In The Big Scheme of Things

I grew up in two very different households. My par­ents divorced when I was seven. My mother had pri­mary custody of me, but I still saw my father at least once a week. My parents are two very different peo­ple—my mother is extremely liberal and self-aware, while my father is extraordinarily conservative.

I think I started becoming cognizant of my body when I began middle school. I had the stereo­typical desire to be in the “in” group, and I scrambled at the first chance to start wearing makeup and buy­ing “cute” clothes. My mom didn’t fight this sudden urge to be “in”; rather, she wisely let it run its course. She stood back and watched as my popular pink eye shadow from sixth grade turned into the black, heavy, emotionally-strained eyeliner of eighth grade. She did have a few rules—I couldn’t shave my legs or pierce my ears until I was twelve, but that was all. Of course I made her drive me to Claire’s on the morning of my twelfth birthday, and that night she taught me how to use a razor. She was also sure to respond whenever I said something about being “fat”; she always frowned and said, “Leah, you are NOT fat.” She advocated healthy food merely for the sake of health, not for a skinnier body.

In my father’s world, on the other hand, girls wear cute clothes and use just the right amount of make­up. Although he never verbally advocated this lifestyle, I always knew it was there, because he never objected when my stepmother made herself heard. Once she told me, “If I were you mother, I wouldn’t let you wear that to school.” She always put makeup in my stocking at Christmas and never ceased to remind me of the calorie content of Nestle chocolate milk mix.

During these years I was exposed to two en­tirely different perceptions of image—in one house­hold, my looks didn’t matter and there was always encouragement for positive self-image. In the other, there was no “self” attached to “image” and there were implicit and explicit expectations to live up to.

Both of these were left behind, however, when I went to boarding school my sophomore year of high school.

I was on my own, with neither a safety net of indifference nor expectations to live by. I continued to wear makeup and believed I was fat. I felt guilty at every meal, even if all I ate was an apple. There weren’t any specific characteristics of my school that necessarily perpetuated this downward spiral; looking back, I think it was the fact that I was too young to be away from home and I still had so much to learn from my family. Boarding school is a weird place, and my entrapment merely made my self-conscious tenden­cies multiply.

Over the course of my senior year, I became more and more exhausted by the demands of college applications, my theses, and my concern for my appear­ance slowly faded. I went from wearing eyeliner on the top and bottom of my eyelids to only the top and then to no eyeliner at all. I graduated and went home for the summer, where my mother acted as she normally did—I was beautiful no matter what. In my dad’s household, nothing was specifically said, but my stepmother asked me with disdain why I stopped shaving my legs (and she still insists on stuffing my stocking with makeup that I’ll never use).

Once in elementary school I asked my mother if she would wear lipstick like all the other mommies. She chuckled and told me that lipstick didn’t really mat­ter in the big scheme of things. She has shown me that it truly does not matter how I look—with makeup or without makeup, lovehandles or none, she loves me. This, rather than my father’s passive aggressive desire for me to be “normal,” is what I will carry with me for the rest of my life.