Honoring Mothers: HOW IT FEELS TO BE THE MOTHER OF THE WORLD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL BABY -- REVISITED
by Joyce Maynard

Originally published March, 2006 in a collection called "It's a Girl," edited by Andrea Buchanan, published by Seal Press.

My daughter Audrey -- my first baby, born just after my twenty fourth birthday -- was a beauty from the start. She emerged from my body with a full shock of black hair and large eyes, black as coffee beans, and skin of a shade that could leave a person with the impression that she'd spent the winter in someplace like Cabo San Lucas or Palm Beach instead of my belly. And what I felt, looking down at her as she lay in my arms that first day (and the many that followed) was the deepest kind of love and something else: the deepest kind of pride. I had made this person. She was mine. And the fact that she was also beautiful reflected, surely, on me.

People told me babies' hair always fell out. She'd end up bald as an egg, they said, but I didn't believe it and I was right. At an age when other babies -- the ones in the doctor's waiting room for their neonatal visits-- remained shriveled and bald, Audrey didn't just have hair, she had a hairdo. Her lashes were so long they cast shadows on her cheeks. Her mouth was a rosebud. "You should send her picture somewhere," people told me. "She could have her face on the Pampers box." In Latin America, maybe.

I didn't pursue a modeling career for my daughter, but secretly, I loved it that I had not simply a healthy, wonderful, cuddly, perfect baby girl, but a beautiful one. In years past, I had sometimes felt irritation with my own mother, at the way she seemed to appropriate what she perceived as my successes in life as her own. (The way, when I got anorexically thin at the end of high school and beyond, she -- as a lifelong dieter -- seemed to delight in my size two body. The way she instructed me in what to wear, for trips to visit my grandparents, how she pressed me for details of what went on after the prom with my high school boyfriend. It all contributed to a feeling that she had lost sight of where her identity ended and mine began.)

Once I became a mother myself, though, I got a glimmer of understanding. I remember a day, a few weeks after Audrey's birth, when her father Steve and I were headed over to the house of friends for a visit. I had spent an hour bathing and dressing Audrey, changing her outfit, deciding which of the many dresses I'd been given -- size zero; they'd fit her for about two weeks -- to put on her that day. Finally I'd made my selection, brushed her hair, inserted her shell toes in their booties, and headed out to the car -- ready for the visit, except for the fact that I had nothing on myself but my underwear. Where once I would have primped a fair amount, myself, for an outing like this, now the only beauty I considered was that of my daughter. For nine months, I'd given over my body to her. Now she had my brain, and something else besides: my vanity. I no longer sought to be the fairest in the land. Only the mother of the fairest.

When your daughter is an infant, you can do what you will with her of course. Hairdo selections, outfits, shoes. She is like the best doll you ever had. And maybe the fact that her entry into your life is likely to herald one of a woman's least glamourous and attractive moments (belly stretched out, waist thickened, hair lank, circles under the eyes) encourages, all the more, the impulse in a woman to avoid thoughts of her own appearance and turn, instead (obsessively, perhaps) to those of her child.

Later, you come to love so many things about your child: her sense of humor, her sweetness, her love of animals, the way she dances, or smiles at other babies, or the joy she takes in a ball, a rubber spatula, a bubble. But a newborn, if she isn't precisely a blank slate, remains far less well known, even to her own parents, than she will be one day. What we do know is her face, her body. The sound of her voice, crying or cooing, and not surprisingly, we come to love those things about her.

When Audrey was about six months old I wrote a little article for a magazine -- Family Circle, I think -- about the pride a mother feels, the vanity, over the appearance of her child. The article was called "How it Feels to be the Mother of the World's Cutest Baby," and to illustrate it, the magazine had requested that I bring Audrey to New York for a photographer to take her portrait.

I dressed her in the most elaborate of her many dresses for the occasion. The photographer and I propped her up on a throne of pillows, bathed in light, while a stylist fluffed her amazing black hair. "Are those eyelashes real?" he said.

The story I'd written was meant to be humorous, of course. I didn't really believe my daughter, or anyone's daughter for that matter, could lay claim to being the cutest baby in the world, but the fact that I and my fellow mothers tended to view our children that way was a phenomenon worthy of note, and of a certain wry self deprecation. Look at what's happened to me, I was saying. Six months ago I had a baby, and turned into a crazy person.

Not the only one, however. When the magazine hit the stands, I was deluged with letters, and so were the editors of Family Circle. How dare this woman say her baby was the cutest, the authors of these letters wrote (deadly serious, all) when in fact that distinction happened to belong to their own baby girl? Photograph enclosed.

