Vanity (4 months old)
My mama bought makeup today.
She met up with one of her only friends in France (only friends ‘yet!’ She insists… is that a tear I see, mama?) at the mall and when her friend asked her (in very fast French) what would she like to do, perhaps sit down for a café? mama quickly said Maquillage. J’ai besoin de maquillage !
She needed makeup far more than caffeine.
Il y a le Sephora?
She went on, Je me sent vielle. Le peu est sèche. And then in English blurted “I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in 10 weeks.”
C’est normal, said her friend. C’est très normal pour les mamans jeunes (very normal for new mothers)
Now, it’s important to note that my mama hasn’t historically been a regular makeup-wearing kind of gal (from what I hear… I haven’t been around long enough to know).
But when you’re a new mom over 40, efforts have to be made.
She’s also, historically, vain enough to care but not vain enough to do that much about it. She could make more of an effort.
Postpartum is probably not the time to add in “makeup skills” to the list of what needs to be attended to. Let’s be real: mama can barely fit in a shower. This is the time to give oneself some grace for not having changed one’s spit-encrusted T-shirt, milk-stained nursing bra.
I rather like mama covered in milk and spit up. I think she’s the most beautiful person on the planet, and I try tell her so every time I nurse and we get to stare adoringly at each other for long moments that evaporate into eternity.
But I usually have a nipple in my mouth, so I’m not sure the message comes across.
My mama has also been on a hard postpartum road, like many women, and she has been stumbling along that road with a depression-shoe on the right foot, and an anxiety-shoe on the left. She knows a thing or two about depression and anxiety. And when she stumbles so hard she trips over her mental health shoelaces and face plants into desperation — that’s the time to resort to desperate measures.
Not meds. Makeup.
A massage. A hot bath. And a little blush & lip gloss go a looong way to making mama feel human again.
She explained all this to me over one of our nursing sessions (to be honest, I was pretty drunk off breastmilk at this point, but I did my best to listen):
On one hand, Mirabelle, I want to model for you a complete self acceptance and love of body indépendant of cultural norms about beauty; on the other hand, I want to model self care, which sometimes looks like running naked through a meadow with twigs in your hair… and sometimes looks like getting dolled up.
She said something else about heteronormative gender appearances and the harmful unrealistic expectations of women’s bodies to not disrupt the male gaze or something, but by then I was fast asleep with a nipple in my mouth.