die Werbung - advertisement

sorry to not have been blogging the past few days. we've been busy since dan got back, but with remarkably mundane, not blog worthy (even a boring entry) things.

so, in my german class there is a model. today's entry is part one of a fictional story inspired by her.

I know exactly where I was the moment I lost my innocence. That pivotal point in which all former reality is shattered, like a ceramic piggy bank. The revelatory moment in which girls realize that liking themselves is bad. That there is a beauty hierarchy, and that, most likely, you are not at the top.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”

I was watching TV with my mom, “The Golden Girls” had gone to commercial, when Kelly Lebrock first flipped her Pantene-shiny hair over one shoulder and spoke those cataclysmic words.

“Why would I hate her just because she is beautiful?” I asked my mom. I was truly perplexed. I didn’t know anything about her except what she looked and sounded like - so how could I hate her? Plus, it had always seemed to me that people liked beautiful people. They were all over TV and magazines. I even noticed that some of the teachers at school were nicer to the pretty girls than to the ugly ones.

My mom smiled and stroked my hair, but as she saw that I was really asking her that question and not just musing to myself, the smile faded into a concerned grimace. She got that look on her face. The one that said, “Oh, God. How do I answer this one?”

I guess I had asked a question that was a little tougher for my mom than my questions had been in the past. She handled the simple questions with ease:

“Why is the sky blue?”

“That’s a great thing to look up in your new encyclopedia.”

“Where do babies come from?”

“Haven’t you been watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom? It’s all in there.”

“How do bird’s fly?”

“You know, just this morning Daddy told me he wanted to explain physics to you tonight over dinner. Don’t let him forget to tell you all the really cool details!”

Occasionally she looked perplexed and answered with the most frustrating of non-answers: “That’s a good question.” Followed by a ponderous silence until I had forgotten the spectacular question I had asked.

On this particular evening, however, I could see that she was thinking very hard about how to answer me. Just like she had a year or so earlier when I asked her why my friend Renee didn’t like me anymore. Her answer had been honest and helpful. “She just changed her mind. It has nothing to do with you. People just change what they like sometimes. Like now you like pepper but you didn’t before.”

I was eleven years old, and apparently she felt as though this question deserved an answer that honored my slightly above average, eleven-year-old intelligence but also tread lightly on me as a blissful late bloomer in the social awareness department. A full minute passed with my mom hmmmm-ing and shifting in her seat. Dorothy teased Blanche about being out with 2 men in one night and, over the canned laughter, mom finally looked at me straight on.

“Some women are jealous of how other women look and people mistake the jealousy for hate,” she said. She searched my face for reaction.

“Oh. Why are the women jealous? Because they don’t like the way they look?” I asked.

“Basically.” She paused for a moment, reviewing the conversation in her head. Then she suddenly drew a sharp breath and said, “But you should always be happy with the way you look. It’s more important what’s in you than what’s on you.”

But her most important point was lost on me. I was still thinking over the part about women not liking the way they look. I heard her last sentence, and I’ve tried to remember it all these years, but the damage had been done.

“Why wouldn’t I like the way I look?” I wondered aloud. My mother silently cursed Pantene for making her explain the finer points of the female psyche from which she had been trying to spare me, as the first tentacles of self-doubt curled through my brain.