Before you read any further please click on this link and look at the artwork by Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck. I tried to embed a live link to the picture but the site that hosts it prevents this and I really want you all to see this image in the context of this post. Thanks to CrazyMama whose own captivating work put me in mind of this artist.
I've been thinking a lot about beauty these last few days. Physical human beauty specifically. Despite years of being exposed to art and aesthetic theory, I have always felt that beauty is by its very nature exclusionary. In our culture, beauty is generally defined by such narrow and impossible physical ideals that at some level we all feel the brunt of beauty's bony cold shoulder. No matter how content I feel with my appearance, I will always want to tap into that greater beauty that eludes me--that eludes us all.
This distance between reality and idealized beauty, this desire, has itself been the fodder for much philosophical musing. I'm no philosopher but I can relate to the simultaneous pain and joy that desire embodies. Its implications are far reaching; it's not a big leap to get from corporeal desire (for a union with a loved one, for a more perfect physical self) to spiritual desire (the notion of heaven and the delayed gratification of the soul). I won't pretend to offer theological insights in this post. I don't have that in me nor do I wish to insult those of you who have spent far more time than I have thinking about theological matters. I did want to raise the above comparison, though, because I do think that any contemplation of physical beauty extends far beyond this rough admixture of mud and water from which we are made.
My daughter is physically stunning. For me, her beauty is breathtaking. I find I stop short many, many times a day in pure and simple awe of her physicality. Somehow, I, plain-Jane-Mad, created her and yet here she is so beautiful that I am at sixes and sevens trying to breathe in her beauty.
But this post isn't supposed to be about my daughter solely. You will notice I haven't included her picture anywhere here and you all know I'm not afraid to plaster her mug all over this blog. This post is about the beauty of children, all our children: their physical beauty to our eyes as parents. Children are beautiful. They possess capital "B" Beauty and I don't mean of the kind that is more than skin deep. Our children are physically glorious: they have soft, translucent skin; their eyelashes fall so delicately on their cheeks; their lips are just the right shade of pink; their noses, ears, hands and feet are perfectly proportioned; and their bodies are framed precisely to fit into our arms, to be cuddled, loved, and drunk up in all their sensuous wonder. Our children are stunninginly attractive.
One of the things that motherhood has given me is a real stake in aesthetics. I feel as if I now have access to perfect beauty and this beauty sees me, recognizes me and loves me. I still find this baffling. I am also amazed time and again when the pristine physical perfection that is my daughter is simultaneously so silly and human. Gadzooks, this miracle of human creation farts. Yep she farts and shits and laughs at silly jokes and batters her beloved Daisy right proper. In the tub, she wears my cheap plastic bath sponges around her wrists and struts about naked while announcing, "Meee-elll has two wallets!! Meeee-ellll going to town." This clearly is no runway in Milan.
This beauty of hers seems to transcend desire, to bypass the "otherness" of beauty that has eluded me my whole life. It is present, it is physical, it is mine to possess (for a breath, for a heart beat, for the length of a bedtime cuddle or a morning smile). It is desire fulfilled. My response to it is love but it is oh so much more than love for it is a slice of physical and spiritual gratification that I still can't quite properly put into words.
I know now, though, why so many parents talk of the perfection of their lives despite the tantrums and the diapers and clutter and sleeplessness. It all has to do with being given a glimpse of how the always-out-there world of true physical and spiritual desire can be achieved. It could almost give a gal faith in something larger than herself, larger than this world.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
I have looked upon the face of beauty
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Beautiful post! And oh, how I relate. I find my daughters' beauty so profoundly satisyfing, this huge blessing that I did not know I wanted.
This is a hard one for me, because while it's true for most parents, it's not true for all. One of the hardest things about Frances's first year was listening to all of hte medical opinions about how she wasn't beautiful, how her proportions weren't perfect. And I know, from talking to and reading the blogs of parents of kids w/ Down syndrome or visible physical differences, that the beauty of their kids too is constantly challenged by the people around them. Remember what happened to Sweetney? And how do you think the mom of the kid Sweetney's daughter was compared to felt? He functioned in VA's post solely as the standard of ugliness to which "normal" kids could be compared.
