. Of course. But for the love of god, strangers on the street were still stopping in their tracks to smile and aww at her. Strangers were telling me she should do print work. People I don’t know were coming up with their cameras, asking to take a photo of her.
Recently, she’s become fascinated with all things princessey and make up. I’ll be concealing my mommy-wounded eyes and she says she wants some make up too – leaning forward, closing her eyes for a magical brush to make her pretty. She says she wants to be pretty. It disturbs the fuck out of me.
I’ve never not told her she’s gorgeous, or that makeup would help her be more so. Never indicated that a dress would make her prettier, or that princesses were best. I argue with her when she says she wants to do _____ because it will make her pretty. I say, “you don’t need eyeshadow to be beautiful. You don’t need to try at all. A dress doesn’t make you pretty, Isobel, you’re already perfect.”
Much like the words stupid, bad and shut up, words indicating that any aesthetic help is required to make her amazing aren’t tolerated from anyone. In fact, the closest to that that she’s ever encountered is when someone says she looks like me and I say something like, “I know, right? She’s gonna hate that in about 2 decades.” Glib, and obviously, it should stop for so many reasons, not the least being it’s potential effect on her self esteem and my apparent lack of any.
And then this evening, she was doing not much, hanging around our living room, watching a movie and it hit me. My daughter is fucking beautiful. Not in that, she’s mine and I love her and of course I think she’s beautiful kind of way, not because she has gigantic witchy eyes like her mommy does and the witchy attitude to go with them, not merely because she didn’t have a trace of shit all over her and her bangs weren’t hanging in her face.
I saw her from the corner of my eye, helping Diego coax a flying squirrel toward a nut, and I was in awe. I saw her expressions not as a detriment, for once. The bags under her eyes didn’t glare at me, beacons of unhealth.
She’s petite, muscular and soft where she should be. Her dark eyelashes go on forever, framing some of the largest eyes I know, a most peculiar mix of green, grey and blue – they’re almost jade-coloured in some lights and the colour of the ocean at night, in others. There’s not one fragile-seeming thing about her, attitude included, but yet she is utterly feminine (and I apologize if that’s offensive to anyone who does not equate frailty with femininity, but I do and this is my poor sentence structure). Rosy lips and full cheeks and a defined jaw-line only add to it. Her hair? A mixture of the lightest blonde, light red and brown. She’s a chameleon. She is perfect.
I saw that I am totally, 100% fucked. Her adolescence is gonna suuuuuuuck.
