How My Mother's Life – and Death – Impacted My Obsession With My Appearance

I scoured my closet for the tenth time, each item of clothing dangling from hangers, hue by hue, all perfectly arranged by color (lightest to darkest) and by weight of material (lightweight to heavier fabrics). Picking an outfit to wear to any gathering, dinner or party is the bane of my social life. Amid the happy hours and brunches and dates is an anxious little girl, worried that if she selects the wrong ensemble, she will be ostracized from society, gabbed about in bar bathrooms and feel completely regretful about the collection she chose. She must stand out, she must attract attention — both of which are mantras that plague her adult mind but that her mother effectively ignored while raising three daughters.

But despite my mother’s disinterest for the superficial, I still feel consistently compelled to put on a show of sorts — a display of a put-together exterior that hides everything I want to keep hidden.

My mom was basically a tomboy, strongly encouraging my sisters and me to play every sport imaginable, or at least to try them, mostly because she didn’t have the same opportunities for athleticism as a girl growing up in the male-dominated 1960s and 70s. As the second-youngest of eight children, there wasn’t a lot of time (or space) for her to explore her own interests. Just when “free” time finally presented itself in her late 20s, she became pregnant with my older sister, then me 17 months later, followed by a third girl two years after that. Not only did she lack the five minutes it would have likely taken her to engage in any sort of beauty routine, she also was deficient of the motivation necessary to attend to the menial act of getting “dolled up.”

When I envisage my mom’s physical appearance, I see her in t-shirts, what today would be considered “mom” jeans and white Reebok sneakers. Her naturally curly dark chocolate hair would bounce with just the right amount of God-given volume to mimic an inkling of image-awareness. Her makeup routine involved a one-handed swipe of Chapstick across her lips before closing it with the same hand and dropping it back into the ashtray of our 90s Ford Windstar van. I can’t be sure if it was her hectic schedule spent schlepping three kids around suburban Virginia or her personal choice to avoid any sort of stereotypical female preparation ritual, but it clearly wasn’t a priority for her to be overly presentable. Despite this pure, unpolished role model, my looks began to seriously matter to me about a decade into my existence.

On occasion, I would sneak my tiny hands into the top slide-out drawer under my mom’s bathroom sink where I would encounter the essentials for the most basic made-up face: a classic crimson lipstick, a pink-and-green tube of mascara, a blush compact with a fingernail-sized application brush… and that was it. These items typically only made appearances before dance recitals, when my mom would paint our 6-year-old faces in ways we didn’t understand. Upon a glance in the oval mirror in our hallway bathroom, standing atop a rectangular wooden stool, we thought we looked as unnatural as clowns. But in hindsight, this was subtle proof that my mom at least had a general idea of what she was doing.

The covert crawls into my mom’s bathroom continued into my preteen years, when we were old enough to stay home by ourselves while she left the house to run errands. I would open the lipstick, dab the tube to my lips and inhale the waxy coating that, for a few moments, made me feel like this is what a woman is “supposed” to do.

My curiosity about this practice of glamorizing transcended my familial world as society’s opinions about what constitutes beauty seeped into my subconscious. Advertisements blared acne remedies between music videos on MTV and VHI. The pages of my “Seventeen” magazines were splashed with products that promised to “bring out your beauty.” Girls at school stocked up on lotions, powders and nail polish from stores not necessarily to improve the texture of their skin, but to make it clear to their peers that they were, indeed, turning into women.

The focus of female existence was relegated to the exterior: what you put on your body and how it looks to other people, and sometimes to yourself. But what if neither others nor myself approved? What if there was no man-made product that could make me feel better about my appearance? What if I just had to accept my looks without feeling compelled to “enhance” this or “accentuate” that? The one person who held the role of implementing these values into my development was a woman who hardly ever asked herself such questions.

Sure, every so often my mom and my dad would have some sort of date night when she would don a floral dress, slip on one of her two pairs of “high” heels and maybe swipe on a bit of blush and lipstick. But now, as an adult myself, I wonder if these actions felt obligatory, if she felt that she had to paint her face for a man, if she even recognized herself in the mirror. And as an adult, these are questions I cannot ask her.

When she was 48 and I was 19, my mom succumbed to a 13-year battle with breast cancer. When I think about her sick days throughout her disease, I picture her face, makeup-free, a woman knocking on the door of the afterlife, not concerned one bit about having a second or even a third serving of dessert. After all, what does it matter?

Throughout her life and even while slowly drifting away from life, she maintained what did matter. She continued to try to build memories with us, even if the loss of her voice a few months after her terminal diagnosis meant they would have to be silent memories, like watching movies side-by-side on her bed. She just wanted us to be close. She wanted us to be OK. And she wanted us to remember what’s important.

It’s not whether I will have the best outfit at the bar tonight, and it’s not whether some stranger will think that one of my curls looks out of place. In inheriting these curls from my mom; I am also thankful to have inherited her ability to realize what matters.