I.

“Mom, will you take a few pictures of me?”

This innocent enough request is the one most likely to unleash our particular, curious brand of mother/daughter conflict.

I will, begrudgingly, agree. She will primp and preen and pose. I will point and shoot as my vague, undefined irritation will rise. I will lose patience and we will ultimately huff off, in opposite directions, hurling accusations and defenses all the way.

Every time.

What is this about?

Why my discomfort with her fondness for self-portraits? Why her fondness? Why, when I look at her playacting in the lens, does it drive me to panic and distraction?

How deep does this thing run, anyway?

Oh, as deep and wide and complicated as the River Styx, little one.

II.

My lovely daughter, Lily, is truly lovely. Pretty, beautiful, eye-catching. Of course she is — she’s my lovely daughter. Most of us feel this way about our children, I imagine. I feel this way about my three sons, as well. They are beautiful. They are kind, intelligent, creative, full of humor and generosity and it shines through their generally happy faces and says, “Here lies Beauty.”

I was that mom who showered her tiny charges with ridiculous trilling singsong sunshine every day, blowing rainbows up their asses. I love language, I love the kids, so every day they would be greeted with fluff and frippery — “Good morning to Mother’s perfect and beautiful angel!” or “How is mother’s perfect peach princess?”

I know — appalling, embarrassing behavior, my first mistake. Now my mantra is, “No one is perfect — nothing will ever be perfect.” Too little, too late.

Lily, like her three older brothers, was perfect and beautiful and she is perfect and beautiful. To me. Having this daughter has, however, taught me some new, ugly lessons about beauty and its mutable nature, its cultural currency.

The trouble started when the world got involved. Strangers — starting when she was a small child and continuing to this very day, where she is hot on the heels of adulthood — have been commenting, gushing even, about her ‘beauty.’ Eyes on her and, without knowing her at all, proclaiming her ‘beautiful.’

It’s innocuous enough when it starts — little children are beautiful, people will comment. And, yes, it’s a compliment. But the way it continued and escalated was alarming (for me, anyway, mother to a pack of scruffy, brawling, beautiful boys, who never heard a thing from the world).

We heard it everywhere and, more importantly, she heard it everywhere.

“Such a pretty girl.”

“A real looker, there.”

“She’s going to break some hearts.”

Relatives and strangers would talk endlessly about her perceived beauty. Never about her mind, her wit, her spirit. Nothing about her devastating chess game or her artistic ability. She got more attention, got away with more nonsense because, ‘she’s so pretty.’

Yes, she’s pretty! But not ‘only’ pretty! Am I the only one to see that?

The older she got, the worse it was. Creepy men in airports scoping my 13-year-old, airheaded women telling her she should ‘model,’ octogenarians at the nursing home mistaking her for her father’s young trophy wife (that did not go well).

Once, a dental hygienist left her in the chair and came out to the waiting room to tell me how gorgeous my daughter was. In front of all the other waiting victims.

What was I supposed to say?

“Thank you.”

“Yes, I know, I did that.”

“You’re welcome.”

I wanted to scream, every time —

“She’s smart, kind and wildly creative! She’s funny and silly and vulnerable and could you please stop talking about her — talk to her!

I worried that the world had defined my daughter — put her in a flimsy, fleeting box labeled ‘pretty,’ and walked away.

III.

What does it mean for a young girl’s identity to be wrapped up in some abstract cultural notion of beauty? Why has it been so unnerving for me to have a child that the world finds beautiful? Isn’t that a prize, a goal? People work hard for such a nebulous and dubious honor. Just look at toddlers and beauty pageants (that’s a thing, right? I can’t look.)

When I was growing up, in the 60's and 70's, it was very important to me to be smart. Intellectual. Bookish. Savvy. I’m not sure if this inclination was cultural or self-imposed, not sure if my parents were involved or if it was spawned by my nascent ideas about feminism. I’m not sure that I ever achieved any of those things, but they were, to me, the foundation of something that might be called beauty.

Strong + smart + kind = beautiful.

This was the odd calculus of my fevered teen dreams.

Of course, I secretly wanted to be beautiful — you know, beautiful in the way of those long-limbed, long-haired forever 15-year-old summer nymphs that 70's teen culture crammed down my throat and salivated over. I outwardly hated those images, of course, feeling very feminist and intellectual about the exploitation and objectification, about the homogenization of aesthetics. But I looked hard at them and yearned for some dose of that thing called ‘beauty’. It can’t be helped — to be female in this world is to be buried under impossible standards, beneath a list of ‘shoulds.’ We are all, girls in our youth, eventually forced to kneel and make offerings to the cruel and greedy gods of beauty — however much we deny.

So in my brain — which is really just the same 70's model (we can never scrub away the grime of our teens) — beauty should be an aside. Yes, of course we want to be beautiful, but it’s more important to be brilliant, thoughtful, strong, kind — beauty follows, right?