When Audrey was not quite two years old, she contracted the chicken pox. She itched all over, of course, but the challenge came when scabs formed on her scalp, and despite my vigilance, she scratched off a scab, just on the crown of her head. The spot left where it had been was probably no more than an eighth inch in circumference but I actually wept, thinking of my beautiful daughter, with a bald spot. I called my best friend, Laurie to talk about it, and found her with a sorrow of her own. "Leah chipped a tooth yesterday," she said, speaking of her own baby girl.

"At least it was a baby tooth," I said. Still, if you'd heard us that day, you might have thought our children had lost a limb, instead of a microscopic piece of tooth, a few hair follicles. The way some men are about the first scratch in a new car was how I was about that microscopic bald spot. My beautiful daughter was no longer perfect.

As Audrey grew, her exotic, other worldly beauty blossomed, and I admit, so did the joy and pride of ownership I took in it. I sewed buttons in the shapes of ducks and kittens on her dresses and stitched appliques of flowers on her overalls. Her thick hair grew to her waist, and though it required hours of brushing, I didn't mind. When she was six, she came home from school with a note: "Audrey had lice." I put a video of Gone with the Wind in the VCR and from the time Scarlett O'Hara first got laced into her bodice to the moment Clark Gable carried her up the staircase, I picked those lice eggs out of her waist length hair, uncomplaining. The alternative -- cutting it -- was just too painful to contemplate, and not just painful for my daughter either. For her mother, most of all.

But here's what happened. Not all at once, but gradually: My daughter ceased to be my dress-up doll. She picked out her own dresses, and sometimes the choices were very far from ones I'd make. She put together combinations that were her idea of fashion, not mine. She didn't like to brush her hair, but she didn't like me brushing it either. As a result, she sometimes went off to school looking like a mess. I hated it, that I cared as much as I did. Sometimes we even argued, and sometimes bitterly, over what she wore, or her failure to brush her hair. Really though, the source of our battles went deeper. My daughter was separating from me. She was not my perfect little girl any more.

For a while there -- around the time her father and I divorced, when she was eleven and twelve -- she got chubby, and then she got a haircut that turned out badly, and for months, she wore a pink velvet hat on her unflattering bubble cut, I knew -- as the daughter of a mother who had cared too much about my own weight, when I was young -- that I had to stay out of this one, but sometimes it was all I could do, watching her scoop handfuls of cookie dough from the bowl, not to speak of the calorie count. She would sit at the counter, eating Haagen Daz straight out of the carton. More than once I got a spoon myself, and started taking spoonfuls with her, just so she wouldn't eat the whole thing herself. I cared about my weight too. But I would rather see myself take in the extra calories, than see them go to my daughter.

These are dirty little secrets I'm writing here. It would be easier, almost, to admit that I got drunk around my child, or yelled at her, or neglected to attend her junior high school band concert -- easier to say (but it's not true) that I was this vain about my own looks, self absorbed about my own hair and clothes and body -- than to say as I do, "I loved it that my daughter was beautiful." "I took pleasure in how she looked." But I did.

Her face wasn't the only thing I loved about her. Not even what I loved best. (There was so much to love: Her smile, Her laugh. Her capacity to make friends wherever she went. Her tenderness to her little brothers. Her quick mind. Her boundless zest for life. I loved those things too.) And still, when I traveled away from home, I loved taking her photograph out of my wallet and showing it to people, and hearing them say "My god, she's beautiful."

Here is the worst shame for me. That when my daughter wasn't beautiful -- and for a while there, she wasn't -- I grieved the loss of her beauty more than I grieved the appearance of lines on my own face, or my graying hair, or the fact that my legs were no longer as slim as they once had been. One day I looked at my daughter -- my dark, exotic beauty, a girl who inherited, from her eastern European grandmother, not only her thick dark hair and dark skin and dark eyes, but also, a faint fuzz of dark hair on her upper upper lip -- and what I felt was a shiver of regret, and a terrible absence of the old familiar pride.

Audrey was thirteen then, and kids at school had teased her a few times, that she had a moustache. I might have told her "So did Frida Kahlo, and she was one of the great beauties of the world." I might have said "Those kids don't sound like the kind of people to be friends with." I might have put my arms around her and said "To me, you are perfect." Instead what I told her was, "You know, we could go to an electrolysist and take care of that."

