When I was just a little girl, I asked my mother
“What will I be? Will I be pretty? ” Will I be pretty? Will I be pretty?
What comes next?
Oh right, will I be rich
which is almost pretty depending on where you shop.
And the pretty question infects
from conception
passing blood and breath
into cells.
The word hangs from our mothers’ hearts in a shrill of fluorescent floodlight of worry.
“Will I be wanted? Worthy? Pretty?
But puberty left me this funhouse mirror add:
teeth set at science fiction angles, crooked nose, face donkey-long, and pox-marked where the hormones went finger-painting
my poor mother.
“How could this happen?
You’ll have porcelain skin as soon as we can see a dermatologist.”
“You sucked your thumb. That’s why your teeth look like that! ”
“You were hit in the face with a Frisbee when you were six,
otherwise your nose would have been fine! ”
Don’t worry; we will get it all fixed she would say, grasping my face, twisting it this way and that as if it were a cabbage she might buy.
But, this is not about her.
Not her fault she, too, was raised to believe the greatest asset she could bestow upon her awkward little girl was a marketable appearance.
By sixteen I was pickled by ointments, medications, peroxides.
Teeth corralled into steel prongs,
laying in a hospital bed.
Face packed with gauze,
cushioning the brand new nose the surgeon had carved.
Belly gorged on two pints of my own blood I had swallowed under anesthesia,
and every convulsive twist,
like my body screaming at me from the inside out “What did you let them do to you? ”
All the while, this never ending chorus groaning on and on
like the IV needle
dripping liquid beauty into my blood.
“Will I be pretty? ”
Will I be pretty like my mother, unwrapping the gift wrap to reveal the bouquet of daughter her $10,000 bought her?
Pretty? Pretty.
And now I have not seen my own face in ten years.
I have not seen my own face in ten years,
but this is not about me!
This is about the self-mutilating circus we have painted ourselves clowns in.
About women who will prowl thirty stores in six malls to find the right cocktail dress, but haven’t a clue
where to find fulfillment
or how to wear joy,
wandering through life shackled to a shopping bag,
beneath those two pretty syllables.
This, this is about my own some-day daughter.
When you approach me, already stung-stayed with insecurity,
begging,
“Mom, will I be pretty?
Will I be pretty? , ”
I will wipe that question from your mouth like cheap lipstick
and answer no.
The word pretty is unworthy of everything you will be,
and no child of mine will be contained in five letters.
You will be
pretty intelligent,
pretty creative,
pretty amazing,
but you will never be merely “pretty.”
Katie Makkai
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