My Mom

I always thought my mom was beautiful. Doesn’t every daughter? But she really was! She was tall and slender and elegant, all qualities that I, a short, plump girl with a childish pixie haircut, hoped to grow into one day--the same day I was going to miraculously lose by baby fat, grow six inches and morph into a younger version of my mother.

Many, many years later when I was an adult, still short but not plump and now with a sophisticated version of that pixie haircut, I was in an elevator at the retirement community where my dad had moved after my mother’s death when a woman recognized him. On discovering that I was his daughter, she turned to me and said with great conviction, “Oh, your mother was a stunning woman.” It was more than a statement of fact. It was a definitive pronouncement. And as soon as she said it, I knew it was the best and truest way to describe my mom. Stunning. The word set her apart from other women more conventionally pretty perhaps but lacking her distinctive style and natural sophistication.

Here’s what a stunning woman looks like. I see her first in old photographs taken long before I was born. She is posing for the camera on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, one foot resting on the rail behind her. She is wearing a big shouldered coat cinched tightly around her waist and holding a rectangular bag against her chest. She stares into the camera not smiling (She rarely opened her mouth when facing the camera, ashamed of her crooked teeth.) looking ever so smart and confident. I like to think it was a boyfriend who took that picture.

Then there is a picture taken in Palm Springs during the first year of her marriage. She is sitting, no slouching, on a diving board, her long slender legs dangling over the edge towards the pool. She is wearing a drapey one piece bathing suit--I have one just like it now—looking languidly out to the camera. The photo is in black and white but I am sure those legs are tanned from the sun.

And always there is the picture I have in my mind’s eye. I am a child sitting on the floor of her bathroom looking up at her most intently as she puts on her makeup for a Saturday night out. She is wearing a black half slip and a strapless black bra, looking wonderfully sexy and glamorous to me. Her make up completed, I follow her to her bedroom where we open her closet and carefully sift through the rack of dresses until she finds the right outfit for the evening. Could it be the slinky white halter gown she wore with long elbow length kid gloves. We were both devastated when the cleaner ruined that dress.

Did I think that some of that magic, that stunning quality, would ever descend on me. Is that why I always got dressed in my parents’ room before a big date? How different the image that came back to me when I stared into the full length mirror on her closet door—a short, rounded but not unattractive girl--a chubby Natalie Wood as a boyfriend once described me—cute but definitely not stunning.