How I’m Passing the Torch of Good Looks to My Daughter With No Regrets

I used to turn heads. Now it’s my daughter’s turn.

I walked out of the St. Peter Catholic school bathroom at 11 years old, admiring the two perfect bumps protruding from the thin white uniform shirt I’d never needed to wear anything underneath. I smiled as I walked back to class. No one would ever know, I thought, that I’d borrowed Sister Louis Ann’s masking tape and made myself a couple of boobs.

They were perfect, I thought. They stuck to my skin in the right spots and were the color of my skin, more or less. I remember getting a lot of looks that day, and I attributed it all to my new boobs. A lot of other girls in my class were starting to bud, and I had figured out a way to keep up.

I was an athlete. Faster than any girl in my class. But the boys didn’t seem impressed by that anymore, not since Heather Santos started wearing a bra.

I swore off the tape after the right ball fell out while racing Peter Miles home that day. He didn’t see it fall, but he did notice the inconsistency. So even though I beat him running that day, he still won.

“Nice mosquito bite,” he’d said. “Too bad it didn’t bite you twice maybe I wouldn’t mistake you for a wall.”

I’d just heard a zinger from my cousin over the weekend, so I was armed.

“Oh yea?” I yelled as he darted past my apartment down the street. “Your dick’s so small it could hang glide on a Dorito.”

I had a horrible crush on Peter for years. He was tall, athletic, popular. But when we got old enough to do anything about it, he got a girlfriend from the uber rich school up the hill. Stephanie Graham was beautiful, tall, big-breasted, and worst of all, really nice. I never got a taste of Peter but ran into him when we were about 25 and I had to take his word that the fat, balding, fifty-something looking man was him. I couldn’t help but think the Doritos zinger was more apt than I’d realized.

I peaked late. If Peter hadn’t noticed my lone mosquito bite that day, I may have used those masking tape balls for many years to come. Thank God Peter noticed. It wasn’t just my chest that budded late. I was small and thin and had hair so bright blonde my friends made me use all my food money on a hat at Disneyland to “turn down” my hair. Granted, we had taken shrooms before enjoying the park that day, but no one else’s hair forced them to squint. I was about 18 at that point and still annoyed that I looked so young.

It wasn’t until I hit about 25 that I began to notice that I was getting the really good-looking guys’ attention. I was getting into clubs free and skipping the lines. I could see the way people looked at me, men and women, was different than it had ever been. It was the beginning of what I called my sexual revolution.

I had affairs with beautiful men at work, took the most delicious tourists home to taste the world from my bedroom, perfected sweet talking boys insecure by my newfound confidence.

I was peaking for sure. And all those girls who’d hit their summit in high school had wasted it on the insecurities of adolescence.

My oldest daughter is 14 now. People joke that I am like that worm that can reproduce with itself. My daughter Indie is my identical twin. She’s a lot like me in many ways, poor girl. So I already know I’m wasting my breath trying to convince her she’ll be grateful someday when she’s hitting her peak later in her life. She’s like a flower waiting to open. And the later it opens the better.

She’s not convinced. Her body turned woman way earlier than mine did. It’s the Mediterranean genes, her Egyptian pediatrician told me. Indie’s father is from Spain. (I’d say he’s Spanish but you’d be surprised how many people assume that means he’s Mexican.) Which is what makes it so crazy she got my electric blonde hair and blue eyes.

Indie wants to be riding the summit right now. Of course she does. She’s in that nightmare phase of life when you sit back helplessly watching Peter Miles and Stephanie Graham’s first kiss shatter the life you had planned. When you’re sure the entire world exists only to judge you, and if you were just as beautiful as Stephanie, you’d have the chance to show Peter how amazing you are.

I know.

But the dichotomy of being depressed because no one realizes how great you are while being overwhelmed by your imperfections is the psychosis of adolescence.