You're right that we all see our own kids as beautiful; but sadly, beauty even in the infant and toddler world is highly exclusionary. There's a reason I get pitying looks from other moms at the playground--and good god, if you've ever seen Frances, the only visible difference between her and another girl of the same age is her size. There's a reason for passionate articles defending a parent's right not to subject their DS child to cosmetic surgery to erase the visible signs of their condition. There's a reason that twelve pregnant women in the UK decided to abort their pregnancies when they found out the fetus had cleft palate.
So when I read posts like this, while I understand on one level, I also remember the months that Frances and I didn't leave hte house because I was so sick of hearing "what's wrong with her?" The experience you write of should be universal; but it's not.
This post is exactly what I needed to read today. I've been groping to put my finger on this since reading the article Beck linked to yesterday about how parenting doesn't make you happier (shocker!). We sacrifice our happiness to so many unworthier things - status, power, money, people-pleasing, jobs. Our children bring us something higher than happiness, and not just because raising children is an essential contribution to society (which it is) or a way of becoming less selfish (which it can be), but because it brings something spiritual, and beautiful, and worthy into our mundane lives.
Andrea,
I thought seriously about whether I should even post this b/c of your experience and the experience of other parents and kids. The whole time I was writing it I kept thinking about the caveat that I should/needed to put in but in the end I found that the post was too personal to me. The link between desire/exclusion/beauty/motherhood was too overwhelming a feeling for me not to want to set down for myself and as a general guiding principle.
I do apologize for the universality of the tone but I kinda felt that this feeling I had would strike a broad chord. All the parents I know do think their children are beautiful beyond reason--even when others don't. I also know that there are parents out there who never naturally come into this kind of physical bond with their child and that isn't always b/c their child is considered different).
There is another post that I do need to write that talks of the kind of "othering" that you speak of--othering that comes from the outside, the othering that begins the process of removing a child's beauty--because in the end that process happens for all (or almost all) children. It's just that its effects are so very much more profound, hurtful, and oftentimes times hateful for those with mild, moderate or extreme visual differences.
And then on the other side of things you have the circus sideshow that is Jon Benet Ramsey and that whole cult of child fetishization that is disturbing in a whole other way. I know that I will talk about all these things at some point. Today, I really needed to simply get this matter of personal aesthetics figured out for myself.
BTW, I know I haven't been reading around these parts as much as you have or as long as you have. I do not know the Sweetney story. Can you send me the link?
I sometimes catch myself when I compliment my daughter on her looks or what she's wearing. Have I said, "You're beautiful" too many times? Linked it too often with "I love you"?
Or will all my "you're beautifuls" somehow store up for the time when someone makes fun of her thin hair or crooked teeth or blemish or nothing at all but they pick on it anyway?
I guess this is a little crumb of what Andrea was saying - how the world comes along and shatters our innocent notions of beauty.
Perhaps it was the cumulative effect of these recent posts(yours, Beck's, BubandPie's) that gave me the insight I had this morning: all the things I want to achieve in my life boil down to doing a good job as a parent, and I've been blind to it. Lazily, whinily, selfishly blind. Maybe this mindfulness thing is working already.
(And little did I know that my lack of laundering skills is art. I've had lotsa sweaters come out of the washer that looked like that.)
De,
You have hit the nail on the head. The other post I want to write, the one that takes into account Andrea's concerns has to do with how I express myself to my daughter when I find her being so beautiful. Some day I will write this post. For now, your comment sums up so much of what I have been thinking.
MH, in no way do I think that what *you* wrote is wrong or exclusionary. Not even a little bit. And in no way do I think you need to censor your own experience.
You're right, it will strike a broad chord. I just wanted to share my own reactions to your post to let you and your readers know that we don't all get to have that. From the moment of Frances's birth I have had to listen to other people tell me what is wrong with her. My first thought on seeing her was, "Were they right? Does she have achondroplasia or Down Syndrome?"--looking for differences, comparing her to others, and nothing will get that moment back for me.
Because for those of us who have gone down that road, we may never have had those pure moments of adoration of our child's physical beauty. Of course we think they are; but there is a doubleness of perspective. There is the "you are so beautiful," and on the end, tagged on involuntarily, whether internal or external, is: "...to me."
And I think that one of the reasons I never worry about telling her too often that she is beautiful, is because of that experience: I already know how often she will hear that she is not.
