"Pretty"

Photo copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved.

Small children are Nature's perfect narcissists. Their entire existence is centered in their senses, including feeling — emotional as well as tactile. Fully-realized humans they may be, but they are not, as some would have one believe, merely adults in miniature. They haven't developed the capacity for most interrelationships, except insofar as responding to the effects of those interpersonal connections on their own bodies and lives.

It's a pure form of narcissism, one come by entirely honestly.

She understands this with benefit of hindsight, and not a little formal education. She understands that much of childhood existence is something to which blame cannot be logically (or morally) assigned, yet that doesn't unravel the multifarious strands of guilt that have braided themselves over and around and through her soul.




She remembers one of the great moral conflicts of her childhood — besides, that is, navigating the seemingly unnavigable waters of avoiding doing anything that might lead to a spanking or a grounding. Those are waters dark and deep and largely opaque, aswirl with ugly things that live, submerged, just below the surface, and she can never know with any confidence what will cause one of them to break the plane of the oily, murky liquid long enough to strike. 

But she knows one thing that makes her a bad person. She doesn't love God. And she doesn't love most of her family.

It's not true, of course. At her young age, she doesn't really understand what is meant by the word "love"; the closest she's been able to come definitionally is to think something (or someone) is pretty, or handsome. And so she thinks that she doesn't love God, or Jesus, because all the photos show a strange man in a white robe with long brown hair and a moustache and beard, and she thinks he's . . . well, maybe "ugly" is too strong a word, but she's too young to know "unattractive." By the same token, she thinks she "loves" her middle sister, because she's the pretty one, and not her oldest sister, the one to whom she's closest by far. And she burns with the shame and guilt of being such a bad girl.

But all these concepts of "prettiness" and "love" — they're all twisted around in her head, and it's made worse by the fact that, in her house, you're not allowed to talk about being pretty. Not about yourself, anyway. Because that's pride, and she doesn't really understand what that is, either, but she knows it's bad. It's a sin. And you're not supposed to want people to tell you you're pretty, either, although she won't really get this until the last real day of kindergarten.

It's the day of the class field trip, and her mother doesn't go like the other mothers; she has to work. And so she boards the school bus with the other children, but still acutely aware that some of the other girls have something else that day that she doesn't. Worse, she has forgotten her lunch in her cubbyhole at school, and no one notices until it's time to eat at the park, and there's no brown paper bag with her name on it. Fortunately, one of the other girls, a little blond girl, and her mother share theirs with her, so she doesn't go hungry. In fact, she gets better food and a better dessert than she would have had otherwise.

When her father finds out, his biggest comment is to complain that the little blond girl's parents are somehow bad people, because her father owns the drugstore in town, and "he thinks he's better than everybody else." She doesn't know what that means, really, but she knows it's a bad thing, and she knows it must be true, because her father said so. And it takes away, more than a tiny bit, the joy she felt in having a friend for the day, and someone to share treats that she wasn't allowed to have at home, and to be so nice to her.

But the real hurt had already come, of course. That happened when her mother picked her up at school and learned that she had forgotten her lunch, like a careless little girl. (Her father will have plenty to say about that part of it, of course, and her middle sister will not lose the opportunity to make her feel bad for forgetting it because it included an item her sister put in the bag for her, not that she bought it or anything.) 

But her mother sees the other children, talks with some of the other mothers, and she's sidelined into silence. That in itself is not the real root of the hurt connected with the day; she's accustomed to that (often via the back of a parent's hand across her mouth to ensure it). But on the way home in the car, as they're approaching the little park in the village with its elderly swings, she takes a breath, and decides to do it. On some level, she knows she shouldn't ask, but she plunges ahead anyway, heedless and headstrong, as they would say.

"Mommy? You think I'm the prettiest girl in my class, don't you?"

Of course, once grown, she understands that that wasn't really what she was asking at all. It all stems from her confusion about what thinking someone is pretty actually means, how it's all twisted up with notions of love in her head, a concept whose existence she grasps but for which she doesn't yet have words to label it. After all, neither phrase is heard in their household, at least not directly toward the children: not "I love you," and not "You're pretty." But she watched the other mothers at the park all day, and saw how they spoke to their children, especially their daughters; she's suddenly realized that some families do say words like that.

And suddenly, it seems like the most urgent thing in the world to establish that her mother thinks she's the prettiest. So that she can know that her mother loves her the best.

And her mother looks at her sitting in the passenger's seat, no seatbelt, and says, "Well, I don't know. That little Stephanie girl is quite pretty, too."

And her heart sinks to the bottom of her stomach.

It could hardly have been a worse choice, of course. Pale, delicate little Stephanie, she of the alabaster skin and bullying friends, the girls who got her in trouble so she had to go with her mother to the office at school. Three of them were on the school bus in the seat in front of her, and Donna and another girl kept turning around to hit her over the back of their seat. Stephanie didn't do any of the hitting, but she turned around, too.  They wouldn't leave her alone, and finally, in desperation, she flung her little red-and-yellow plaid metal lunchbox up over her face to protect herself, sending the pail forward to push them back. And, of course, it connected: not with Donna nor the third girl, the ones who were hitting her, but with Stephanie's china-doll forehead, leaving a short scratch. And of course, the other girls lie, and she doesn't have their friends or their families or the respect of the teachers, and so she has to go to the office.

And her mother knows all this. 

But she's desperate now, and so she tries again: "But you think I'm the prettiest, right?" [Years later, she'll feel the memory as "But you do love me, right? But at age five, "pretty" is all she understands.]

And her mother says . . . she doesn't even really remember the exact words, because her mother told her she shouldn't ask people to tell her she's pretty, because it's not polite, and it's bad to ask people to tell you things like that, but she can't remember the exact words, because the blood is rushing in her ears, and she feels sick to her stomach.

Years later, when she tries to explain what the world was like within her family to someone from one of those other families, where people tell each other that they love them, and that they look not merely pretty, but positively beautiful, or handsome, she has to stop and think. And she realizes that not once in her life to that point has either of her parents ever simply said, "I love you." Never "I" anytime, anyway. Always only "we." "As in "Your mother and I love you, and that's why we have to ground you, because it will keep you safe." Or "Your mother and I are the only ones that love you, and we're the only ones that will ever really love you, so you've got no business worrying about what anyone else thinks, because they don't care about you anyway." Reinforced, regularly, by assertions that she's an ungrateful child who clearly doesn't love her parents, because if she loved them, she wouldn't be such a bad girl.

Always conditional. Always possessory. Always proprietary, in both senses of the word. Always for a purpose that had nothing to do with love.

Even toward the end, when her mother on rare occasions says the three words, it's too late: She knows that her mother wants things from her — performance — that she's not prepared to give, that she cannot and will not. And so it becomes just another exercise in strategy, of the sort of manipulation, the thinly-disguised horse-trading and trickery that characterized most of the interactions in her family.

They came by it more or less honestly, of course, with their own histories of abuse and abandonment, of an antiseptic coldness that left no room for the messiness of sentimentality.

Knowing the source does nothing to change it.

She's surprised, actually, that she ever came to understand what the word "love" actually means. Of course, she left "pretty" to the dust of memory long ago, so perhaps that's all that's left.






All content, including photos and text, are copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.