Poem: I'm Learning To Love My Face
Like that's a thing one must learn, because it's a thing I'm trying to learn.
Well, I’m zero for two here on getting my email out on Friday morning early this month. Yeesh. I plead “summer,” Your Honor. Summer and mush-brain, which are closely related. It was 105 degrees here in Portland this week. That is a wildly inappropriate temperature for the Pacific Northwest. Do you hear me, Weather Gods?? What do you think you’re doing up there?
Alright, back to the regularly scheduled programming.
If you’re reading this on your phone’s email, it will format pretty close to properly. If you’re on the Substack website/app on your phone, it will be super wonky and will look much better on your laptop/desktop.
I’m Learning To Love My Face
like that’s a thing one must learn because it’s a thing I’m trying to learn like the crinkles that fan out from my eyes from decades of laughter don’t deserve their place on my skin like the grooves that bracket my mouth from eons of sorrow must convince me of their right to furrow though they print the map of my life onto my fatty tissue and who could complain about such a miraculous art installation as that like the watercolor smudges that brush my cheekbones that I tell myself are freckles, but which might be age spots that need a new name, though “age spots” is the new name since Depression babies called them liver spots so I will call them watercolor marks and now they sound like a sunset sky painted in shades of tan and peach across my cheeks, and suddenly they match the map-lined mouth the Japanese-fanned eyes that turned the gray of a stormy sea the moment I quit dying my hair and let it fall in sterling curls and why WHY did no one tell me that growing old was growing new beautiful and not that wretched word “aging” until my daughters came along who wanted bling in their hair, too, the moment the first silver threads appeared in mine and who don’t wear makeup around new people so they’ll know they’re befriended for themselves and maybe maybe life isn’t a once chance deal. Maybe the ones who are meant to teach you that beauty and smoothness are not the same don’t, but the ones you are supposed to mold will form you instead and look at that! — my smudgy life map crinkle fan ocean-eyed face looks lovable even to me.
Why does this exist? (a stuffy artist statement)
In December my 19-year old daughter and I got into a conversation about makeup. She’s an artist and tends to wear either no makeup at all or the most elaborate makeup on earth.
She told me she never wears makeup when she’s going places with new people and never wears it to school. Being a 49-year old woman, this was the exact opposite of the makeup theory I had grown up with. When I asked her why not, she said that she wants to know that people like her for her and not for her makeup.
This began my own reassessment and revision of how I view makeup and how I think of my own face and body. WOW! Pretty shocking ideas. For the most part, I’ve quit wearing most makeup most of the time and have started trying to baby my skin a bit more to compensate. It’s been very freeing. I might start getting all my life advice from my 19-year old.
Something that stuck with me this week:
When you are trying to recover from being over-busy, downtime feels very odd. I’m taking it as a sign that I have been overdoing it for far too long.
And now, an Irish blessing because I like those:
A friend's eye is a good mirror.
I post on Friday mornings
Just so you know what to expect. I may also post at other times, but for sure on Friday mornings (6:00am PST delivery so we can sip coffee together and celebrate another week done). See you then!
About Rachel
Working on a scifi book series about a girl who just wants to heal her father from his terminal illness but inadvertently sparks an intergalactic incident instead.
Watercolor marks! Love the reframing.
“like a sunset sky painted in shades of
tan and peach across
my cheeks,”. Beautiful!