I keep saying we've got to find another word for "beauty,"
Dame Helen Mirren said as she waited for her cue backstage
at a catwalk show in Paris. I think we should start calling it
"character" instead of beauty, because that's really what it is.*
My saga of beauty was themed first by the nurses at my birth, then by my mother. Introducing their firstborn to my parents, the nurses called me "doll face." My mother repeated this story to me—making it my memory as well as hers. We both attached importance to it, although hers I now understand as mother-love and pride, while mine birthed a life lived with a core belief about the source of my worth.*
In fourth and fifth grades, prompted by my mother's asking about my interest in it, I entered a modeling competition sponsored by the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston, Massachusetts and became one of their child models for a year. My photos appeared in full-page color advertisements in the Sunday edition magazines of the two largest papers in Boston. When a fashion show on the nationally syndicated Arlene Francis television program was filmed in the store, I waited with my mother, watching the cameramen set up their cameras. I knew the announcer Hugh Downs from seeing him on television. He and Arlene Francis were smiling and chatting, as they waited too. But the more time that passed, rather than my enjoying the excitement of my opportunity, and the importance of representing Jordan Marsh, the more overwhelmed I became. I told my mother I couldn't model. Instead of helping me to remember the girl I'd been when answering questions on stage in the competition, or the girl talking freely about her activities with the host of the radio show, or the girl posing and smiling for seasonal ads for the newspaper photos—my mother called my dad. He dropped whatever he was doing and drove into Boston. As soon as I saw him, I was fine. This was a pattern that would continue. When I was upset and needed comforting, or when I misbehaved and needed correcting, my mother called my dad, and rather than personally developing my character and building my own inner reliance, my reliance on him developed and grew. The pattern continued to the extent that in my mid-teens I would be told, "You were a problem baby" and "a problem child," and later, before my wedding, my dad said, "You're your husband's problem now." Yet of both parents, he was the one who helped me the most.
By thirty-five, a precipitating time began that foreshadowed my eventual move to India, unknown, of course, at the time. I worried about what I would do for work if I had to—although I now know there was no need for worry. However at that time, my anxiety had kept building. "Suffering from fear, I wasn't helped by my mother who asked what was wrong, as I had a home and family, or my father who in frustration asked if I needed a kick in the ass, or by my being reminded of my accomplishments. I didn't know what was wrong with me."* My parents became exasperated. I responded to this loss of support, and unconsciously found another avenue of consolation that lasted several years, to be followed by years in my early forties of vacillating feelings.
By my late forties, I was pressed to develop an independent view of myself and also develop strength of character. From one experience, and its consequential turning, I welcomed my difficult undertaking, and then began my successful journey of discovery. Thirty years later, when I saw Dame Helen Mirren's comment, I knew exactly what she meant.
My realization is, "What we accomplish, seemingly in private, sparkles when we find the changes we've accomplished in print—spoken or written by an admired public personality."
* https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/helen-mirren-beauty/?hpt=ob_blogfooterold
* Until I was seventy-five, I had wrongly believed that I had been loved by my parents for my
beauty and my school achievements. I wrote more about this in an earlier blog. See
https://www.purelyprema.com/welcome/2019/4/17/2018-diving-deep?rq=Diving%20Deep
* Prema Jasmine Camp, "Beginnings and Endings" in A Flower for God, in pre-publication.