My Mother’s Makeup
I sit at my mother’s vanity and play with her makeup. It’s a ritual I performed repeatedly as a child. This time is different, I’m an adult now — too old for dress up, too old for fantasy. I should already be who I planned to be when I grew up. But I indulge anyway, for the sake of the youth I still cling to.
I hear my newborn wailing for me downstairs. I know my husband is cupping him in one arm as he fumbles to get our toddler dressed. I know I should hurry to help them all, but I don’t this time.
I’m too transfixed by my mother’s assortment of iridescent eyeshadows, her deep violet eyeliner, her red liquid lipstick. Because today I woke up 50lbs more than what I’m used to. I woke up feeling like I was in a foreign body. Today I woke up still tired, I woke up covered in the spit-up and sweat of other people. Today I woke up feeling like I didn’t really recognize myself.
So, I sit at my mother’s vanity and I decide to don a face of my own design. I grab a brown eyeshadow so dark it may as well be black and I smudge it on recklessly. I line my eyes in plum until I look sickly. I release the cap on the red liquid matte and lather my lips. My reflection grins and I laugh at how overstated I’ve made my face in relation to who I am.
“DOM!”
I hear my son shout, which means he’s copying my husband, which means my husband must be calling for me to speed it up. I rush to wipe the makeup from my face. Playing in my mother’s makeup like a child is a private thing. The makeup is a secret I decide to keep with myself.
The eyeshadow comes off easy, the eyeliner takes a little work. But the lipstick does what it’s meant to do and it sticks. It sticks and suddenly I’m anxious. I scrub and I can’t get it off. I’m like Lady Macbeth in a frenzy to hide the evidence that might expose me. I feel trapped in it. I’ve got to get out of what I look like. I move to take my shirt off. The crewneck I’m wearing looks stupid, now, looks too young for me. It’s a little too short, too, and reveals that I’m still wearing maternity jeans seven weeks after delivery.
When I could breathe I thought no one would notice the stretchy black fabric, holding my pants up. But now that I’m panicking I know that everyone will notice what it signals about me. There’s no way I could front as anything other than someone’s tired mother. You can smell the breastmilk on me. Motherhood seeps through the sight of me.
I sit at my mother’s vanity under the weight of all that I’m not anymore. I see her face in my face. I see her hands in my hands’ subtle gestures with her many blush brushes. We are so much alike that we punish each other for it. We’re so different we often can’t communicate across the divide.
My mom’s not an unusual woman, and I’ve always chased the unconventional. I’ve never questioned her strength, but I judged what life led her to do with it. It seemed she thrust all of her will into my brother and I, and so I decided that when I was grown I’d save my strength for myself. But I’m older than she was when she had me, and I find myself depleted in the face of my dreams. Every ounce I said I’d give to me is split between my family of four.
I now see the ordinary trajectory of her life as an extraordinary feat. I see them less as necessary gestures that she carried out to take care of us, and more as means of holding onto herself. I see how much work it took, work unrewarded, work unacknowledged. Graduating from college. Going back for her masters. Working her way from Red Lobster waitress to teacher, from teacher to school administrator. This, on top of the lonesome and ceaseless work of being a mother.
As people tend to when it comes to the work of Black women, I underestimated her contributions. It took being in her shoes to see my mother the person, not my mother the mother, not my mother the example to draw from, not my mother the means to an end.
I give back my mother’s personhood as I feel mine slipping through my fists. I am her second baby and I’ve just had my second baby. My second baby swallows the gaps in the day that used to belong to me and I feel more and more like I exist solely in service to others. Did my mother feel this way? Does she sometimes still? Can I quiet the feeling and learn to serve both my goals and my children?
A part of me always foolishly felt above the narrative of her life. I felt destined to transcend our house that looked like all the other houses, in our town that looked like so many other towns, in a life that looked like so many other lives. I felt I was a well of untapped potential, deeper than anything a conventional life could unearth.
But more often than not these days, I find myself wondering if I even have the strength to match my mother. I find myself struggling to manage the work I thought I was beyond. I find myself looking a lot like my mother but with half the resolve.
If I am a deep well of untapped potential, my waters have migrated from her reservoir. My children fill their buckets from my depths. In her mirror I reconcile the me that I am in relation to her, and the me that I am in relation to my kids. How much of me do I get to keep in my mother’s makeup, in my postpartum body? How much of herself did she give up when she had me? Did she grieve her potential self like I mourn who I thought I was?
One month before my twenty fifth birthday, I am not who I thought I’d be. I don’t look like I thought I’d look. I don’t do what I thought I’d do, or have what I thought I’d have. My life more closely resembles everything I once swore against than that which I sought out. I’m not interesting or alluring to most people, because my life is a story most people have heard (if they aren’t already living it). But I’m learning to value my narrative anyway. I’m learning to find the extraordinary in this ordinary life of mine. I owe it to every woman who has done this work, too, and felt invisible for it, unseen.
There is no peace prize for the profound work of motherhood. There is no genius grant for the troublesome task of making divided ends meet. There aren’t accolades for making it to the end of a day that feels like an endurance test. We must adorn ourselves in makeshift medals and titles.
Today I leave my mother’s lipstick on as tribute to her. I blend it with a bit of my own as tribute to myself. I smudge golden glitter on my eyelids, like a gold star sticker on a job well done. I decide that the average life I’m leading is led pretty damn well. I sit at my mother’s vanity and I see myself in my mother’s makeup — and I see her, too. I descend the stairs to my children and get back to work.
Like what you’ve read? Pledge any amount to my Patreon to support.
