Unlearning My Immigrant Mother’s Ideas of Beauty

In an old photograph from my high school graduation, I’m wearing a sleek gold dress my mother chose and worked hard to pay for, hair in an elegant updo she proudly styled, shoulders up to my ears in discomfort. Everyone else in my childhood friend’s backyard is more casually dressed. Looking at the photo, I see a people-pleasing daughter of Polish immigrants, a dancer accustomed to costumes, a hippie kid succumbing to her mother’s pressures and judgments. I remember how uncomfortable it felt in my body to try so hard to be a good daughter. I want to remember, instead, who I am trying to become.

I was the first in my family to go to college, escaping 1,000-plus miles west, to Boulder, Colorado. Around the same time, my mother got her GED and cosmetology license after years of nannying and cleaning houses for wealthy people. She began working at a fancy hair salon in a suburb outside of Chicago, where appearance was a vital part of the job. I was happy for and proud of her. But in the years that followed, I would also feel the standards she had for me—to be and look put together—intensify.

I’ve inherited an idea from both sides of my family about the kind of woman I’m supposed to be. It’s an antiquated idea of womanness but one that persists—it has to do with pleasing others and obedience. Beauty, in this view, is both regimen and reward. In my teens, my gorgeous and conventionally fashionable mother took me to the mall when she could. It’s where she tried to gift me a kind of womanness she didn’t have access to growing up low-income in Poland, at a time when store shelves were often bare, where she was forced to drop out of high school to work when both her parents died. She wanted something different for me—glamour, beauty, comfort. Part of me enjoyed accumulating pretty things we’d found at a good sale. Another part felt stifled by hyperconsumerism, how she imposed her tastes, and the many rules she subscribed to about appearance.

Having been disciplined into heteronormative ideas of beauty, I have to constantly ask myself whose gaze I am looking through. I’m not interested in the male gaze. Beauty makes me think about attraction and what I am looking to attract. It reminds me that my ill-defined relationship to beauty is connected to my bisexuality, which risks being caricatured—we’re so often called confused. But sexuality and gender identity are ever evolving, shifting shape. And so is my relationship to beauty.

Beauty isn’t bound to goodness, morality, compassion, authenticity. This is perhaps what makes its industries so seductive and so profitable. In the poem “Hatred,” translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak, the poet Wisława Szymborska writes, “Let’s face it / it knows how to make beauty. / . . . Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.” Beauty isn’t free from the violences of human lives under war, under capitalism. It can be both sustenance and destruction. Sometimes the destruction is, at first, barely felt: a small, steady chipping away at one’s self-perception and autonomy.

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One morning shortly after college, I woke up to a voice mail from my mother. In it, she was hysterical, almost crying. She was angry about my new Facebook profile picture, which she said didn’t look like me. My face looked so long. Where did I get the dress I was wearing? Why did I shop at thrift stores, was I struggling with money? In the photo, taken by my childhood best friend on my third ever trip to Poland, I was midsentence, lips parted, eyes full of curiosity and excitement, my forehead up close to the camera, wearing a floral dress that I’d found thrifting in the city where my parents met. It was full of charm to me. I was stunned to hear how upset she was when I called her back. When I finally found it in me to put a stop to the conversation, I told her she was crossing a line. A few days later, though, I ended up changing the photo. My face did look long.

I bite my nails when I’m trying to self-soothe or untangle a knot of thought and feeling, like during that conversation with her, and while writing this essay. My parents have tried for years to get me to stop and grow my nails long. Don’t go out looking careless and disheveled like your American friends, they’d say when I was a teen. Years later, it occurred to me that they were communicating something else about appearance, class, and belonging—that immigrants and their children can’t afford to look unpresentable. That belonging has a costume and a price. I have to ask myself: To belong where, to who, and at what cost?

I have to ask myself: To belong where, to who, and at what cost? 

Even in relationships where I feel more comfortable being authentic, I catch myself searching for a rubric. A few years ago, one of my best friends asked me to give a speech at his wedding. I found myself at the under-construction mall during a climate strike, embarrassed, retweeting an infographic about forest fires and pyrocumulus clouds, taking a floor-length blue dress to the tailor. I was performing a woman my mother imagined, performing an elegance I thought the role of best-friend-gives-a-speech demanded.

It’s not that I was pretending to be someone else. It’s not even that I didn’t like the dress. It’s that I am so often oriented toward others, so filled with the noise of other people’s perception because I’ve splintered myself into so many parts, that I’m not even sure I know what it is that I would choose. On one hand, it’s just a dress. On the other, performing who we think we should be, or what we think others want us to be, is exhausting.

Like many immigrant daughters, I’m of a lineage of women who didn’t put themselves first. I don’t have the lived experience of unbridled authenticity and honesty in my personal life, nor do I have many models of it. Writing often feels antithetical to the charge as an immigrant daughter to be a secret keeper, to never bring shame to the family, to obey.

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In my early twenties, I performed in a dance-based project in homage to the work of photographer Francesca Woodman. Her haunting photographs, at once dark and playful, thrilled and provoked me. Most often, the subject is Francesca herself—many of the photos are nude self-portraits with an unapologetic emotional range. A woman as her own muse. I’d grown up being photographed by my father, often taking staged photos with my parents to send to family in Poland. I was well-versed in how to smile for a camera, less practiced in permitting myself a range of expression when observed.

