Painting Life

This morning I groggily wandered into the kitchen just in time to hear my daughter's father tell her how beautiful she looked. Her face turned up toward him as I struggled to reconcile his words with her shockingly pale face. I could feel my eyes blinking as I tried to understand what was going on and in confusion I asked my daughter if she was going to put her makeup on.

She laughed at me and said "mom, you are totally out of it" and then explained that it was picture day. Since her grandparents would be getting copies of her picture she opted not to wear any makeup.

I could feel my brain ache as I fought to understand what was happening in the kitchen. Something felt incredibly wrong about what I was seeing and hearing but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

In all fairness, I'm usually a morning person. But this morning I woke up with a pounding headache and the accompanying spinning room. This made both my daughter and her father laugh while I swore that I was not either "out of it."

But here's the deal. Last spring my daughter decided that she wanted to 'express herself' by adopting the "Emo" look. In what seemed like an overnight deal, she went from a wardrobe made up of primarily "camo" prints to black t-shirts, black eye-liner, and what has been described as "perfected complexion." She's been very proud (and committed) to this expression of herself. Since I remember wearing roach clips in my hair in the 80's (and please, anyone who lived through the fashion of the 80's has NO business criticizing today's styles), glitter eye-shadow and flourescent pink lipstick, I have good reason to believe she'll outgrow this with her self esteem intact.

And that was what was wrong with this morning. My beautiful daughter, who is perfect just as she is and just as she wants to be seen, changed because she was afraid of being judged. She believes that if her father, who loves her, disapproves of how she views herself then surely others will too.

We all paint ourselves. Sometimes it's with makeup, clothes, jewelry. Sometimes it is with where we are, what we say, or how we decorate the spaces we inhabit. We carefully choose how we show ourselves, what we let other people see, what we want other people to see. We make these choices and in these choices we are our authentic selves.

Sometimes it's in the blog templates we pick (I'm still deciding on this one.)

This mothering business isn't for the faint-hearted. And when I finish writing this I'm going to slip into my daughter's room and remind her that I love her, just exactly how she chooses to be.