Beauty is as beauty does.

This is the possibly ridiculous platitude that I’ve been feeding my daughter for years now, for whatever it’s worth.

And what’s it worth?

A tidy synopsis is that I want my daughter to enter the adult world with strength and grace and — yes — beauty that has little or nothing to do with the package. The mainstream take on beauty is subjective, fleeting, misleading and, often, downright damaging. I want her to look beyond that to the heart and the head. I want her to ford the depths and find the real stuff, the stuff that matters and makes meaning — what some unimaginative types might call inner beauty, the stern stuff that makes the outside shine.

IV.

Back to the pictures.

It’s a wonder to watch her turn it on for the camera. She can be pissed or ill, picking her nose or a zit, but the second the camera is trained on her she lights up. Smiles or pouts, plays wistful or tough. She’s good, she’s got a dramatic flair that seems almost otherworldly to me. I don’t understand it and it makes me wildly uncomfortable. Consumable images of my daughter shake me in some deep place, the same place that wanted to hide her from those prying eyes when she was little.

I have never gotten along with cameras. They hate me, I hate them — I shy away or make tense, tweaked faces that don’t look like me at all. It’s been this way my whole life — the best photos of me are candid, snapped in moments when I didn’t see it coming and my real self was stolen by the lens. Perhaps my Native American heritage has made me wary of the soul-stealing powers of photography (or perhaps that’s just so much New Age misappropriation bullshit).

Whatever the source of my awkwardness, I’ve told myself that to love the camera is to love yourself a little too much, which is just not okay — not ‘intellectual’, not ‘feminist’ (though I’m not sure when or why it was impressed upon me that self-love is a negative). I was relatively comfortable with my self-portrait disdain until this beautiful, confident daughter came along and embraced her selfie generation (I know, you’re not really the ‘selfie generation’, it just serves my purpose here).

Could it be that in spite of all my bad uncomfortable feelings about the ‘selfie’ obsession, it has spawned a generation that is more comfortable with the self-image, and therefore more comfortable with the self? Lily and all her beautiful friends (and they are all truly lovely) play with the concept of beauty in ways that I would have rejected back in the day. These girls love make-up, they color their hair, they play dress-up, and they take many photos of one another. It’s play — confident, happy play.

And this is where it gets sticky for me.

Is it confidence or is it narcissism?

The confidence part is excellent. Lily is the picture of confidence. She speaks her mind, eats like a lumberjack, and doesn’t pretend to be anything other than who she is. In a world full of mothers and daughters struggling with body image and self-esteem, this is no small thing. I was ready to walk a daughter through the minefields of teen self-loathing, prepared to tell her that she was beautiful no matter what anyone said, no matter what the insecure little asshole in her head told her. I’ve been there, lived that.

I was not, however, prepared to manage a confident beauty. I don’t have that script and why would it even be necessary?

V.

The other part of this complex puzzle is photography itself.

Is it art or is it narcissism?

I am an art historian (okay, I have an art history degree, no one has ever paid me for my opinions — whatever — it was really fun to write those five words). I have studied photography, I have a great appreciation for the art, and portraits have been a special favorite. So it would follow that I would appreciate my daughter’s work in portraiture, no?

No.

And Lily is a photographer. She’s good. Young women in our town hired her to take their senior portraits and she started a very popular photo blog. She has a great eye and a sharp grasp of composition. Her portraits are warm and human and, dare I say, beautiful.

So, why am I so uncomfortable when she trains her talents on herself? Cindy Sherman has made a great noise in the art world doing the same and self-portraiture is a hallmark of great art throughout the ages. I can rationalize this all day.

And yet — it continues to make me squirm. Every time she asks me to shoot her, every time she shows me the latest selfie. Even though she’s confident, even though she’s artistic, even though she’s beautiful.

When does this tip into the treacherous waters of Narcissus? When does a collection of pictures of yourself — even your grounded, smart, confident self — become the badge of something unhealthy? Does it ever?

Perhaps my discomfort is about my concern that the world doesn’t really see her — they only see the show, the trappings, the shell.

Perhaps it’s about my own complicated relationship with beauty, or lack of beauty, or all the striving and grasping for something we’ve named beauty but is really just so much subjective ethereality, each to her own.

Perhaps it’s the daughter, my baby, my only girl, scaring the shit out of me as she marches into the big beautiful and ugly world with not nearly enough armor and a little too much flash.

Whatever it is, it’s hers. She has been blessed with something that many call beauty, she’s been blessed with a good brain and the power of confidence and I just hope she can go out there and own it, so it can never own her.

Sometimes I wish I could just hide her away, enjoy the brilliant, fierce and gentle person that lies beneath that shell, keep her all to myself.

But that wouldn’t do anyone any good at all, would it?