Laughing at my face

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My kids are constantly breaking down my walls for me, and I feel like a newer, lighter human being because of their joy and love. Damn we are lucky to have our kids, aren’t we?

Seeing the natural overwhelming beauty that my daughter possesses blows every other preconceived notion of “beauty” out of the water for me. Barbie doll? Ridiculous. Laughable to me, even. And here is how…

My daughter takes one look at the towers of catalogs and models that wait for us each day in our mailbox… people who are so beautiful that they are getting paid for what they look like… and she gets excited, and runs for a pen. And as I wander around the house, cleaning up the piles of mail and such, these are the things I see.

 

I laugh out loud so hard tears come out.

It just never fails.

She doesn’t see an impossibly perfect person who makes other woman feel badly enough about their own face to run out and buy this particular make up product to cover up with.

Nope. She sees with open eyes.

And what she sees is a blank canvas.

Something to improve upon with a few doodles, a great imagination, and a joyful heart.

 

It lifts me up and frees me from my own walls of self-hatred… wishing I was more beautiful… wishing to be something other then what I am… carefully developed from years of reading teen magazines and watching commercials and movies when I was a girl…

This You Tube video of Killing Us Softly has been around before, but this time it hit me that for the first time, I felt quite free from this type of *perfection* pressure.

It is really worth a watch, if you haven’t seen it yet… it’s eye opening, and I think it is important for everyone to see, menfolk included.

 

Then I find a beauty like this, and my kids remind me yet again that EVERYTHING is supposed to be fun.

That’s why we are here!

Even beauty is supposed to be fun.

 

That’s a new concept for me… I thought beauty was supposed to be stressful and competitive. But watching my daughter have fun for hours trying on different outfits and flinging the clothes all over her bedroom is enough to show me that our bodies are supposed to bring us joy.

And adorning them, dressing them, even making them up or scenting them, is supposed to be for fun… not from fear or guilt.

The half hearted way I’m tempted to dab on foundation when my skin looks drab… I’m not doing it!

I’m not doing it unless it is FUN!

I’m not going to do it if the reason I’m doing it is because I feel ugly and I want to cover up.

NO. I’m doing this the right way now. I’m only going to put make up on when it’s because I feel gorgeous!

And I’m only dressing up if it’s with a huge smile on my face because I want to! Or I’m sticking on lipstick because I love this huge smiling toothy mouth of mine, not because I look in the mirror and see pale thin lips and want to erase them.

 

My son helps me too… and he doesn’t even know he does.

I overheard this exchange from my two kids as we were getting ready for bed last night:

Miles: “Sometimes, when we are at a store and I’m laughing, I’m not laughing because anything is funny. I’m laughing at Mommy’s face.”

Clara: “Yeah. Mommy’s face is so weird.”

*******Peels of laughter and cracking up********

 

And I know how far I’ve come, in this whole beauty/insecurity dance I do, when comments like that make me laugh and please me… truly please me… instead of make me run anxious to a mirror to see what they heck they are laughing at.

 

Another gem was Miles saying to me (as he is watching me wake up one morning a few weeks ago): “Mommy, your face is really wrinkled when you are sleeping. But during the day, it just looks regular… like a teenager.”

Wow. Like a teenager… my regular face, with no make up? No one else but my son could look at me and say that with total honesty.

But it was said with the innocence and complete conviction and truth of childhood… not as a compliment to make me happy… but as a raw and utter fact from my son.

So I’ll take that over looking like a Barbie doll any day of the week.

doodle 4

 

Now go find a catalog and doodle armpit hair on all the women and butt fumes coming up from all the men.

I guarantee you you can’t take beauty too seriously with a Sharpie marker in your hand.

xoxo, Laura