Christina as Little Mermaid, age 7 -- born beautiful. Photos c 2011 Barbara Newhall

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

My daughter is beautiful. She was born beautiful. But I sometimes wonder if she really wants to be.

If she liked being beautiful, then why the heck would she dress up as a skeleton for Halloween when she was 6 years old? As a warlock at age 8? As a heap of trash at 11?

And this year, at age 28 – as a perfectly presentable, but not particularly pretty, eleventh incarnation of the Doctor on BBC-TV’s “Doctor Who?”

I got an email from Christina late in September asking me to locate her clunky old black boots from high school. She’d need them for her Doctor Who costume. She’d get the tweed jacket on eBay and the bow tie from Aunt Reena’s costume shop in Valencia.

Christina at 11 goes for icky -- a trash heap with a garbage can for a crown

Once again Christina was gearing up to cast herself against type for Halloween. Why?

Christina was just minutes old when she was pronounced beautiful for the first time.

“She’s gorgeous,” said the nurse anesthetist as she suctioned out our new baby’s throat.

“You probably say that about every newborn,” my husband said.

“No. This is for real.”

Christina had the usual puffy newborn eyes and neckless body. She also had a wide, generous mouth.

Jon thought she looked like a frog. I thought she looked like a duck.

But it wasn’t long before the puffy eyes opened and it became apparent that, indeed, little Christina was in danger of growing up beautiful.

That worried me. Mightn’t Christina turn into one of those vain females who depend on their looks to get ahead? What if she decided she didn’t want to be a smart professional woman like her mother and grandmother before her? What if she decided to go with arm candy and be done with it?

An astronaut at 5 -- space fantasies

In my family and in Jon’s, smart is everything. We go to college. We read the New York Times. We play chess. We love a good debate. We edit newspapers, do science and write things.

What if our daughter turned out to be none of the above? What if she decided to just sit there, looking beautiful for the rest of her life?

And that is why, when Christina was little, I made sure I did all the recommended mom things to build up her self-esteem. I told her she was good at math. I complimented her cooking. I went to all her soccer games and cheered when she blocked a pass with her long legs and gangly body.

But I was careful not to mention beautiful in the same sentence with “you are.”

Nonetheless, despite my careful mothering, Christina figured it out. She had a face to launch a thousand ships, and she knew it.

I learned this to my dismay one evening over a Chinese restaurant dinner when Dolly, an old family friend, put down her chopsticks, looked at my daughter and declared, “You’re a beautiful girl, Christina.”

Skeleton -- scary at age 6

Christina was unperturbed. Clearly she’d come to terms with this state of affairs on her own, possibly while looking in a mirror.

Instead of blushing and thanking Dolly for the compliment, Christina was matter-of-fact. “I know,” she said demurely.

Christina went through the usual girlish pink phase when she was four or five. For a while, everything she owned from jammies to lunch pail to ballet leotard was pink.

When Halloween rolled around, however, Christina wanted nothing to do with pink – or pretty.

At the toy store, the two of us checked out the Halloween possibilities. We strolled the girly costume aisle sparkling with princess robes, angel wings, magic fairy wands and bride get-ups.

But Christina wasn’t interested. She wanted to be a witch. An astronaut. A skeleton. One year – in a departure necessitated by her love of the Disney movie – Christina opted for a Little Mermaid costume. But in no time she was back on track – as a mud monster.

At 15, a vampire

As the Black Mage from Final Fantasy.

As a clown.

As an off-duty medieval knight, inspired by the Tamora Pierce novels.

As a vampire.

And so, all these years later, I have to wonder, did I overdo it? Does my daughter think she’s not allowed to be pretty? Does she think she must always choose interesting, creative, ambitious or shocking over pretty on Halloween?

Even more worrisome, does she believe she has to play the off-putting pile of trash or the in-your-face vampire – in real life?

When I was about sixteen, my father noticed that I was enjoying a lively social life with lots of dates with lots of boys. I was into clothes, make-up, haircuts. An experiment with peroxide had turned my bangs orange.

My father’s mother and grandmother had been starchy church women, schoolteachers both, and my father had decided it was time to set me straight.

