I am a lipstick addict.
Then she asked, “Do you find you’re suddenly concerned about your looks?”
Was it that obvious?
I’d started having my eyebrows shaped by a professional, and I tended them with meticulous tweezing.
After my kids were born, I couldn’t even bother with that.
There were a half dozen colors to try on my mouth.
I loved the processthe neat tools, tracing my lips' perimeter.
“Yes, I think about my looks a lot,” I told the doctor, shyly.
After all, girls like me, women, we’re organizers, we donate money to political campaigns.
We’re not supposed to care about lipstick, about the glassy, mutable veneer of things.
They were too drag queen, too goth.
The world needed action, power!
But I needed lipstick.
“You’re not alone,” she said.
“It’s natural.”
“Why do I have to look better?”
was the muttering of my adolescence, an unconscious feminism.
The two of them called me “natural” as an epithet.
My mother wanted me to look “attractive.”
Besides, in high school, I excelled at academics: See, looks didn’t matter!
Whenever I spent time with my sister, however, I felt dismal and dumb.
What I noticed, though, was a glossy sign in a Lucite frame touting a new moisturizer.
She pulled out a tiny pot and opened it to show off a dense cream.
“How much is that?”
I left with eight products, all of which seemed to contain the words boosting or defying.
I fell for it, dropping $150 and pretending not to notice the price.
What I wanted, fiercely and for me, and right now, was to look attractive.
Well into adulthood, I hardly ever bought makeup.
The artistry of applying it eluded me, and I decided not to bother.
Motherhood crammed work down on me, and I minded, though who could I tell?
The boys were healthy, but the work was still exhausting, a plain old-fashioned sacrifice.
When I was in my 20s and early 30s, men used to notice me.
But not in the years of being a mother.
To the world beyond the eyes of my children I have disappeared.
The thought of lipstick renovation stopped me.
Must get to mirror, must fix the bad color and reassure myself with the ritual of tool.
The wrong mood, the bad day, the long wait.
In perfect lipstick, all is bearable.
But he is wrong.
They are a symbol of all the falling apart I cannot stop as my boys pull at me.
Lipstick pulls me together, helps me make a grasp at dignity.
I hug my father, who is resting in his room.
“A glass of wine?”
my stepmother offers, but we don’t make it to the kitchen.
Instead, we gossip about bronzers, moisturizer, the eyelash curler.
We are laughing, dancing in and out of the space before the mirror.
And for a moment we find a refuge of necessary silliness in a regular lifetime of monumental concerns.
Photo Credit: Riccardo Tinelli