How could I do that to the girl I loved more than any other on the planet? I was a girl once, myself -- a girl who thought her eyebrows were too thick, and plucked them obsessively, a girl who slept with Saran Wrap around her waist to lose inches from her middle, a girl who lived on one container of Boysenberry yogurt a day for one entire summer of her life (the seventeenth). I was a girl whose own mother had thrilled to the loss of twenty five pounds, when I was eighteen (bringing me down to ninety seven pounds), without a clue that what it took to get there was my putting my index finger down my throat every day.

I was a woman (the very same woman who breast fed this very daughter, and the two sons that followed) who, at age thirty five, wrote a check to a plastic surgeon for three thousand dollars, for the insertion (through her armpits) of silicone implants, because the boyfriend she'd met, after her divorce, had suggested it might be a good idea if her breasts weren't so droopy. I was a woman who did a hundred situps a night, in the dark. I was a woman who, at the age of forty, had a dentist fill in the gap between her front teeth (that she actually sort of liked) because she had recognized that most women didn't have a gap like that, and she wanted to look more like everybody else. I was a woman who sometimes, in bed at night, put a hand on her own belly -- no longer flat, after giving birth three times -- and instead of registering appreciation for what my belly had borne, and acceptance for its understandable softness, I ran my fingers over my flesh with a small but ever present sensation of regret and disgust. I was a woman who should have known as well as anyone the pain that women go through, trying to replicate a certain accepted image of female beauty and present it to the world. And in spite of knowing the cost of going that way, I was ready to see my treasured only daughter experience the same kind of pain I had experienced.

I think it was a different kind of pain I wanted to spare her. I wanted my daughter to be spared the humiliation of rejection, the loneliness of feeling unworthy, unloved, unnoticed. And I actually supposed the way a woman best protected herself against those things was to make sure she was pretty enough -- beautiful enough, if possible -- that she would hold power over those who might otherwise hurt and reject her.

But Audrey, to her credit, wasn't buying that idea. I would prefer to say that I had recognized, for myself, the unwisdom of trying to maintain power in a cruel world by accepting the world's cruel rules, but I think Audrey decided on her own -- not all at once of course, but gradually, over the years of her teens and the ones that have followed -- to live by some other code than the one that would have had her on a lifelong mission to look like someone else's concept of a beautiful woman. Somewhere along the line my daughter decided that she would love herself the way she was. And of course, that has made her more powerful than conventional beauty (which always fades) ever could have.

I wish I could say I simply and purely celebrated her choices -- to give up shaving her legs, to discontinue the electrolysis on her lip, to let her belly -- no longer chubby, but round in the way a woman's belly is meant to be -- show over the top of her jeans, without feeling a need to hold in her stomach as her mother has spent the last thirty years doing. For a while there, I tried gently to suggest small concessions: why not wear a bra at least, to protect against the future effects of gravity? I told her I'd pay for contact lenses to replace her glasses, took her to a department store to buy fashionable tops to replace the pillowcases she chose to wear for a while there. But somewhere along the line, while I supposed I was teaching my daughter how to look like a more attractive woman, she taught me, instead, the nature of true female beauty. It is a glow that radiates from her, and a person doesn't need to be my daughter's impossibly biased mother to spot it, when Audrey dances into a room.

When she was nineteen, Audrey shared a dormitory suite with five other young women at U.C. Santa Cruz, where she went to school. I remember the first time I paid her a visit there, sometime in the fall of that year. I walked into the common room the six young women shared and saw, on the wall, a row of life-sized plaster molds of six naked female torsos, painted silver. No faces -- the girls had cast their bodies from the neck to the waist, painted them silver, and mounted them over the couch.

These were young women -- women who had yet to nurse babies or celebrate their fortieth, thirtieth or even twentieth birthdays -- and still, there was not a single pair of what someone in Hollywood might term "perfect breasts" in the bunch of them. And still, they were beautiful. More so, as you got used to them. Which is the same thing that's true about my daughter. She wears her hair in a long braid down her back now. Except for a little lipstick, now and then, she wears no makeup. She moves like a woman who knows how to dance bachata and merengue, and she does. Some people think she's Cuban, but mostly they just ask where in the world she comes from because truthfully, she looks like nobody but her own self. Not me. Not any of her grandparents. Not her brothers. She is her creation, her own art work.

I thought I made her. I suppose I thought she would be a reflection of me, but I was wrong about that, as every mother is, who supposes her daughter to be hers. In the twenty eight years since I gave birth to her, I have learned that my daughter made her own self (though in a certain way, she made me who I am too). Her beauty is her own creation. She is not a reflection of me. If she reflects anything, it's the light of the sun.

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