The Sweetney story is that Violent Acres, a truly hateful human being, posted a picture of Sweetney's daughter beside a picture of a kid with DS on her blog, and captioned it with (paraphrasing), "And you wonder why your daughter doesn't have any friends?" The implication being that Sweetney's kid looked like a kid w/ Down Syndrome.
Which is hurtful to Sweetney, of course; but in a world where people don't see differences as inherently ugly, a child w/ DS would not be used as the standard of ugliness with which to wound mothers of 'normal' children, and it wouldn't have hurt.
Mad,
This is a wonderful post and so thought-provoking.
I, like De, have really struggled with how and when and how often to tell my little one that she's beautiful. I THINK it all the time. But I also don't want her to think that this is what I value in her most or very much at all. Especially when, so often, "You're beautiful," is a response to more than just her physical beauty.
I also wonder, almost every time I say it, whether I would say it as often if she was a boy. And if I did, would I use the word beautiful? While I use it for her father on a regular basis I know that I, too, am deeply entrenched in the gender roles that are set out by the world we live in.
I try to give her compliments about being brave and smart and strong just as often as I compliment her on her beauty...but who knows?
Sigh. The point I keep trying to make to my parents and other parents is that I imagine that I can forgive myself my inevitable mistakes so long as each decision I made was a considered, concentrated decision. And no one that I've "met" in the blogosphere is doing anything but that...
Sorry...a bit off-topic and maybe I should have confined this to my own blog. I promise a shorter comment next time! ;)
Thanks for sharing your reactions, Andrea. As you know, I always welcome your voice and your insights. One of the first posts I read of yours was the story of the agressive boy in the playground and your realization that no outing would ever be a simple outing for you or for Frances. That post, and others, have touched me deeply. Only now am I seeing how the effects of such incidents trickle back to darken even those "perfect" moments that are the reserve of the mother/child bond.
As for the Sweetney story: it is an extremely sickening example of a situation that is all too common. It's like being called a "Dyke" in highschool by one of the popular boys. At the time you take it as an insult but when you look back on it later in life you realize that the insult was much more hurtful because you yourself only knew how to process such an epithet as hurtful. Yes, the parents of the child in that photo must have been devastated by the entire experience.
Sage,
You are right on all those fronts. I do not hesitate to tell my daughter she is pretty, beautiful, smart, strong, courageous...
I do this b/c I think back to my own experience of adolescence. My best friend was the pretty girl in school. I always felt like the chubby outsider. If it weren't for my mother always, always reinforcing my sense of self (and that included my physical self) I likely would have had a much more bleak time of things. At the time I always said to her rather petulantly, "ya, but you have to say that. You're my mother." Inwardly, I was always happy she did.
I think this would would be a much better place if we all told people, all people, of their beauty more often--except maybe the ones who hear it too much already and are too self-aware of their beauty.
Mad and Andrea,
You're both so right. How terrible for the parents of the DS child that VA used as an "example".
Andrea, thanks for reminding me that the "...to me" can be far more heartwrenching for some of us than for others. I feel that way when I talk about my brother and how intelligent he is...it sometimes feels as though I'm saying it defensively. Even though it's true, I know that that's not obvious to everyone he meets.
And Mad, thanks for making me consider whether it's right to EVER hold back on those compliments.
wow, the comments are as amazing as the post itself.
it is a very personal thing - and yet as others have spoken of, it's also wide reaching and struggles to align itself with "practically accepted representations of beauty" and while we know that is crap, we also know how conditioned we are to fall into it. Andrea's points were well taken, and so were the subsequent responses.
And I also agree w/ De - I catch myself not saying how breathtaking I find M, and instead searching for another word that describes her way of being in this world, and then sometimes i notice i can't, so my tongue is tangled altogether and nothing comes out.
i look forward to the next post, about the othering.
Jen,
It might not be the very next post but it will come in time.
I'm gasping here about the Sweetney story - the part I knew about is where VA photoshopped feces into a photo of Sweetney's daughter (nice).
Personally, I find many children with Down's Syndrome to be heart-stoppingly beautiful.
I don't think I use the word "beautiful" very often when I'm talking to my children (it just doesn't come naturally to me to do that, somehow - I'm pretty stingy with "I love you," too, though I'm getting better with that one). But I know that my worship of Bub's beauty runs deeper, even, than the Pie's. And it has little to do with being "good-looking" - it's about innocence.
