she is beautiful because you love her

My father said that my mother was the most beautiful woman in the entire town. I looked at the man who divorced her nearly ten years ago with a skeptic eye but nodded in agreement.

“He’s telling the truth, ” a man next to me said. We stood at my grandmother’s visitation reminiscing with friends, family and complete strangers. This man fell into the latter category. “She was absolutely beautiful when we were younger, everyone I knew was in love with her.”

I watched as my father and this man, an old college friend of my mother’s, stared at her standing in the next room. I had heard it countless times before- your mother was gorgeous in college, they’d say- and I’d seen enough pictures to know it was true. It was a timeless kind of beauty, the kind that isn’t achievable with make up or hair products, making her even more lovely in her rarity and envied by most. She was tall and blonde with fair skin and light eyes and a smile that lit up her entire face.

“Your mother smiles with her whole body,” my father would say. “She makes everyone else smile, too.”

I watched her in the next room and even behind the lines that snuck onto her face with age, her smile still lit her entire face and even in grief, she glowed.

“You look like her,” my grandmother used to insist every time someone started to talk about my mother’s beauty. “But still, different.”

I would always laugh- different, of course. I dismissed beauty in my ugly duckling stage. Beautiful women were stupid, frivolous, superficial. But my mother defied the image I tried to create. She was smart, determined, funny and amiable- all of the qualities I strived to achieve.

My father laughed when I told him I didn’t want to beautiful, I wanted to save the world instead.

“You think beautiful women can’t do that?” he asked. “You know why your mother has so many admirers? It’s because with one smile she makes every person she meets feel like they are important, like they matter. Beauty is so much more than you think.”

My mother never was satisfied with being Jane, my father said. She wanted to be Tarzan. She didn’t want to vacuum the tree house, she wanted to swing from the vines.

She won’t be saving the world any time soon. You’ll likely find her, instead, keeping my 17 year old brother focused on school and helping college graduates find a job. She isn’t the same woman that my father and her friend from college remembered at the funeral home that afternoon- she’s even more lovely today.

My mother believes that mascara is the savior of womankind and her favorite beauty tip is to smile with your eyes. She watches Hilary Clinton on television and wonders why she has to act like a man and refuses to dress feminine because she’s too afraid she won’t be taken seriously.

“Just shameful,” she says, “to think you have to hide beauty to be taken seriously.” And I wonder if she’s right. I wonder if beautiful women are dismissed as only that- beautiful.

My mother tells me over and over again that while beauty isn’t everything, it is something. And while I always roll my eyes, I can’t hate her when she says it… she’s far too beautiful.