Family
I Still Feel Like a Teen and Not in a Good Way
My mother’s need for me to be body-perfect still haunts me.
Mel Haasch
It was New Year’s Eve, 2025, and I was supposed to be dressed. My husband was waiting for me in the other room of our hotel suite to go join friends and celebrate in Antwerp, Belgium. But I was frozen, standing naked in a hotel room, shocked at what was staring back at me.
Who was that ugly, old woman in the mirror? Did I really look like that? I started to spiral, the way my 13-year-old self used to when my mother told me my nose was too big, my lips too thin. Like most adolescents, I had walked around with a mirror analyzing myself, everywhere I went. If my mother had enforced any message, it was that I was nothing if I wasn’t pretty.
Recently, I’ve felt some of those adolescent feelings creeping into my 60-plus life. More than I’d thought about in a while, I find I want to look good. I care. I was brought up to care. But as I age, I find it harder and harder to meet my own complicated expectations. How can I be pretty with bumpy legs, saggy arms and wrinkly knees?
My parents were very stylish people. My mother had a model’s figure, 5’8”, curvy with slender, long olive-skinned legs. Her favorite designer was Yves Saint Laurent. I knew Saint Laurent was a genius before Miss Hodapp taught me how to multiply and divide in third grade.
My glamorous mother loved to shop. I spent many a day as a kid in the dressing rooms of department stores, sitting on a bench or stool waiting for my mother to make up her mind about some item of clothing.
I remember at I. Magnin’s in San Francisco, where I grew up, a woman named Miss Elena helped my mother shop. She was French, about 5’2” with a thick Parisian accent and a chic gray bob and bangs. I invited both Miss Elena and her similarly petite sister to my first wedding. That’s how important they were to our family.
My middle sister inherited my mother’s beautiful legs. I didn’t have bad legs, but I had inherited my dad’s. Bad legs were a beauty deal-breaker, according to my mother. She could not have cared less about how I did in school. She never finished college herself, preferring to draw dresses in the margins of her notebooks. What mattered was that I was witty, stylish and pretty.
There were some exacting beauty standards floating around our house. I was often sent back to my room to change into a dress or skirt.
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And my looks? Well, let’s just say, there was room for improvement. “You have your father’s nose,” my mother would say.
One night when my mother was having her nightly pre-dinner bath, I came in to chat. Still in my green plaid school uniform, I sat down on the covered toilet seat to tell her about my day.
Before I began, she observed me, as if she were looking at meat at the butcher’s. “You know, the top half of your face is better than the bottom half.”
My mother always said exactly what she was thinking. I felt like a plaster mold that needed to be re-sculpted.
Hair was always an issue for me, both good and bad. I had a lot of it. My mother thought I was too hairy and that I had a hormonal imbalance. She took me to her gynecologist, Dr. Bartolucci, who she had a crush on, for his medical opinion. He didn’t think I needed medicine, just electrolysis to remove my unsightly hairs.
My mother found a friendly electrologist who performed his zapping in the back room of a hair salon on Union Street. And while he painfully probed my chin and neck hair follicles with an electric current, I’d study his own stubble. Hair was an issue for everyone, it seemed.
Hair is still an issue for me. With menopause, I have hair where I don’t want it and no hair where I do. Just the other day, I spotted a curly black interloper on my neck, a flashback to my youth. And my once bushy dark eyebrows — my best feature according to my mother — could use a hair transplant.
When I turned 18, my mother offered to get me a nose job. Then a few years later, my mother told me not to worry, that my face had grown into my nose (or was it the other way around) and I would not be plain after all. Hallelujah, I wouldn’t embarrass the family.
While the hairs on my face could be controlled, the hair on my head was strong, thick and unruly. My mother was always pushing it behind my ears. It had a mind of its own, a bit like me. As soon as I could, I left home.
But just because I had geographically escaped my mother’s judgments, it didn’t quiet the voices in my head.
Once my mother got dementia, she changed. She started to tell me how pretty I looked. She stopped handing me lipstick or commenting on my hair. She told me she loved me. She ate with abandon and stopped caring about how she appeared. I kissed her on her soft forehead, forgiving her, loving her. I knew she only wanted the best for me but was too damaged herself to know how.
As I got dressed that night last year in Antwerp, I tried to remind myself that I didn’t need this baggage. I could hold what I loved about my mother — her energy, humor, aesthetic eye — and discard what I didn’t like, what didn’t serve me.
My body is aging. It is bumpy and wrinkly, no question. I look like a Shar-Pei, only that dog breed has wrinkles that are cute.
But that same body has delivered me three wonderful children. Those B+ legs have walked thousands of miles, hiked steep mountains and biked across Britain. I give them an A+. Those arms have carried my adorable pudgy grandchildren. And those lines around my thin lips? Well, I’ve laughed a lot in my 63 years.
Then something surprising happened — I thanked my body. I smiled and started to get dressed.
Can you relate to the above woman? Let us know in the comments below.
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