My Mother’s Warfare Against Aesthetics

Picking out the outfit to bury my mother in was hardest for two reasons: One, she owned a lot of clothing. Two, she had very picky taste.

Of course, the task was difficult for all of the reasons one might imagine — a welling of grief and anguish, the palpable emptiness in the wake of loss.

But standing in my mother’s closet a mere two days after her passing, I hadn’t processed much of anything. I was still half-expecting to hear the distinct clack of her high-heeled boots coming around the corner.

Sifting through the hangers of olive-colored skirts and beaded tank tops, all I could really think was: would she want a jean or leather jacket?

Like many mother-daughter relationships, ours often revolved around clothing and makeup. My mother had always been interested in fashion and aesthetics. I found a picture of her when she was about my age in the 1980s, clad in a bold neon top, flare jeans, and dangling earrings.

From a young age, I remember us bonding through trips to the mall, trying on accessories in her bathroom, and strutting through the house for first-day-of-school fashion shows.

But our connection went far beyond bracelets and brooches. As I grew up, we shared our career aspirations, political opinions, and our deepest fears and anxieties.

My mother was a fierce, stubborn, hard-working woman. She was also a woman who cared about her appearance and deeply internalized the aesthetic pressures on women.

A materialistic woman is not seen as a “desirable” woman by society. Yet, the worldwide beauty industry is an almost $600 billion production based on selling women the belief that they are not enough. From the time that we are girls, billboards, commercials, and Facebook advertisements hardwire us to believe that certain material items are key not only to our happiness but also to our success.

In high school, I began to notice how much my mother tied her sense of self to how she looked. I judged her. I resented her. But I also related to her. Hasn’t every restless woman once asked herself: would I be happier if I were prettier? Skinnier? More youthful?

Hasn’t every restless woman once asked herself: would I be happier if I were prettier? Skinnier? More youthful?

As long as women are objectified, their physical appearance will function as a core value and the absence of their beauty will be perceived as something to fix.

I could judge my mother all I wanted, but the pressure to look a certain way is even greater for aging women. As Susan Sontag puts it in her essay, The Double Standard of Aging, “For women, only one standard of beauty is sanctioned: the girl.”

If aesthetic pressures are intensified for aging women, they become even more complex for sick women. When my mother’s chronic cancer turned terminal at age 59, the way that she related to aesthetics took on a new layer of significance.

 If aesthetic pressures are intensified for aging women, they become even more complex for sick women.

When you are sick, you are stripped of yourself. I saw this firsthand as my mother lost her appetite, her hair, and then her desire to get up in the morning. A woman, who once took so much pride and joy in getting ready and being out in the world, felt too ashamed and ostracized even to leave her own bedroom.

In her 1980 book, The Cancer Journals, the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde begs readers to confront the intersection between feminism and illness. Sickness robs women of their selfhood in a particularly insidious way. If women are taught to internalize their worth through their physical self, Lorde argues, then sickness is the ultimate threat to their personhood.

When my mother first got sick, I couldn’t understand why her aesthetic deterioration seemed to be the most agonizing part of all of it for her. I wished so badly that she would be a woman who would boldly buzz off all of her hair and fight societal standards as she fought the disease.

But when you are a sick woman, you are up against even more societal stigma than before. People kept telling my mother to fight — “keep fighting,” “you’re so strong” — as if her strength was dependent on enduring a never-ending pain.

Our medical system reinforces this pressure to no end. Not only are toxic treatments pushed at all costs, but in the hospital, your particular body becomes the body — converted into a test tube.

My mother decided to stop treatments when it was clear that they would only prolong a painful quality of life. She could no longer be the devoted mother, loyal friend, or fierce workhorse that made up her identity.

Instead, she put all of her energy into getting a wig. In her final days, she put on lipstick in the hospital mirror. She didn’t want to be pumped with more poison, she wanted us to paint her fingernails.

The idea of beauty as a site of resistance rather than capitulation circles back to Lorde and her fight with breast cancer. In 1988, she wrote, “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

I came to see my mother’s desire to maintain her aesthetic as her form of warfare in a battle that had suddenly and brutally stripped her of her identity, motherhood, and womanhood at a young age.

My mother literally wore a wig on the day she died. Silly as we thought it was at the time, I now see this as my mother reclaiming herself in a world that had taken so much from her.

Sometimes I look at that wig — sitting in her closet — and its long, beautiful, blonde locks. They were not her own. But they gave an important piece of herself back to her when nothing else quite could.

Rebecca Katz just received her master’s in Journalism from USC Annenberg. She works in audio journalism and is in the works of starting her own podcast. twitter:@rebeccaerinkatz.