The Woodman photograph I most often return to is called “Self-Deceit #1.” In it, Francesca is naked on all fours, curving her torso around a desolate granite corner, looking into a square mirror placed against the wall. She’s looking down, averting her own eyes in the mirror. Her work makes me reflect both on being seen and my own gaze. Where do I avert it and, in doing so, deceive myself? Where do I give myself the space to see and be seen on my own terms?

Performance and the page are where I practice enacting the autonomy I aspire toward. Where I attempt to reconstitute my self-perception. Raised in a strict working-class Catholic household, I never imagined being part of a performance like our dance-based Woodman homage. There I was, toward the end of the show, spotlit on a dim stage, distorting my face into grotesque shapes as fellow dancers papier-mâché’d my naked body in front of a live audience. They pasted strips of paper onto my bare stomach, chest, legs. I felt visited by Francesca’s ghost. She was giving me permission to invite in ugliness, complexity, and play. I didn’t obsess over what people would think or how I looked—I focused on how the movement felt. I felt alive. But offstage, I haven’t stopped seeking approval.

I didn’t obsess over what people would think or how I looked—I focused on how the movement felt.

Growing up, I let my name, the sound of which I’ve always loved in Polish, be mispronounced. For the sake of not inconveniencing anyone during the first eighteen years of my life, I let people call me Patricia. The brassy sound never felt right, but it was a way to assimilate, an attempt to secure belonging—further shielded by whiteness, which ensured my parents wouldn’t be assumed to be undocumented.

In college, in a new state, I began introducing myself with the correct pronunciation of my name (Pah-trits-yah). Among the various moments that brought on the shift, one stands out: Standing outside at a party, a new friend who also had a non-American name asked me how to really pronounce mine. She told me it was beautiful and practiced saying it. Reveling in the sound of my own name taught me about a kind of beauty I didn’t need to seek out, labor over, or buy.

But I confess, I still deceive myself, and I can’t get enough of beauty—scenic lookouts, hot women on Instagram, the muscle and curvature of petals. It’s seductive on the receiving end, exacting in its performance. To perform the kind of womanness I was disciplined into requires money and time, which at once attracts and eludes me. Am I actually interested in becoming more beautiful? What does that even mean?

Recently I had to get rid of a bouquet of gorgeous white lilies with carmin anthers that made me ill. I felt nauseous and dizzy every time I approached them, but couldn’t bring myself to throw them out. After photographing them excessively in my apartment’s late-afternoon glow, I finally dropped them off at a friend’s place, sick to my stomach.

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My mother and I wear the same size. When I fly to my childhood home twice a year, she insists that I don’t need to bring much because I can borrow her clothes. I alternate between feeling held and controlled by this. I am held by her care and by the comfort of the option to arrive with little. I bring my own clothes but inevitably go to her closet and try on a few of her carefully chosen, hard-earned items. When I wear them, she gives me compliments and an approving look. Sometimes she says, You can keep it.

In recent years, in sharing her pride in me for all my accomplishments and education more often as I’ve grown older, she’s expressed her own desire to have time to read and learn more. I tell her I want this for her. I’m reminded that her overbearing concerns about my appearance come in part from an impulse to protect me from the relentless judgment of a society still steeped in misogyny and heteronormativity. Appearance was her way of seeking and securing ease and worthiness in this country, where she hasn’t had the opportunities I’ve had, where she arrived not knowing the language, where my parents were undocumented for twenty-two years.

One Christmas visiting a few years ago, my mama, while doing her nails on one of her too-few days off, added, to her usual chiding about how I need to slow down and take better care of myself, that tending to appearances is also about nurturing a connection to oneself. She was often worried about how busy I kept, how exhausted I seemed, and whether I took any time for me. She wasn’t wrong—I was struggling through chronic health issues that I was trying to ignore. In my attempts to reject materialism and vanity, to reckon with the limits of self-care in a world full of urgent disparities, to center my students, to contribute to struggles for prison justice and abolition, I was also rejecting slowing down enough to experience inhabiting my own body and take care of my health.

These days, I’m practicing slowing down. Sometimes the body forces us to. I’m in the process of trying to ease up on the good-daughter performance, among other self-denials, and give myself permission to be more unapologetically myself. Slowing down lately looks like dancing in my kitchen, or getting outside near water or trees, or reading a poem aloud in a bath of salts and petals. I’m practicing surrendering to the sensory and to my appetite for more beauty in my life. Beauty, for me, increasingly has to do with a quality of attention.

I was once bewildered and disturbed by the cost and time-consuming nature of the rituals that might make one more beautiful. I’m still bewildered, still skeptical of any insistence on self-care that doesn’t account for community care, still reckoning with the performances demanded of me. But aging has made me more aware of my body’s longings—for rest, for ease. Time has made me more understanding of my mother. Amid ongoing questions about beauty and belonging, in the necessary distances that give me the freedom to find out what it means to be more fully myself, I find myself feeling closer to her. I’m working on feeling closer to myself too.

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