Here's the quotation this post reminded me of. It's from George and Sam, Charlotte Moore's book about her autistic sons. In a chapter entitled "Compensations" she writes,
"And besides, they're very beautiful. There's an autistic 'look,' which Asperger noted in his original paper. 'Elfin,' 'ethereal,' and 'dreamy' are the adjectives that come up most often. There are many exceptions to the rule, and some autistic children can be very plain indeed, but often they are outstandingly good-looking - much better-looking than one would expect from observing their parents. They have symmetrical faces, with dainty, regular features and large, bright eyes. They often look younger than they are; perhaps their faces, never distorted by the base emotions such as selfishness, malice, and guile, retain that unclouded purity that is so attractive in babies.
...I suppose some people find it sad that a child with a perfect face is not 'normal.' I don't; for me, their angelic faces perfectly express their innocence and strange integrity. I find the boys' looks a huge compensation and solace. I never tire of gazing at them."
Wow, what a post -- and what a great discussion you've got going on in your comments.
I'm looking forward to that other post you were talking about writing.
Working with children, includung those with special needs, for over 20 years, I have never seen a unbeautiful one. Childhood beauty is refleted not only visually but Through a child's innocence and sense of wonder. We experience their experiences with a new wonderment and this is the beauty we feel at our core. In the lives of children every small aspect of their growth is wonder and it is so easy to take notice. Beauty should not be an adjective for only the physical realm.
Yes B&P and Nan, part of what I wanted to get at but didn't know how to write is the innocence and trust that radiates through their facial expressions. I know that beauty is more than skin deep but in this post I really wanted to talk about how, in childhood, that inner beauty is reflected in the outward physical beauty of ALL children--not just the conventionally pretty ones.
Thanks all of you for one of the best comment discussions I've ever hosted. An honour.
I have your post open on my browser all day long, way back when there was only one comment showing. I'm so glad I waited to comment so I got to read the thought-provoking comments. I can hear Swee'pea fussing so I have to cut this short.
Oh Mad. How...beautiful.
I feel that the moments we have holding them, breathing in their perfection and beauty make us feel a certain beauty in ourselves. A deep down contentment with the state of the universe.
I find myself frequently whispering to my son that he's beautiful. I have, on occasion, thought about the gendered connotations of the word, but "beautiful" captures it best. He's almost 4, but I still catch my breath several times a day when I glance over at him.
How could anything so recently from God not be beautiful.
Even at 13, 13 and 16 I cannot help but be overcome by the beauty and uniqeness of my three. I think the beauty you behold in your own children never fades. This includes when they are raging with hormones and really coming into their own seperate beings.
God, I can't stop wondering out loud to Pynchon about how beautiful Miss Baby is. And I feel at once awed and a little embarrassed: awed by her baby gorgeousness, and embarrassed at my awe and my seemingly constant need to express just how beautiful I find her. Since she's still pre-verbal, I'm giving myself free rein to adore her adore her adore her out loud, but I do worry about what it means to always be talking about it when she's around.
And Mad, I really appreciate that you've described your simultaneous denial of your mom's compliments, and your appreciation of them. Gotta remember that when Miss Baby gets her tween-angst ...
Wonderful post and wonderful comments!
I'm constantly in awe of my son's gorgeousness. He is absolutely lovely. And I'm not just talking about his 'looks' - it's all of him. The smile that lights up his whole face. His sparkling eyes. The gaps he still has in his smile. He's just lovely. And I can't believe he came from me!
I do tell him he's gorgeous. I also tell him how smart and clever he is, though, and how fast, talented, etc. because I want the focus to be on his accomplishments and his sense of pride in them as he grows up.
Really. A wonderful post.
I hate that I missed this discussion! Especially havign not seen it before I wrote my own post. But you know, my thoughts in response to this post of yours run more along the lines of what I was thinking when I wrote the Eros Posts, and invited others to do the same - writing out our visceral experience of the beauty of our children as erotic, as something that can only be in the eye of the beholder because it is the only the beholder (the lover, the one who loves) who truly, viscerally, appreciates the beauty of the beloved (the one who is loved.) Of course, there is something objectively beautiful about all children - ALL children, Bub is right that DS children have a transcendent, angelic beauty - because children are so innocent (in the sense of not corrupt). They are always soft; their eyes always glimmer; their hands are always small. But that extraordinary beauty that we see in our own children - that's the glow.
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