Starbursts

Beauty post, part 2:


Elsie is a beautiful child.  She has been beautiful since her earliest days when her birth hormones subsided and the swollen, purple, tiny-old-man features so common in newborns relaxed into those of a delicate china doll.  When she was an infant, people would stop me on the subway, in the grocery store, on the street, to tell me that she was the most perfect baby they had ever seen.  She has grown out of her babyhood, but she has not grown out of attracting this kind of attention from strangers.  Her style tends towards angelic, with a crown of whispies that catches the light like a halo, and her usually blue eyes shifting into green and, occasionally, shining gold as her hair.

I am as delighted by looking at my daughter as I am worried about what it could mean for my girl if she grows up conspicuously beautiful.

I grew up pretty enough not to be ugly, but not so pretty that I got noticed for my looks -- and I think that was good for me.  There are some HUGE advantages to being attractive, and I would be much more worried if my daughter was disfigured, but if BEAUTIFUL is the primary way people identify you, it begins to be the way you measure yourself.  Adolescent women especially buy into the dangerous game of their own objectification.  Anyway, we are, none of us, perky and smooth and shining with a golden glow forever.  Growing old is easier if your identity is not linked so tightly to your physical dimensions or the smoothness of your skin.

I was more often noticed for my intelligence, and so I identify as "the smart girl."  Alzheimers will be brutal on me, if I ever get it, but I can handle my wrinkles.

My hope for my daughter is that she goes through a moderate awkward stage in her early adolescence.  Nothing severe enough to leave scars, but greasy and blemished and gangly and dis-proportioned enough that, during that pivotal moment in her development of her own identity, SMART and FUNNY and KIND and PRINCIPLED give PRETTY a run for its money.

A few years ago, Elsie developed a pair of blemishes under one eye.  Each is a bright red thing with a raised point in the middle and hair-thin red capillaries stretching away from it in all directions.  I developed one on my chin when I was pregnant with Elsie, and it hung around for five years before finally disappearing on its own. I affectionately call mine a starburst, though the official name is the much creepier spider angioma.

Elsie recently informed me that people often ask her about the marks

"What happened to your face?"

"And what do you tell them?"  I asked, my interest piqued about how my daughter would respond to a more negative observation about her appearance.

"I just say they've always been there.  They're part of my face."

I like that answer.

Elsie drew this self-portrait the other day, and it is my favorite one so far.  She captures herself in fine detail, in her favorite fiery hues, with her placid little smile and two bright red points shining from under her many-colored eyes.

CREATIVE, OBSERVANT, AUTHENTIC.

I shouldn't worry so much about this one.