Christina at GeekGirlCon as "Doctor Who" hero; bow tie from A Chorus Line in Valencia, CA

“Barb, you need to develop your mind as well as your beauty,” he told me one day. “Your beauty won’t last your whole life, but your education and your mind will.”

I took that as a double-edged compliment: My father thought I had beauty and that I was potentially smart.

At age 28, Christina is now safely out of the woods. I think I can relax. She is beautiful, sexy and graceful – but nobody’s arm candy.

And she’s smart, smart, smart. She doesn’t play chess, and she doesn’t read the New York Times. She’d rather bake you a birthday cake than suck you into a debate.

But she did make it through college nicely, and – like her mother and father before her – Christina is a devoted editor and writer. If she’s going to dazzle the world, she’d rather do it with a good story than a gorgeous face.

And Christina knows a good story when she sees one. A pretty girl in an angel costume does not make a story; she’ll tell you that. There’s no tension there. Pretty is just pretty, and that story is going nowhere.

A pretty girl dressed up as a pile of trash, on the other hand – now that’s a story.

Next Halloween: My son the boy

© 2011 Barbara Newhall

Within a couple weeks of hip surgery, my mother was doing physical therapy at a skilled nursing facility. c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Barbara Falconer Newhall

Ten reasons why I’m finding it impossible to write about my 92-year-old mother, even though she’s all I can think about right now:   

1. I love my mother, and I don’t know how to write about that.
2. My mother is difficult, and I don’t know how to write about that.
3. My brothers can read, and they know about this blog.
4. My mother can read. So can all six grandchildren.
5. My mother has osteoporosis, dementia and a messed-up stomach. She is losing herself, piece by piece, like dandelion feathers floating off in the wind, and I don’t want to think about that.
6. My father is dead. My in-laws, Scott and Ruth, are dead. If my mother dies, there will be no more grown-ups left in my life.
7. I don’t want to be the grown-up. 
8. If my mother can die, anybody can die, me included.
9. If I write about my mother I might find out something about myself that I don’t want to know.
10. I’d rather grab a Clausthaler, curl up with the afghan that once belonged to my mother-in-law, and watch “House” re-runs. Except I’ve already watched every last one of  them in the three months since my mother broke her hip.

Note: My mother died on December 18, 2010. I still don’t know how to write about her. One of these days I’ll figure it out.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

By the time I got my camera out, the fit young runners had pretty much disappered.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

I was all of three or four years old, pumping away on the pedals of my tricycle, near tears because the big kids were leaving me behind.

“Wait for me!” I cried.

Nobody listened.

My six-year-old brother Davey and his friends had decided to ride their bikes – actual two-wheelers – all the way around the block. Davey had persuaded his friends to let me tag along, but I couldn’t keep up, and nobody would slow down for me, so little and so slow on my tricycle, not even my big brother.

When we reached the other side of the block – far from home – the big kids sped up. In tears, I watched them grow smaller and smaller down the sidewalk, then disappear around the corner.

Today, this morning – same thing. I watched in dismay as my daughter and a handful of other fit twenty- and thirty-somethings took off running, leaving me behind.

I decided to record my humiliation with a photo of their trim figures receding in the distance, but by the time I got my camera out, they had all but disappeared down College Avenue.

Christina had talked me into this. She’d gotten me out of bed at the crack of dawn – 8 a.m. – to meet the Berkeley Lululemon running club at College and Ashby for a six-mile, Saturday morning run to Lake Temescal and back.

At first, I trotted along behind the much-younger runners. But after half a block, I had to face up to reality; I’d never keep up with all those fit young things. But I could do a brisk three-mile walk down College to Broadway in Oakland and back. And that’s what I did.

A sweaty Christina was waiting for me outside the Lululemon store at the corner of Ashby and College.

I don’t know how my four-year-old self found her way home.  Maybe I sucked it up and managed on my own. More likely Davey eventually came back around the block to get me.

Today I sucked it up. I gave myself a terrific hour-plus walking workout. But by the time I got back to Lululemon, the rest of the running club had finished up and left for home. Except for Christina. Still sweaty from her six-mile run, my daughter was standing outside the store, waiting for me.

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall