Everyone Is Beautiful is about a mom with three boys under four who decides to get her groove back.In the process, she learns an important thing: A good groove is hard to find. Especially for moms.It’s so easy to judge your parents, when you’re young: all the things they didn’t do for you, all the ways they let you down. It’s so easy to feel indignant and insist that you would have done a better job.
And then you become a parent yourself. And somewhere in those early years with kids—maybe on the day your toddler flushes your new silk scarf down the toilet—you come to understand something important: That your parents were just doing the best they could. And that as the years of your childhood were ticking past, your parents’ years were ticking, too.
By the time I was ten, my mother was forty. She didn’t press pause on her life to raise me and my sisters. Those years were happening all at the same time. My childhood was her thirties. She was raising us, but she was also, from time to time, doing a thing or two for herself. Now that I myself am a mom in my thirties, that strikes me as perfectly fair.
But it’s tricky for women to think about their own interests while raising little kids. It feels selfish. In the abstract, giving everything you have to the project of childrearing makes a lot of sense. But in particular, those minutes are your minutes, too.
It shouldn’t be that hard to do both: your kids’ minutes and your own. The two are connected, after all. Your children aren’t you, but they come from you, and you’re just as invested in their well-being as in your own. If not more so. But doing both—as always—is harder than it sounds. “A few years” is a long time. Right? We don’t have all that many years on this planet. And they skip by faster and faster.
And your own interests are looking for you. They find you in dreams. In the carpool line. In the bookstore. In moments of frustration. They don’t leave you alone.You can ignore them for a long time, if you want to. In some ways, that’s easier. Figuring out how to take good enough care of everybody—including yourself—is a recipe for frustration.
But some nights, no matter what you’ve decided to do, you’ll find yourself awake at three in the morning, Googling pottery wheels on Craigslist, or writing a poem, or reading old letters. The next morning, your eyes will be puffy and you’ll wake up with a sense of panic about how you can make it through the day on so little sleep. And you might lose your car keys. Or forget to put your daughter’s snack in her backpack. Or forget your son’s costume for the school carnival.
You might hear yourself cursing those stolen hours from the night before. But you’ll hear something else, too: the memory of who you used to be lifting itself up, singing its own song out of a crackly jukebox across a crowded room.You can barely hear the song. But it’s there. And what’s more: You still know every word.