Maybe you'll get why. But if not, give me this one. This one is for me. Message to myself: Let yourself.
My mother has been, is, always will be, was born, and has worked hard to remain beautiful. Stunning. At any age, she has surpassed the looks, caught and held the gaze, of her peers, her contemporaries, knew how to be beautiful, knew how to make her beauty work for her. Blonde, slavic, full Czech, in her 20s and thirties she was Mia Farrow breath taking. At 70, she still is.
And there were other parts of her too, the softer parts, no lines, the creams and potions, the vitamin e capsules, pricked with a pin, gel in a tiny porcelin dish on her dresser, for just under the eyes, magnificent in the daylight, my mother. Petite, like a doll, flapper flat and thin, with proper manners and grace I never seemed to learn.
Yes me.
Those are the Dimino genes, she'd say. My curves and blooming and puberty hitting at 11. Me shapely and developing early, me at five already knowing I would have some chest.
I can't tell if, though something has nagged at me this year, if she, maybe unconsciously, fed me, draped me, over did it with me--was that from love, the overabundance of food and toys and undershirts? Or was it something else.
I remember being in the pediatrician's office at 13. Him saying, in his 50-something Italian Macho way, "If you lost 20 pounds, you'd be Miss America." I remember the panic setting in, my mother in the examining room with me. And I can't quite hit on what was swelling inside that panic. Besides myself. I do remember some of the thoughts that came to me, flooded my 13-year-old brain. Things like:
I'm not allowed to do that.
I don't want that kind of attention.
I can't achieve real beauty, slavic beauty. I have the wrong genes.
Why would I want to be a ditzy miss america?
Why wouldn't I?
What do I do?
What should I say when I leave this room, to her?
Why is my face so red?
Just some thoughts. Like those. Rushing and pushing their way from somewhere in my groin up past my forehead, pulsating. Oh God. Why did we have to come here?
So over the years, the decades, the 20 pounds doubled, and doubled. And while I never felt particularly "ugly," I journeyed through my adolescence and early adulthood remaining in my place, the place I had learned to love and receive love, a place where I fit with the side of the family that was my father, whom I missed so, him thick and strong, those Dimino genes. Yes. Okay. I'll keep those. But how far do I have to go to fit that mold. Like Aunt Marge, may she rest in peace, needing a cane to carry her plumpness around? To be a good girl, do I need to be deny my physical beauty? Agree to decide it isn't Beauty? Beauty that is not flapper thin, blonde, petite, or especially attractive from a Magazine-Media point of view? Or from my mother's point of view? I didn't know. Sometimes I still don't know.
I know I can think of myself as genetically challenged.
And I did that. Have done that. Although I found in my husband someone who saw into my beauty, appreciated me, even with my genetic challenges, which he didn't see, which I saw, still--finding that in someone else does not change how you feel about yourself. You take yourself, as they say, with you.
Just this last year, I've set out on a journey that I've chronicled pieces of here--you hear it, don't you--you read it in me, in us, in our love and language, in our agony and breathtaking vulnerability--I know you do. In the end, opening our skin and becoming vulnerable to one another is the only way to get inside. You gotta get in to get out.
So, where is this going? What has moved me this week, to write this?
I think that for the first time in my life, I'm giving myself permission to be beautiful. The way I see beauty. Me. I. The way I see it. I'm learning to see it. And maybe it won't be Magazine georgeous, and maybe it won't be thin, and maybe my beauty will be, more, well, challenging than the norm--to the norm--and maybe it won't be. I don't know. Because I've never, not ever, until this year, looked at myself through my own two eyes.
I'd never seen myself until I came here.
But I am starting to. And being here--finding my voice--that's a big part of why, of how I've come to not fear my own mirror. Put down hers. Stop judging based on genetic code. Start relishing health, start accepting that it's okay to get better. It's okay to live. For me.
For Me.
Me.
ME.
