ugly truth

This morning, my husband sent me a link to an image of Uma Thurman's (recently?) renovated face.  It looks great.  But it doesn't look like Uma.  Uma's face, as Mia Wallace and Poison Ivy and Fantine and Emma Peel and Beatrix Kiddo, is gone.

The sadness I felt as I stared at this new Uma face and tried to find Uma in it was the same as when I stared at Renee Zellweger's face and tried to find Renee in it.  Like looking at one of those "magic eye" stereograms popular in grade school.

What scares me about plastic surgery is not its availability, popularity, aggressive marketing at the back of every fashion magazine, or even the horror stories of botched jobs.  What scares me is that Uma and Renee, talented, gorgeous, wealthy, acclaimed, beloved, and renown, somewhere along the way, thought they were ugly.

Although I (and my husband) are philosophically opposed to cosmetic surgery, and I doubt I'd ever have the budget available to have myself overhauled even if I was for it, I know that I'm not immune to the feeling of ugliness.  Just because Uma and Renee did something about it and I probably won't doesn't make me better and them worse.  We're similar in our struggles and similar in our feeling of ugliness.

If Uma and Renee thought their beautiful, beautiful faces were ugly, what hope to the rest of us have?

So here's a possible remedy.  I've broken it up into three parts.

1. If you know a woman, love a woman, sleep with a woman, are friends with a woman, or are related to a woman, tell them they're beautiful.  Be honest.  Be specific.  Be persistent.  Be poetic.  Be brave.  If you tell a woman "You're pretty" they may not believe you, but they'll find it hard to argue with "I love how restful and radiant you looked in the sunlight yesterday afternoon".
   
2. If you are a woman, believe it.  Don't look for opportunities to negate a compliment.  If your husband tells you he loves your face without makeup on try to imagine why he would, even if it seems impossible.  When your daughter tells you she loves you because you're squishy, accept that you are the zenith of womanly beauty to her.
   
3. Finally, shut your beautiful face about your ugliness.  There will always be "flaws".  They will multiply.  But unless you want to carve them out with a knife and suffer losing all sorts of character, personality, responsiveness, and cellular integrity in the process, it's time to embrace and shut up about them.  When you say you hate your legs a little part dies inside your friends who thought your legs superior to theirs.

Happy Valentine's Day, you pretty people.

wifercize wednesday: secrecy

I just finished reading an article in MORE: Canada's Magazine Celebrating Women Over 40 which is delivered free of charge to my office every month. I read it because, well, if 40s are the new 30s, and 30s are the new 20s, then I NEED TO START THINKING ABOUT RETIREMENT. Plus, it has a pretty, shiny cover.

In it, the author (under the pseudonym "Ivana Filler", a bad joke which will make sense shortly), goes to a cosmetic dermatologist to have a wrinkle filler treatment (called hyaluronic acid...who voluntarily injects ACID into their FACE?) without her husband's knowledge. The trick is to see if the treatment can remain unnoticed by her husband, since he is an outspoken advocate of aging gracefully. She maintains her anonymity throughout the article and ends the piece celebratorily, since he seemed more interested in a "small, black streak on the underside of the front bumper" of their car than her facial alteration.

She advises him to just rub it off. "No one will even notice," she concludes. Zing!

My issue isn't so much her anonymity (although I have opinions about that), or anti-aging treatments (surprisingly, I have opinions about that too), or the tired stereotyping of men who are more into cars than relationships (right on cue, hubby tweets this), OR that it seemed her secrecy stemmed from selfishness desire (the mighty "I"), but that she would a) do something that her husband obviously didn't like (or consider necessary), and b) keep it from him.

It reminds me of this great quote of Michelle Pfieffer's, from an interview with InStyle:

When Pfeiffer heard a so-called expert on marriage and romance advocate "keeping the mystery" between partners, the actress found it hilarious. "Can you imagine, for 20 years, trying to stay mysterious in your relationship?" she asks, guffawing. "That's the worst advice I've ever heard. Of all the people in your life you don't want to hide from, it's your partner."

If the first year of marriage has taught me anything, it has taught me communication and openness. It's a two-way street that requires a lot of bravery and courage but is the only way, that I can see, of fulfilling the mystery of "oneness" that marriage promises. Since you see each other naked, you might as well be honest with your other half. Message to wives: lets not bluff our way through life. Better a disagreement in the light than a secret kept in the dark. Things that grow in the dark aren't pretty. Not even if you inject them with hyaluronic acid.

Which, I suppose, makes me wonder how integrated we are before we get into a marital relationship. Are we being honest with ourselves? With our friends? Message to pre-wives: start living open, honest lives now. It'll make it easier to live an open, honest life with a hubby.

"I want to be clear, I want to be open
I want my eyes to be deep as the deep blue sea
I want to live real and transparently
So if you want to see me, you can see me."
- Jeanine Noyes, Transparent