The Beauty Lie

“Thus, the little mermaid learned her world’s greatest paradox: that their currency was beauty, and their coin was body parts.” – Esther Dalseno

We grew up without mirrors. I mean, there was a round, smallish mirror in the dining room and standard size medicine cabinet mirrors but nothing to see your entire body or even most of it. For a family of mainly women, three daughters and a mother, the aspects of femininity that I noticed in friend’s houses, the vanities, the collection of makeup, the mirrors, just didn’t exist. My mother’s credo, honed at Harvard design school, was “form follows function.” She washed her thick, chestnut hair in the kitchen sink with dish detergent, rarely wore makeup, and remained absorbed by her work and my father. Luckily, she was a knockout and when she did dress up, lipstick, mascara, she took my breath away. We were important but tangential and reflective; our beauty reflected on her. My father’s judgement was sacred and harsh. His only caveat applied to weight. Whatever you do, don’t get fat.

photo by Suhyeon Choi

I was obsessed with beauty products, anything that could transform one from a study child with bangs and short, thick hair. I wanted to be blonde, tiny, delicate, and thin. I read Glamour, Mademoiselle and other fashion magazines avidly while fully aware I possessed none of the clothes or makeup or possibilities these women had. I pined for beauty which I equated with power. In time I would understand this focus on appearance was essentially delusional and even worse, a trap. By the time I started to notice desire in the eyes of men, I was ill-equipped to protect myself from the anger that often accompanied that feeling. I was accused of cock-teasing and manipulation by my mere presence as a pretty girl.

I became a shiny surface that reflected back those that chose me. I had to be chosen, not to choose. Despite my mother’s feminism and seeming independence, she allowed my father to beat her, deferring to him even as he withdrew from us.

At fifteen I managed to persuade my parents to allow me to take a long biking trip with my best friend through New England. Before the trip started, we met our group and leader in New York City, and I realized this grown man was looking at me with something beyond interest, desire, and hope. My braces had recently been removed; my face had lost its baby fat and my cheekbones were prominent. Playing soccer had changed my body to something strong and slim. My friend and I began to enjoy this power, aware our very existence could unsettle men. When we stopped in Maine to shop in the iconic L.L.Bean we stood in front of a full-length mirror, our waists encircled by bicycle chains, her blonde, willowy, lovely, me, wild-haired, muscular and suddenly transformed to model beauty and laughed.

One evening the leader took me aside and told me to visit him later. I had developed a crush that made me weak in his presence, but when I told him I was a virgin, I loved him and wanted to spend my life with him, he wisely sent me away. Crying in the arms of my friend, she whispered that someday, someone would love me back and at that moment I thought of my father and how he had stopped looking at me.

Later that summer, on a first date, I was raped, slapped around, and told it was my beauty that was to blame, my beauty that made him hurt me, my beauty that was to blame for what had happened. That night something inside me turned to stone. The romantic obsessions I’d had in the past, literary men like Heathcliffe and movie stars like James Bond, men who placed women on pedestals until they were pulled down and frequently murdered, were no longer of service. Instead, I saw myself as a commodity, a thing to be bartered in exchange for a job, a part, an expensive meal. It would never feel like it had in that store in Maine, a gift to be celebrated, something to love. It would take a long time, several terrible losses, becoming a mother, and my own aging for me to comprehend the mixed messages I received as a woman.

Now, as I lower myself into the lane at the pool ready to swim hard for an hour or so I reclaim that strong body and forgive the girl who longed for beauty. We are all ages, that baby that held a sunbeam, the teenager obsessed with her face, the mother who didn’t have time to brush her hair, and now a woman in the final part of her life, grateful to be alive.

– Molly Moynahan