Welcome!
to the eighth edition of Tiny True Stories! If you’re new here, hello, and thank you! I’m so happy to see you. I met a lot of you after my Electric Lit essay “My Mom Rage Is a Response to the Avalanche of Worry That Comes With Parenting” (which, before publishing, I called “Mom Rage and the Multiverse”). Publishing that was wild; I loved talking rage and anxiety with friends and new friends and strangers. It’s long and could have been longer. This newsletter is maybe the opposite, though of course they were built from the same sparks.
If you’re new, this is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 10 minutes or less (sometimes my own, and new this year, sometimes other short pieces I love!) I also share recommendations for other things I loved this month—food, books, poems, memes, anything. Tiny does not just mean short—I often write about the forgotten, small details of our lives, where most of us spend most of our time.
For Valentine’s Day I wrote a Valentine for beauty that’s gone. As I’ve gotten older, I care less about Valentine’s Day (though of course I’m a human being and love flowers and all that gooey shit). Most of the time my husband and I would rather just go out together, and not on Valentine’s Day—on a different day, when it’s not so busy. Maybe that doesn’t feel romantic to you, but it’s become romantic to me. Ease, comfort, security, are romance.
So that’s what I wrote about this month: how the only certainty about beauty is that it changes.
When you’re done, I have an ask for you at the end of today’s newsletter—I need input! Keep reading, and I’d love to hear what you think.
Today’s Tiny True Story
Anything Like Hearts
Every morning when I drop her off at school, my daughter asks me to draw a heart on the backs of both her hands. “So we know we love each other,” she says. She then draws her versions on the backs of my hands. They never look anything like hearts, just squiggles. Still, she squints while she draws, takes it very seriously. Sometimes when she’s done, she forgets they were supposed to be hearts and tells me the squiggles are horses, or trees. Sometimes she kisses my hands when she’s done, lifting ink onto her lips. I smudge it off with my thumb before she goes in, and she laughs. When I wash my own hands later, I do it badly on purpose to try to save her designs as long as I can.
A new friend at a bar recently asked how old I was. Old enough to forget, it takes me a minute before I say 36, 37 soon. She told me I looked younger, much younger, because of my “skin and general demeanor.” Lately, I’ve had a hard time with my body, my appearance, more than I ever have, except maybe as a young teenager. I know a later self will look back and say of course you were beautiful. I’ve already done that for my teenage self, my young adult self. And yet I cannot do it for this one, have never been able to learn this lesson. Whenever my daughter plays with my makeup, I tell her it’s fun, it’s decoration. I’m careful not to tell her what I think: that it will make me look better, more beautiful, less ugly. And yet—one day she is brushing on some of my sparkly highlighter and she says, “This will make me beautiful!” I tell her she is already beautiful. She pretends she is a puppy, already moving on. I look at myself in the toothpaste-splattered mirror. I still want to put on concealer.
It’s embarrassing to write this down with the intention of sharing it. Like, hey, everyone, a stranger thought I was younger, which I took to mean beautiful, though she did not say that. A stranger without the context of years of knowing and loving me, like my husband, or the benefit of not many years at all, barely any room for comparison, like my daughter. In the moment I was genuinely baffled—the bar must be too dark, the low light time-traveling my now copious gray hairs, the lines next to my eyes, the dark circles long since having fought off the concealer. She was kind, of course, it was nice. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I liked hearing it. But it startled me, how little I really thought about my own beauty anymore. I don’t love how I look, but more often than not I’m indifferent. I do not long for a past beautiful self; I’m content where I am. This thought surprised me more than the fact that someone thought I was younger. Sure, I put on concealer, mascara, sometimes do my hair, but it is to get to a baseline of functional, to look in the mirror at a person I recognize, and leave the house. When did this change? Maybe with my daughter’s birth, maybe parenting a toddler and trying to work, maybe just getting closer to 40, not looking at myself much anymore. How quickly one kind of beauty fades, like the color of leaves in the fall—at once bright, then fallen, subsumed by the beauty of snow, so quickly you cannot pinpoint the day it happens. We only know it by its inevitability. One beauty will always fade, will always be replaced by another. I’d just started to look for beauty elsewhere.
The other day I dropped my daughter off at school, and on the drive home I glanced down at my hands on the steering wheel. No heart-scribble. We hadn’t done it that day, or the day before. Some unknown day had been our last, and I hadn’t known it. She stopped needing it. My own heart breaks, a little. Before, we had the beauty and pain of saying goodbye. But she did not need that kind of beauty anymore, so she set it down to be replaced by another, like the inevitability of spring. Now, a new beauty: one of ease and confidence. Like all beauty, it’s inevitable, temporary, changing. Heart, horse, tree, nothing.
For both of us, I celebrate the beauty of getting older, of leaving behind what we once needed and now do not any longer. I am tempted, but do not mention the hearts to her again.
Letters of Recommendation
This piece, “Yellow Boat,” by the genius Debra Gwartney in the excellent Short Reads newsletter. It’s a flash essay about the death of her husband, and about letting him go. Exquisite. Let it destroy you; very on brand for Valentine’s Day.
This hilarious McSweeney’s essay about attempting to “work” with a child on your lap. For some reason it gave me the same response as videos of people ALMOST eating it on ice: cackling. Please enjoy, as a treat.
Calvin Klein, for hiring Jeremy Allen White. iykyk—I don’t need to link to it.
FINAL ASK: If you like Tiny True Stories (I have the honor of being your obedient servant!!), I’d like your opinion. I am considering adding a paid option. A paid subscription would get you more exclusive essays a year, chances to workshop with me, and would support my work! Nothing would change for free subscribers—paid subscribers would just get more. If this seems at all interesting, please either leave a comment or pledge your support by clicking the button below, so I can gauge interest. I love you, thank you!