The gaze of the world

 

My friend Rebecca The Poet posted that image on Instagram, and I thought dear god that child with her powerful sense of being has something to teach me.

It's the season of spinning over here, of me freaking out about things that in the scheme of things don't matter much, like what I will wear to my daughter's wedding, the mother of the bride who can only wear flat, comfortable shoes, nothing fashionable, and whose shape is such that nothing fits of the garments that appeal to me, and the things that do fit are unbearably dowdy, yet one has no choice but to wear a garment that fits I suppose. Maybe I'll wear something from my closet that is already broken in, that I've worn a million times before, that everyone has already seen me in, but a garment that allows me to forget about myself, to not keep tugging at it, adjusting it, overthinking how I appear to others in it, and besides, I am peripheral to the main event anyway, because at the end of it my daughter and her love will be married.

Sometimes I still actually envy my mother for her slender grace, the way she could don any dress she chose and look perfectly elegant. I can still hear her when I was an ungainly child, tugging at my dress, my socks slipping down into my patent leather shoes at the heel, I can still hear my mother telling me gently, "Darling, once you get dressed just forget about yourself," and I thought back then, easy for you to say, and I think it even now. But she meant well. She ached that I couldn't seem to get comfortable in my skin, I saw her noticing it, agonizing over it. She took me to dressmakers to have my clothes custom made, so we would no longer have to endure the sessions in clothing store fitting rooms, trying on garment after garment only to walk out empty handed once again. I love her for trying, though, and for loving me, even though I struggled to love the rotund little girl who stared back at me from the seamstress's mirror.

But what if, in my own head, I could see myself as physically fluent as that ballerina, as light as air, as unconcerned with the gaze of the world as the child in that picture. Now that would be a trick worth mastering.

Thank you dear friends for your thoughtful and supportive comments on my recent post about my husband's sparse communication around medical issues. I took the post down, because the health information is his to share, not mine, but I will hold your comments close, especially those that clued me in that our marital dynamic around health is more common than I might think, that men often protect their vulnerabilities in this vault-like way, and also, as one kind soul said in response to my not knowing whether to be angry or scared, "Be neither angry nor scared. Just listen."

I asked my daughter the other day, what am I afraid of at the core? Is it that disaster will strike and I won't be prepared—as if one can ever truly prepare for disaster. For now, life is rolling along, and I have the nerve, despite the larger world being on fire, and possible surgery in my husband's future, to be concerned with the gaze of other people.