Beauty is a Way of Seeing

My mother is not vain. She has never considered herself to be beautiful. In her mind, cute, fun, and friendly have always seemed more appropriate descriptions than gorgeous, alluring, or mysterious. She believes, as my grandmother so often said, that “beauty is only skin deep” and my mother is not interested in appearances, in shallowness, in anything that is merely skin deep.

My mother has retained many childlike qualities, I have always been able to see the child version of her peeking out through her eyes. The child her is loving, mischievous, and playful. The child her is lost in a world of her own imagining and although tethered to the real world through her body her interior world is not defined by the way the body looks.

I have hugged her while she was still sweaty from washing dishes, I have seen her without a stitch of makeup doing her grocery shopping, I have previewed outfits purchased at thrift stores, her favorite shopping destinations. The impact of seeing her this way is immeasurable.

Perhaps, at one time, appearance was more important to her. But when I was growing up, her approach to life was always more pragmatic, more practical. Her sense of self-worth coming from her ability to get things done and care for others, rather than what she might look like while executing the task at hand.

I have inherited these qualities from her, like the color of my eyes and the tip of my nose. Sometimes I forget to look in the mirror all day. The secret delight of this approach is that I feel beautiful, and I never know if I’m right or not.

So much of our society is built around the idea of seeming beautiful, mostly because interior beauty cannot be purchased, cannot be sold, and so the world that advertising reflects is one where the only beauty that matters is the beauty that can be seen.

And so often a certain portion of our youth and the ideal of beauty are seen as the same thing, that to attain beauty and remain beautiful children should try to look older and middle age and beyond should do anything to go back to a time already past.

But this is only true within a shadow world of human invention, in nature it is just not so. The hoary-headed dandelion has a serenity and elegance that is not present in the golden glory of its youth. The vibrant shades of trees in the fall make all previous incarnations seem lackluster by comparison. The blanketing snow has sparkling hues of tangerine and periwinkle and mauve, that can only be seen if one looks closely, if one takes a moment to pause at just the right time.

My mother’s greatest gift to me is essentially freedom, freedom from unreachable expectation, freedom from seeing myself as having only one thing to offer, freedom from having my worth tied to an ever-sinking ship.

My mother has often told me that I am beautiful, but I know what she means. She means that my work ethic is beautiful, my care for my family is beautiful, my lively imagination and my sense of humor and my unending curiosity are all beautiful.

I am passing this gift on to my daughter. I think she is beautiful when she is muddy, when she is stinky or sweaty, when she is covered in some unidentifiable sticky substance. I see her through a mother’s eyes, through my mother’s eyes.

Because I know that in her eyes, I am beautiful, simply because I am me, and I return the favor, seeing as beautiful the thoughtful wrinkles that denote her creative mind, the callouses on her caring hands, and the sagging breasts that enshrine her loving heart.