Wind catches the curtains in my children’s bedroom. They sleep with flushed cheeks and eyelashes long and every night I check on them before I go to sleep, and every night I feel both afraid and awed by their beauty.
I touch lips to their skin, remember how my mum prayed over me as I grew in her womb, that I wouldn’t be outwardly attractive. Because it was the heart that counted, the inner beauty, she said.
But I knew I had an appearance. I could see it in the mirror. And because my mum never gave me compliments, when I was young, and my dad was often absent, I began to believe I was ugly. Insignificant. Not worth my father’s time or my mother’s affirmation.
As a result I wanted nothing more than to be beautiful.
And for years I chased this elusive beauty until I became anorexic until it nearly killed me.
Even now when my husband tells me I’m pretty, I wonder why he didn’t tell me that yesterday, and what makes me pretty enough today to warrant a compliment, and I’m desperately afraid of him losing interest in me. Of him never being home, like my father…
(for the rest of this post, won’t you join me over HERE, at Chatting at the Sky, where we’re giving away a copy of Chasing Silhouettes?)