Tribute to a different kind of beauty

I’ve decided to participate in today’s “Beauty of a Woman” BlogFest organized by Amber McLaughlin.

At first, I had planned to repost a blog entry from last year, “Fiction, like beauty, is more than skin deep.” The post discussed physical beauty only briefly, as a touchstone for a deeper discussion of writing as vocation and avocation.

However, when I reread the first sentence, “I don’t wear makeup,” I was struck by how tenaciously the influences of our upbringings cling to us (or we to them).

My mother never wore makeup. I think this had to do with her fierce (and I do mean fierce) independence and a furious desire to prove that her value to the world lay in her intellect, not her face or body. As an adolescent, I rebelled against my parents in all sorts of ways. I flirted (pun intended) with my physical body and with the idea that the the cerebral and the corporeal might co-exist. Interestingly, I never took to wearing makeup, even at my most rebellious (though I did once own a leather skirt).

I’m not sure my mother ever felt completely at ease with being female, mostly because of the time and the culture she was rebelling against. But, as is so often the case, her discomfort led her to bring her gifts to the world: her patented research at Bell Laboratories in the early 1960s and her second career as a physics professor and administrator at Simon’s Rock College.

Despite the fact that I have spent large portions of my life trying to differentiate myself from her, I am more like her than I usually feel comfortable admitting. And she was, I am happy to say, beautiful.

20 thoughts on “Tribute to a different kind of beauty

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  1. Oh Audrey, what an amazing woman your mother was. You did a wonderful job in giving us a glimpse of her and the beauty of her intellectual mind. She had a lot of things going for her. And I suspect so do you! Thank you Audrey for sharing your story with us. 🙂

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  2. Beautiful post about your mother. She didn’t let the worlds expectations of what she should be keep her from being herself. There is much beauty in that!

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  3. How lucky you were to have a Mom who was not afraid to be herself. What a wonderful tribute to her. I love how simply you wrote this, and the wonderful photograph you included.

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  4. Nice post- I am a scientist type, too, and have struggled with the notion that beauty and brains don’t really coexist- at least it didn’t seem so in the halls of the Chemistry building where I was getting my master’s degree!

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  5. You’re mom was a trailblazer. I can understand her non-desire to comform to the expectations of gender. Especially considering her career. She sounds like a truly beautiful woman. 🙂

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