by Trish Cantillon

I watched nervously as the nurse flicked the veins on my mom’s arm, trying desperately to get an IV in. “What am I going to do with you, Miss Joaun? These veins keep collapsing!” the nurse said. My mom was recuperating in a rehab facility from a fractured pelvis and newly diagnosed hypertension which came with a salt-restricted diet which she refused to eat. She’d been there for a couple weeks but was not getting any better. On this particular night, the nurse told us that if they couldn’t get the IV in, to at least remedy the dehydration, she would have to go to the hospital and probably require a feeding tube. With the possibility of an ambulance ride and transfer to the hospital looming, while the nurse continued, my mom began fixing her makeup.

“Miss Joaun, you are a smart lady, you know you need to be eating. You are too thin,” the nurse was trying the other arm for suitable veins. My mom looked over at me while she rubbed some blush on her cheeks (if she was going to the hospital, she wasn’t going without her face on). Her beautiful blue eyes were wide, not with fear, but surprise, then she spoke to the nurse.

“I just can’t believe that I lived so much of my life with people teasing me for being round. My own mother joked that I looked like the only kid she fed in our family. Now I’m being told I’m too thin. I just don’t believe it.” She checked her make-up in the mirror on her table, then smiled at me and shrugged. In the middle of a legitimate medical crisis, at seventy-seven years old she was flattered. I patted her hand and smiled back.

My mom was an exceptionally beautiful woman. Through no fault of her own, the lens with which she viewed the world, and it her, was focused completely on her looks. She had a brief career as a model in the late 1940s before getting married and having five kids. Being objectified never seemed to be an issue for her because her looks were the currency she used to navigate the world. And since it was the fifties, the era of I Love Lucy and Ozzie and Harriet, objectifying women was normal; even expected, and that suited her just fine.

When she was introduced to John Kennedy at his Inaugural Ball he responded by telling her, “You must be the prettiest democrat in California.” A salesman at Robinson’s Department store would go out of his way to stop her if she passed by his counter to tell her how pretty she was. It got to be where we’d have to walk the long way around to the escalator just to avoid him. At a red light in Beverly Hills one afternoon, the comedian Milton Berle pulled up next to our car. My mom was putting on lipstick in the rearview mirror. He winked at her saying, “You don’t need it,” before pulling away.

And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of people who would comment, almost every day, on her beautiful blue eyes. Her children and handsome husband were either an extension of her good looks, or a too-real reminder of time marching forward. She never embraced the social conventions of wife and motherhood; never a good cook, never a room mom. But she did impart a love for a luncheon fashion show at Bullock’s Wilshire Tea Room, the joys of room service in a nice hotel or clean sheets on a perfectly made bed. And on the days she had to drive carpool she treated us to Baskin-Robbins ice cream.

With all the attention paid to her for her looks, all the positive reinforcement on “the outsides,” what was she supposed to do when she started to age? When a woman being treated as an object was no longer acceptable? No one had prepared her for the shift in dynamics, and although I think she did the best she could, she struggled with it for her entire life. Caught between wanting to be seen as a smart, independent woman and needing to be recognized as a beautiful woman who required tender, first-class care.

Her embrace of women’s lib in the early 1970s was to form a group of her lady friends which she named, “Brains, Beauty, Talent.” They would gather in the living room of our Beverly Hills home twice a month to sip cocktails, eat hors d’oeuvres and brainstorm ideas. The genesis was honorable—she knew that they were smart, talented and beautiful and believed that if they put their heads together they could do something. I don’t think the something was ever clear, and the group fizzled out after a while.

When my parents separated, she re-entered the post-sexual-revolution dating scene as a very modest, discreet woman. She was used to being adored for her looks and longed to be taken care of. She wanted to get remarried. Her single life started off with a bang, lots of dates and then steady boyfriend who himself was old-fashioned. Because of his religion, he did not want to officially divorce his wife. After that there were several one-off dates and as time crept forward two things were clear: men her age were mostly interested in dating younger women, or they were looking for a woman less sexually inhibited than my mom. Not to mention that all her life her looks allowed her the privilege of being picky. It must have been confusing to hear people say, “How is it that you’re still single?” And then never be asked on a second date.

In high school she asked me, “Do you think I’ll ever have a boyfriend? Get remarried?” (I’d asked her a version of the same question hundreds of times, “Will I ever be thin?”) She’d just been on a date where she’d walked to what she thought was her date’s car (a Mercedes) when he had to tell her he had a Pontiac. I knew she wanted me to boost her spirits and make her feel better and that was okay, but I did see an opportunity to gently make a suggestion.

“Of course!” I said, “You just may need to be a little more open.” But, it seemed, shaking those old ideas proved too difficult. She never had another serious relationship.

I didn’t find out until late in her life that she never finished college. It gave me a new perspective on why she was so insistent that I get my degree, even when it took me a couple false starts to get a Bachelor’s. I finished unceremoniously, in a winter quarter, after nine years. My mom threw me a party and made sure I had a graduation cap to wear for pictures.

In the final years of her life, it was interesting to observe which ideas she was still steeped in and which ones she had let go. A mother of five children she had never been “awake” during childbirth. She laughed, telling the story of when my oldest brother was born. As she was coming to after the sedative had worn off, the nurse informed her she’d had a boy and my mom’s first response was, “Is he cute?” But when I was in labor with my son, she stayed in the room and watched his birth. The twelfth grandchild and the first birth she’d ever witnessed.

Her whole life she demurred when the talk of age came up. When I was very young she told me she was twenty-three, even though my two oldest siblings were in their late teens. She’d also lie about her kids’ ages which made doing the math on her age more difficult. But visits to the ER in her seventies blew the lid on all that. We could finally ditch the fairytale that we didn’t know how old she was. She wasn’t happy about it, but she made peace with it.

As age and illness progressed, however, and her life got smaller, she never gave up the ritual of putting her face on and doing her hair. It was an activity that had defined her; without her face on, she wasn’t Joaun. It was where she drew her identity and worth. No longer in the large master bathroom of her Beverly Hills home with the lighted vanity mirror, but sitting at a desk in her room at the Catholic assisted living home, a dime store magnifying mirror perched on the desk, and oxygen strapped to her nose, she’d spend the first two or three hours of every day getting ready.

On the day before she died, a hospice nurse came to interview her. The first thing she said was, “Well, aren’t you a pretty lady!” It was remarkable and unremarkable. I could only see her as the unwell version of my mom; frail and thin with ridiculous makeup on for no reason. But being viewed as pretty was her thing—it was who she was and who she projected out to the world, even hours before she passed away. I find comfort in that because I know it made her happy and gave her a sense of peace. But I hope that she was also able to see the other meaningful ways in which she lived a beautiful life; as someone who could listen without judgment, as a faithful person and as a mother who engendered a love of family to her children.

My mom would sometimes say to me, almost wistfully, “You don’t know how pretty you are.” Though she was self-assured in her beauty, she never fully grasped that she was more than her pretty face.

Trish Cantillon is a married mother of two who has published on The Fix, Refinery 29’s “Take Back the Beach,” Storgy, Brain Child Magazine Blog, and in Gold Man Review and Berkeley Fiction Review. She works for Dream Foundation, the first and only national organization serving terminally ill adults, and their families by providing end of life dreams.