It's been almost a decade since my mother died, but her shadow remains forever attached to my own. My mind's eye can perfectly recall what she looks like (although in my memory she hovers somewhere around the age of 42, which is a full fifteen years earlier than her death). I hear the timbre of her voice there too, the way she rolled her South American "arrrrrs" and the passionate way she yelled at characters on the television. I remember her smells through the vast array of perfumes that sat on her dresser, their glamorous names sitting rich in one's mouth - Samsara, Calleche, Shalimar, Insolence. Even now, I'll stop dead in the middle of the street if someone walks past leaving a hint of her on the breeze. My fingers can still feel the pillow creases that lined her face every morning and the coarse, darrrrk hair that fell onto her shoulders.
She is all around me, yet she is nowhere to be seen. She is with me. I am alone.
!["Now I am a mother and I have learned to see my face through different eyes again."](/web/20161205054908im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/o/o/0/j/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt1rdl.png/1480643002559.jpg)
After she died, I saw her in the strangest of places. The clump of flowers growing at the bottom of the garden gate. An old T-shirt worn by my sister. Once, standing behind my friend Emily at the pub while occasionally rubbing her shoulders. In these sightings, she was no longer 42, but nor was she 57. She was 30ish and dressed in a woollen blue kaftan. This was how old she was when she married my father, and the kaftan was her unconventional wedding dress.
Lately, I have been finding her in my face which seems the most unusual hiding place of all to discover her. Family legend has it that when I was born, the midwife took one look at me and declared, "She's the spitting image of her father!" (Remarkably, she had delivered us both.) The frequent repetitions of this sentiment throughout my childhood did nothing to assuage my fear that I was an inadequate girl, and I absorbed this latter status as fact alongside the belief that I wasn't entitled to think otherwise. In my mind, it was settled: I looked like my father, a six foot four man with a thick beard and enormous limbs, and it was nothing short of embarrassing to hope there might be some of my small, dark, high-cheekboned mother in me.
But all these years later, I can finally see that she is there. She gazes out at me from photographs of my own face, so convincingly real and present that I sometimes have to do a double take. Her smile is now my smile. The curve of her jaw is mine too, as is the way she (and now I) flexes her hands. Even those famed cheekbones belong to me, finally.
Has it always been like this? Has she always been there, waiting for me to find her and learn this belated lesson? I grew up thinking I was ugly, but her face is my face. She is my mother. How can I punish myself with accusations of ugliness when it turns out that I look exactly like the person who, until I had my own child, had always been the most beautiful to me?
And now I am a mother and I have learned to see my face through different eyes again. This small, tiny human looks at me with unconditional trust and love. And my face, which is also her face, is now my child's face. Small and new, it is the best face I've ever seen. These are the bluest eyes, the sweetest ears, the cutest double (and sometimes triple) chin. The gummy smile I always hated on myself is happiness personified here. Everything is where it is meant to be, perfect in all its imperfections.
There are few things more pointless and self indulgent than obsessing about the way we look, particularly when a large part of this obsession involves believing others despise what we consider our obvious ugliness. It's the worst kind of narcissism, the kind that imagines other people sit around fixating on how repulsive and awful you are, as if we are the biggest piece of shit at the centre of the universe.
But there is some liberation in learning to look at ourselves through the eyes not only of those who love us but those whom we love fiercely in return. My child has my face, and I have my mother's in return: to think of myself as grotesque is to consider the same of the two of them.
We inherit our parents' genes but we also inherit their baggage. My mother thought she was ugly too, like many of us women cursedly believe. But I wanted so desperately to look just like her, and I wish she had known that. I wish she could see her face in my child now. I wish she could see it in mine. Instead, she looks out at me from photographs taken years after her death. She is me, and at last I am her.
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