It did not dawn on me until I was sixteen or seventeen years old that I was, at thirteen, extremely funny looking. When I approached my mother with this realization, she audibly gasped, and very defensively declared, “No you were not, you were, and always have been pretty…and smart, too!” I should have expected this response from my mother. I had grown up hearing, “You are pretty…and smart, too.” By the time I was sixteen, the saying had become somewhat of a joke between my parents and I. Whenever I suffered from those frequent bouts of teenage anguish over my physical appearance, I could count on my parents to assure me of my stunning beauty, while simultaneously reminding me that my intelligence was equally important to, if not more important than, my physical appearance.
On any given day, I would have smiled, nodded, and accepted my mother’s compliment without argument, only half believing her statement. However, on this day, I was unwilling to accept the blind delusion my mother had been living with for years. Pulling my sixth grade school picture from a photo box labeled This Is Your Life Alyssa Jill, I presented my mother with the damaging evidence.
There I sat, staring directly into the camera with a shy, or possibly forced, smile upon my face. My teeth were horribly crooked. Despite the fact that I had already suffered through one set of braces in an attempt to make room for my “big girl” teeth, the orthodontist simply could not change the size of my bone structure, resulting in too many teeth in too small of a space. I donned a chunky turquoise turtleneck, that could have held my head in place had it not been attached to my body, the collar was that thick and restrictive. My obsession with Madonna was apparent from my crimped hair to my blue eyeliner. Styles, that over the course of the summer, I had worked hard to perfect. I spent every moment indoors in front of the bathroom mirror with my mother’s array of eye shadows, liners, and lipstick, applying them with care as I waited for my curling iron and crimper to reach the perfect temperature. After dousing my hair in Aqua Net, I listened with glee as it sizzled on contact with the crimper. All moisture now sucked from my tresses, and the perfect kink achieved, I once again applied pressure to the Aqua Net sprayer, and delighted in the stiff perfection of my style.
Holding the picture inches from her nose, I declared, “Mom, how can you say I was pretty? Look at my crimped hair and blue eye liner!”
My mother smiled and replied, “That was the style!”
Remembering that I had only recently convinced my mother to forgo her Farrah Fawcett feathers, I realized that I was going to have to try another tactic. My mother had entered into the fashion and beauty trends of the nineteen seventies only to emerge from them in the nineties.
Looking closely at the picture, it soon struck me that though the crimped hair and blue eyeliner accentuated my adolescent ugliness, they were not the cause of it. My ugliness was a result of something much less easy to identify. Something subtle, yet vital. Proportion. My face, my facial features to be exact, was out of proportion. My nose, eyes, and particularly my lips, were those of an adult (an adult with very large defined features), yet my face was still that of a child. My cheeks were still subtle and soft, without definition. My nose against this subtleness appeared large, and extraordinarily bony. My eyebrows were unplucked and appeared to crawl across my forehead in caterpillar fashion. My eyes also bore the dark bags of a woman, not a girl, with too little sleep and too much stress.
However, nothing was more prominent than my lips. Today women go to extraordinary measures to achieve such full, plump lips. Mine were naturally luscious, and, at the time, excruciatingly embarrassing. They were the first feature my peers noticed, the first feature my peers ridiculed. Adults would often call them “stunning” and “incredibly attractive”, but these comments, just like my mother’s statement that I was pretty…and smart, too, were lost. At thirteen, what did adults know? It was not until Julia Roberts rose to fame, and I had “grown into” my lips that they, and I, began to receive compliments from my peers; ironically, around the same time I began arguing with my mother regarding my thirteen-year-old ugliness.
I pointed these facts out to my mother with little success. She was determined to believe that I was as pretty at thirteen as I was at sixteen. I sat staring at my thirteen-year-old self, teeth elbowing each other out of the way, lips staging a coup against my other features, and nose rising like a newly formed mountain. I had presented my evidence and lost. I had no other choice but to close my case, and accept that in my mother’s eyes I was pretty at thirteen…and smart, too.
Years later, my mother began scrapbooking our lives. I entered her house one day to bits and pieces of This Is Your Life Alyssa Jill scattered across her scrapbooking desk. Holding my sixth grade picture in her hand, my mother looked up from her desk and with apologetic eyes declared, “So, I have been looking at these pictures of you in junior high. You were right, you were kind of funny looking.”
I could not resist smiling, laughing, and in good humor declaring, “I told you so!”
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