My mother, my self
On being a "cool mom," and passing down a legacy
“Can you say a bit about how your mother’s body and style has been passed down to you, or not?”
I’m 5 or 6. I’m sitting on the steps up to the third floor, the ones where I can sit and look into the bathroom while my mom gets ready for a night out. She is beautiful.
She’s tall, 5’10” barefoot, wearing a black spandex catsuit, her eye makeup dark but subtle, a gold belt around her small waist.
She comes out of the bathroom and poses, this way and that, showing off her look for me. She laughs. I stare, smile, cheer, reach up for a hug.
When she’s ready to go, she snaps shut her black leather clutch with the gold hardware. It’s rectangular, with sharp corners, a gold band around its edge. She tucks it under her left arm. Zips up her heeled boots. She is so glamorous.
My mother probably had the single biggest influence on my taste and style, in the sense that I both absorbed and rejected it fiercely. She is Greek, so her taste is at once loud and bold and gaudy, while also clean, functional, and relaxed. She is also a bit of an enigma, her style inimitable, ineffable.
I remember she ran for school trustee when I was about 4 years old and seemed to have a shot at winning — until her campaign brochure hit the mailboxes of the more conservative Greeks in our community and they shunned her for wearing just a single earring. It was too much, too daring. Even a little ~queer~. I just thought it was fabulous.
My mother also suffered tremendously from body dysmorphia, from a very young age and beyond. I inherited some (though blessedly not all) of her body anxieties, and they’re hard to shake. I feel for her. I feel for me. (And I feel for you, if you struggle with the same.)
My mother has spent the majority of her life fighting against the tide of her physique. She is objectively, inarguably, incredibly beautiful, but I doubt very much that she was built to be a size 0. Indeed, I recently took a 23andMe DNA test and learned that my “genetic weight” is basically the weight I am now, which is very much not a size 0. I’m willing to bet my mother’s “genetic weight,” at nearly 68 years old, is roughly the same. But she’d be hard-pressed to accept it. Wanting — needing — to be as thin as possible has forever been tied to her happiness with herself.
In her 20s, she worked as a model, walking runways, hosting events, and once even posing for the cover of a romance novel. She revered that era, valorizing it (to my mind) as her “peak beautiful” period. But of course, after having children at 27 and 32, her body changed. She had bumps and lumps and her feet were a size larger, and I don’t think she ever got over that. She wasn’t the same as before, but she wasn’t entirely different. How to dress? How to be? They’re the same questions I’m asking myself now, age almost-36 and mother to a 1-year-old.
I loved that my mother continued to dress how she liked when I was growing up, that she had fun with clothes and passed that joy along to me. She was always the coolest-dressed person at school pickup, her brown hair shining, her bangs bouncing. But her self-criticism was relentless.
If I’m being honest, I wish she’d hidden her negative self-talk from me. Worked through it in her own mind, with other moms or with a therapist. I wish I’d never heard her talk about her weight or her lumps or her dissatisfaction with self. I wish I’d only seen her living in her body, thriving in it, rather than shrinking, dissecting, praying it would change. This is probably unreasonable, probably unfair. But for myself, for my own well-being today, I wish these things had been different. I wish they hadn’t been passed on.
What else have I inherited from her?
A passion for spandex
A love for all-black outfits
An inimitable style (once described by a friend as “un-bite-able” — I’ll take it)
Big feet
A taste for gold jewelry
An obsession with dogs
My mother and I have not spoken in a long time but I do think of her often, especially when I get dressed and know I’m the “cool mom” at the playground.