I want to help her get through it all by focusing on the things I know matter in life. Beauty doesn’t make people happy. Hell, it doesn’t even make them not insecure. I want her to be a strong and kind person who doesn’t need the validation of others to be happy.

Unfortunately, I’m not as skilled as I imagined I’d be before becoming a mother. I reluctantly assure her she’s beautiful, and will become even more beautiful. I tell her stories of what it was like being a hot, blonde American living in Spain. Watching heads turn as I walked down the street was like living in a movie.

I suffered back then worrying about how hard it would be when people didn’t look at me anymore. When I was too old to be worth the effort of shifting their gaze. I dreaded the number 35. For some reason, I decided 35 was my expiration date.

I remember watching Tosh.0 one night with my husband when comedian Daniel Tosh did a bit about how he would never fuck a woman over 40. I was 32 at the time. My husband laughed a little too hard. I flushed and stayed quiet. I could read the laugh with no translation. I would stop being attractive soon. And he wouldn’t. Although I was relieved I still had some time. Phew. Thank God I wasn’t 40 yet or Daniel Tosh wouldn’t fuck me.

The most surprising gift came with the years spent bracing for my descent off the summit. I didn’t fucking care anymore.

What good does the admiration of others do me? Sure, it was fun to get those looks, and you’d get a little surge of dopamine similar to what the psychologists say we get when someone likes a post we shared on social media. But a look (nor a like) never really did anything for me. It didn’t pay my bills. Fix my relationships. Or even make me happy beyond a few moments of indulgence. I knew it was dangerous to base too much of my happiness on the opinions of strangers.

When I go roller skating at the beach now with my daughter, heads are still turning. But they are not looking at me. She notices them too, although she plays the game well. Little stinker. The little boys on their scooters gaping in awe unconcerned with being noticed. The young guys with their girlfriends, stealing a glance as their girlfriends stiffen and pretend not to notice. And the old men gaping like the little boys, their wrinkled wives smiling along, well past the viral self-doubt endemic in youth.

The looks mean something to her now, and I’m more than happy to pass the torch.

There’s a freedom in not being noticed, and liberation in not caring.

My daughter is still scaling the cliffs of Beauty Peak. Someday she’ll reach the summit and indulge in the gratification of admiration that, as much as we don’t want to admit it these days, gets you the things you want.

But only to a certain point. Her allure may slay the hottest guy in Europe and make beautiful children with him. But he may turn out to be a miserable douche, and she’s stuck with him because of their kids.

Okay, that’s my story, but it still illustrates the point that beauty doesn’t improve your chances of making good choices.

Because once the fog of veneration starts to clear, you realize that you’ve been celebrating on a ledge, and you’ve got a hell of a lot more climbing to do before you reach the true summit. Seems like a lot of women in the spotlight cling to that ledge, even after most of it has crumbled under their feet. Poor Madonna is a perfect example.

Luckily for us normal people, beauty fades in harmony with our realization that we still have a lot more climbing to do. Carl Jung was adamant that the second half of life is time given to us for what he called individuation, or the process of discovering our true calling — finding our authentic self. It’s more of a spiritual climb, rather than the purely material quest we’d been living in the first half of life.

“Of all those who ever consulted me who were in the second half of life, no one was ever cured who did not achieve a spiritual outlook on life.” — Carl Jung

While I’m so tempted to share all the wisdom I’ve gained on my climb with my daughter, I have to realize that it will do little good. Each one of us has to make that free solo ourselves, has to heal our cuts and bruises and falls, and experience some time on that ledge before the route of the second ascent becomes sendable.

Trying to make her understand that her beauty doesn’t define her and that you can be happy once it fades would be like making fake boobs out of masking tape balls and sticking them to my chest. I might think I’d cheated the game for a little while, but they wouldn’t stick.

I’ve passed the torch of beauty to my daughter. I can’t be bothered with its weight anymore. She still has many years to bask in its fiery glow.

I won’t spoil it for her by revealing that the torch is just a tool to make her strong enough for that second climb.