My childhood was filled with pithy sayings, courtesy of my mom, who never heard a catchy phrase she didn’t adopt. “You get more with honey than you do with vinegar,” she’d advise me sagely if I snapped at her after not getting my way. Some of her momisms were memorable for their wisdom, while others linger in my head as snippets from an era of myopic thinking, like “Boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
I remember reading a magazine back in my teens in which a newly married pop singer shared her secret for keeping romance alive. She confided that she set the clock to get up before her husband and made sure that when he first saw her in the morning, she had done her hair and makeup and was wearing a pretty dress. That way he’d have a beautiful picture in his mind all day long. Even for someone like me who was weaned on Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming, that statement sounded moronic.
The years that passed between my being a teen and having a teen saw our country weather both a war and a revolution. Like many women who were raised by the full-time homemakers of the fifties, I sought to instill a certain sensibility in my daughter, a confidence and independence more relevant to the current times. And still I found that the status quo in the schoolyard hadn’t changed a bit.
Growing up, Daughter was burdened with becoming very tall very quickly, along with being extremely slender. Arriving as the new kid in a cliqued-off class resulted in every obvious difference being scrutinized and then called to her attention regularly. One of her chief tormentors was a diminutive little snot who perhaps sensed she would one day score an 800 on the Math SAT and get into all the colleges that waitlisted him.
Always outgoing, empathetic and creative, Daughter struggled to reconcile the positive person she was with the negative remarks from her peers. Feeling her frustration, I searched for a way to preserve her healthy self-image, and in her early teens, shocked even myself by suggesting modeling school. I figured if genetics was any example, she’d continue to get taller and would always be more slender than most. What better place to learn to appreciate the traits her schoolmates derided?
Who we are as adults is comprised of an infinite number of experiences, choices, and simple twists of fate. Daughter was always beautiful; she just needed to keep feeling it inside and wear it like skin. I thought of this lately as a contestant on Britain’s version of American Idol made the news. Apparently, both the judges and the audience decided she wasn’t any good the moment she took the stage. They could see she was neither young nor pretty. For what must have seemed to Susan Boyle an eternity, she stood before a universal schoolyard rolling their eyes. And in the end, she stood tall.
Give yourself a treat and give Susan Boyle a listen in this clip from Britain’s Got Talent
Daughter’s Featured Fotos catch New Yorkers at their New Yorkiest
flaunting
body languaging
schmoozing
chilling