On Being Beautiful

photo by the lovely and talented jen gibson, at London Bridge Creative

I'm not beautiful. I mean, I'm not ugly. My looks do nicely enough. But I'm not drop-your-jaw and turn-your-head, look me up and down, holy wow, how-is-that-creature-walking-this-earth?, sort of pretty. I'm okay with that. I don't think I'd like being that kind of beautiful. It appears to be sort of a hassle.

Lately though, I feel like I'm getting a taste of what it might feel like to be that beautiful, though the attention I garner is in its most innocent form:

I have a beautiful baby. She turns heads.

Or maybe it's just that I have a baby, a little baby. And though she absolutely is beautiful, there's something about her being a baby--any baby at all--that softens the world, makes it turn and coo and exclaim and comment.

I walk into a store, and an older woman holds the door open for me, exuding sympathy for my awkward maneuvering, as if she's momentarily projecting herself back into new motherhood by looking at me. She looks down at Henrietta as we pass and I say thank you.

"How old is she?" she asks.

"Four months," I say.

"Oh, she's beautiful," she says.

Some version of this happens every time I go anywhere with her. It happens in the aisles of the grocery store. It happens in restaurants. It happens on sidewalks. It happens in parking lots. When I take walks with her in the afternoon, people come out of their houses to see her, to say hello, to announce oh, how pretty, what a dear little baby, congratulations. And though they often mistake her for a "he" (Is it her melon-bald head that implies a male baby?), it pleases me endlessly to be the object of this sort of attention. I don't tire of it. The world is good to you when you're pushing a pram. It loves you. It calls you beautiful, even if you're not much to look at all on your own.