A memoir--the stigma of ugly

Emily Dickinson wrote

If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.

If one person can read this post and think differently about herself, then it will not have been written in vain.

In reading back over some of my memoirs, I find that many of them are negative messages that I received about myself, especially from my only sibling, an older sister named Lynda. In this post, I want to write more about a major message that I got from her and perhaps inadvertently from my parents and from some others.

Thinking that I was “ugly” through my teens and into my 20s and 30s and 40s had a huge impact on my life.

You may remember these paragraphs from an earlier post:

“One night at the dinner table, my mother asked my sister if she would show me how to pluck my eyebrows. Lynda responded that it didn’t matter if I plucked my eyebrows or not, that I ‘was so ugly that plucking would not help me.’

“What I don’t recall is my parents’ reaction to her hurtful remark. I don’t remember that they said or did anything. I envision silence around the table, almost as if they agreed with her assessment of my looks. The sad thing was that I believed her.

“Still later at a country club dance when I was a freshman in high school and my sister a freshman in college, we were both dressed to the 9s. Lynda was dancing, and I so wanted to dance. A young man approached our table where I sat with my parents, and he said to them, “Your other daughter is so pretty.” Then he looked down at me and said, “Ooopps!”

I have included some pictures of myself for you to view in my posts--sometimes they are there as if to prove that I was indeed “pretty.”  But the truth is that in comparison to my mother, and yes, even to my sister, I was not "movie-star" or "fashion-model" pretty, as were they.

Another really sad thing was that I got in my head and in my heart that nothing was more important than being pretty. So the belief that I was ugly became a stigma or a mark of disgrace in my life.

It mostly began in my early teens. At first, I thought that it was my nose that was particularly unattractive. Then it was my skin. And the occasional blemish would horrify me. Later in my 20s, my skin became so dry in spots that it would flake off. Then it was my chin that was ugly. Later the focus was on my mouth; my lips were too thin. My mouth was too small; my teeth were too small. (Once a student told me that I had hamster teeth.)

Then a few rude men made me feel bad about being fairly flat chested in my 20s. "You're not much up top, but you're okay," a stranger said to me at a dance club one night. Even when their off-hand remarks probably meant nothing, the negative comments of unthinking people would become burned into my psyche. Then the focus became my eyes, especially when a student asked me if I were Asian. And on and on through the decades. Mostly it was "sins of omission," when no matter how hard I would try to look good, no one would say anything to me. Compliments to other women or girls on their looks made me feel less than. Simply put, I was crazy.

Perhaps a lot of young girls in their early teens--in middle school--get this same idea in their heads: that they are not pretty. I wish that they, unlike me, could have some guidance about such a thought before it becomes a belief that rules, and perhaps, ruins their life. I wish that they could have someone in their lives who makes them feel good about just who they are and just what they look like. And about that amazing person that they uniquely are!

Without sounding self-pitying, (I never intend my memoirs to sound self-pitying.) I want people to know that it is extremely difficult for a female to go through life feeling unattractive, and such a belief can affect most everything that she does. It influences both small and big decisions. I think one of the worst effects of feeling ugly is that it causes us to become self-absorbed and thus unhappy.

So convinced was I of my unattractiveness that early in my teaching career when a male student told me that I was pretty, I actually argued with him, “Oh, no, I’m not!” To this day, I remember the shocked look on his face. You see by that time, I had bought the belief--hook, line, and sinker--that I was ugly. And sink me it almost did! Both of my marriages were to handsome men, regardless of their values or whether they were kind or not. I couldn’t see beyond thinking that I must look “okay” if a handsome man is attracted to me. I turned away from some “ordinary” looking men, who may have been better husbands.

After our daughter was born and was a particularly pretty baby, my second husband used to brag to people all the time about how pretty she was and how much she looked like him. I remember asking him one day in a very small voice if he thought that Ellen looked a bit like me, to which he answered, "Definitely not."

I became a clothes horse and spent too much time and money on clothes and on makeup. My figure was never good enough; I thought that I was "fat," even when I clearly was not. I hated pictures of myself'. It wasn't until fairly recently (in the last 10 years or so) that I began to share my feelings about my looks with others--my daughter and a few close friends. I had been ashamed of my feelings and didn't want to illicit false compliments from them. It's rather ironic that now that I am old and fat and winkled, and probably truly unattractive, I see my face through the eyes of love and think that it's rather pretty, after all.  

What I’ve finally come to realize is that there is not just one kind of pretty. In my yesteryear, there was one kind of pretty--tall and slim with big breasts, long hair and big round eyes, great smooth skin and straight white teeth, strong features and broad shoulders. I was none of those things. Perhaps that is still the media’s ideal of beauty.

I know that "hurt people hurt others." And I wish to apologize to anyone that I may have hurt in the past. I didn't mean to hurt you, dear one. It had nothing to do with you and everything to do with me.

There are all kinds of beautiful people. Beautiful has little to do with their physical appearances. The most beautiful people to me are those who are kind and tender. They may be short and fat with short hair and small eyes and spotted skin. That’s all right; still they are beautiful, for they are kind and tender and their heart shines through their faces. I wasted a lot of time and energy on this issue. I wish that I had known that physical looks just aren't that damned important after all.

This is one of my favorite pictures of myself. I am 35, and I am pretty! Recently one friend said that I do not look happy in this picture; he was quite astute!

In my next memoir, I’m going to write about the Louisville years, where I first began to feel, in a word, ugly. I think that for me there were just those two words: pretty or ugly. I wasn't very good at seeing the inbetween.

But first I want to share with you a poem that I wrote years and years ago, but that I have come to truly believe more today--

All of my growing up years, I was told or overheard
How beautiful my mother was
How beautiful my only sister was
No one ever said that I was even pretty

From afar, I watched the beautiful girls at school
Wishing that I could be one of them
Later I befriended and dated only attractive people
To make me feel pretty, too, I guess

My sister gave birth to a beautiful daughter
Whom I embraced as my beautiful niece
And loved through the summer days
Until one day she grew up and floated away

I dated only good-looking men
Some of them were not such nice men
Twice I married those good-looking men
Twice I divorced those same men

I gave birth to my beautiful daughter Ellen
Who at times almost made me feel beautiful, too
(I already knew she was beautiful before she was born)
Now she has given birth to two beautiful daughters!

And I, I have come to set my own standards for beauty
I’ve learned to broaden its definition to include
Kindness and tenderness and understanding
Real beauty lies in learning to love yourself
As is.