Keywords
Beauty, pretty, mother and daughter
Document Type
Essay
Description
I can’t write about beauty. I’ve written four different opening lines, ones about beauty being a beast, or my hatred of photographs of myself, or the Maybelline counter in Macy’s in eighth grade where my mother took me to become beautiful. The sentences stumble over themselves. I have so much to say, but I feel too much, and the words choke upon entry, tumbling headlong into the white void. I hear my seventh-grade locker partner and the woman in Georgia who both told me I had hair on my neck—haven’t you heard of tweezers?—and my mother’s words each time I call on Zoom: “Abby, you look so pretty. You really are beautiful, you know.” I wonder, if I didn’t look so much like her, would she say it quite so often? There’s a desperate self-assurance about it, as though she is trying to convince herself along with me that our particular genetic cocktail is lovely, gorgeous. Beautiful. After all, I am my mother’s daughter.
Recommended Citation
Thatcher, Abby
(2021)
"Inheritance,"
Inscape: Vol. 41:
No.
1, Article 7.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/inscape/vol41/iss1/7