Beauty Is What It Is

The other day, a friend told me she was finally learning to believe in herself. She had spent years thinking she wasn’t worth much.Her mother used to tell her, often, that beauty was fleeting and for a long time, she believed it without question. As I listened, something stirred in me.
A familiar story. Mine. Words I too had heard, and carried silently. Before the feeling could fade, this text came to me. It doesn’t speak only of my mother, but of all those mothers who, thinking they were protecting us, planted doubt instead. Those who had, in turn, inherited the same legacy: modesty as a shield, invisibility as a virtue. It speaks of those quiet transmissions,
of the body we learn too late to see without shame, to love without fear.

“Beauty is fleeting,” she used to tell me.
Like a prayer. Like a warning.

To shield me  from what, from whom?
from the vanity of young girls who awaken and find themselves beautiful,
my mother would repeat over and over that beauty fades.
But who knows what we sow when we mean well?
And who knows what a young girl takes from it?

She told me never to see myself
through the eyes of those who looked at me as a woman.
That I should beware of those girls who knew they were beautiful.
So she repeated, gently or sternly:
“Beauty is fleeting.”
As if innocence could only survive by blinding the mirror.
As if growing up were something to fear.

To preserve the child, she stifled the woman.
She locked the door to becoming.
To her, there was no age at which one should stop being a child.
All children are good. All children are beautiful.
That should have been enough.
She didn’t want me to become aware
of that singular beauty
the one that stirs desire,
the one eyes begin to watch,
the one hands might want to take.
That kind of beauty, she said,
was too fleeting to matter.

And so I grew up invisible.
Unaware of the body that was changing,
shaping itself in quiet rebellion.
I crossed the threshold from childhood
without noticing the woman emerging.
I didn’t feel beautiful
since beauty, I had been told, was just dust waiting to disappear.

I thought I was ordinary.
One girl among many girls.
One woman among many women.
All I knew of beauty were the dangers.
So I hid.

And I became a woman without the joy of becoming one.
Maybe I was desired; I didn’t believe it.
Maybe I was beautiful  but never “pretty.”
Or perhaps I was both, in the eyes of others.
But I never saw myself in them.
I stood outside the game,
outside the quiet pleasure
of knowing oneself beautiful,
when you’ve been told early enough that you could be.
That you could love yourself,
even if that beauty doesn’t last.
Because what it leaves behind
is deeper, more enduring
than the freshness of a face.

I learned, later, with disapproval,
that the fleeting nature of beauty
is not a reason to turn away from it.
Quite the opposite.
It is because beauty fades
that we must look at it,
see it while it still lives in us,
cherish it before it slips away.
Love ourselves at every age.
Sometimes for our shapes.
Sometimes for our light.
Sometimes for what we radiate.
Sometimes for what our bodies carry,
what they survive.

She used to tell me:
“Beauty is fleeting.”
And now I tell myself:
“Beauty is what it is.”

And if I must choose
between the ignorance of what I might have savored
and the soft betrayal of an inheritance born of fear,
then I choose to learn how to see. Because maybe if I train my eyes to love,
my heart will know how to remember
even when the body has spent its time,
when the color has faded,
and the skin bears the lines
of years crossed
with or without grace,
but always with trace.

By Aliane UMUTONIWASE