(im)perfection

I may have mentioned this earlier somewhere, but I have a big shnozz. It’s large. It sticks pretty far out from my face, has a bump in it and ends in a bulbous, well, bulb. When I look down my nose at you, I have a long way to go.

It is my father’s nose, I think. My mother had rhinoplasty years ago, so I’m not real sure.

Believe me, for real, when I say this, but it no longer bugs me. Ok, once in a while I get self-concious, like when I am meeting someone for the first time or I end up in profile in a picture that other people will have access to. But I think (hope) that it is something that people notice the first time, and then it becomes normal and is never thought of again. Like, it really never dawns on me that one of my friends has h-u-g-e gazoongas, even though the first time I met her, I thought, whoa, that girl has huge gazoongas. Or that another one of my friends has kinda bad teeth, or that another one is freakishly tall. It really just took me a few minutes to think of those examples, because all of these friends are so darn beautiful, and I love them.

We all have our physical imperfections, but I won’t go into the reasons why I think that we think of them that way. I’ll just tell you why I thought that, even though all of my ‘imperfect’ friends were beautiful to me, I was not.

I knew my nose was big in grade 5. how did I know? Why, because an older boy on the schoolbus told me, of course. That whole year he and his younger brother called me only by their special pet name for me – gonzo. It spread. Soon, all the other boys on the schoolbus were calling me gonzo.

Grade 5 was a bad year for me, for several reasons. I was 10, and another little ‘gift from god’ had just been added to our family (the second new addition in two years), necessitating a move out of the only house I had ever lived in. I had to change schools. Again. It was to be the 3rd school I’d go to in 5 years, thanks to being classified as gifted. I had to be bussed to the new school, via a school I didn’t even go to, so those boys were not even classmates. My teacher was mean, mean, mean, I was doing really bad in French and my little brother (earlier new addition) started to act out, causing family tension. Oh, and I found out that I had a big nose.

To make matters worse, after enduring the entire year of busrides, I ended up changing to their school the following year, (4th in 6 years if anybody is keeping score), where the taunting continued.

Now, just to clarify: I wasn’t a friendless loser wandering the playground with noone to talk to but gonzo. I had lots of friends. That year I even had two ‘boyfriends’ (we were ‘going around’ – that meant holding hands and dumping them when the wind changed direction, just because I could). But it didn’t matter. The seed had been planted, and I entered those dreaded early teen years painfully unsure of myself and drenched in low self-esteem. The reason, of course, was as plain as the nose on my face.

It didn’t help that it was no secret that pretty much every woman in my family over the age of 20 had had a nose job. It was as normal a thing as getting your driver’s license. It also didn’t help that, when I confided in my mother, the solution she offered was to get it ‘fixed’ when the time came; or that, for my 16th birthday, my aunt offered to pay for it. I guess the time had come. I cried a lot, and as my big nose turned into a big red nose, I just felt worse.

I would see other girls on the street or on the bus and wish that I could trade noses with them. I wonder now what they might have wanted to trade away, and if it was for anything of mine.

But by 16, thanks mostly to my very cool, very influencial older sis, I was already on my way to becoming a feminist of sorts, and for my birthday, I wanted a new phone, not a new nose.

Me and my sis talked a lot of smack about the women in our family (and in our highschool) that had changed their faces; about how they were denying their beauty, their strength and their roots (thank you, god, for matzo ball soup, yiddish swear words and prominent proboscises). We wanted to be ‘real’ women. We didn’t want to be victims of culture and society. We wanted to be positive role models to our daughters.

I soldiered on through high school, university and travel, doing all the things that ‘pretty’ girls do, like bedding hot men, making lots of friends and smiling for the camera. I just learned how to turn my face, ever so slightly, so that my nose would not cast a shadow, making it seem even larger than it already was.

I never got a nose job. I married my seriously good looking aryan prince with height, freckles and a perfect nose. And now we have a daughter. And I want to be an amazing role model for her, and look, won’t I be able to show her that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes, and that her mother is strong, funny and loving, even if she does look as though she just escaped from gepetto’s puppet shop? But, lord help me, I also want her to have her father’s nose, and have mercy, I have already spent some time comparing photos of myself and bumblebee at age newborn, 2 months, 4 months , 6 months, 1 year, looking for any signs of resemblence in the mid-facial area. So far, she is her father’s child. And I am relieved.

But what if that changes? C’mon, you know this has nothing to do with some warped, out-moded sense of what is and what isn’t beautiful. This is about a mother wanting to protect her child from hurt that she has experienced, from pain that has just as much chance of breaking her spirit as it does building her character.

I won’t be able to shield her from everything; of course I realize that. But I will do whatever I can to ensure that she feels as beautiful as she is, and that the size of her self worth is not wrapped up in the size of her nose, or her waist or her breasts or her bank account. And if I ever see anybody trying to make her feel that way, I will be there to listen and talk and lay a smackdown on anyone I have to. Lord nose.