My little Narcissus

I love to watch my son checking himself out in the mirror. His whole face lights up, he strokes his image in the mirror and coos to himself and he basically flirts his tail off with the child we now refer to as “the handsome lad in the hall.” He has also recently discovered “the cute boy in the oven” since the oven door is a highly reflective shiny black, and while I hate to gossip, I think someone should tell the boy in the hall that D and his new friend are developing quite a fast friendship. It’s only fair.

One thing I particularly love about D’s being so smitten with himself is that now when I’m standing in front of a mirror, I am rarely obsessing about my own appearance but rather am enjoying his. I’ve never been much of a looker, and apparently the rule is that the amount of time you look at yourself in the mirror is inversely proportional to how much you think you deserve to be admired. So despite not being a fashionista/hipster to begin with, I would spend endless hours in front of the mirror in the days B.D (before D.), hoping that the cream/product/makeup I was trying this time would transform me from being The Interesting Girl [code, apparently for “she ain’t much to look at but she talks so much you hardly notice what she looks like”] to being The Pretty Girl. Motherhood has made me finally just accept that I am no great beauty and that that’s okay. I just don’t have time to lament, I guess. I’ve gone from wearing makeup to realizing that it never made much of a difference in how I looked anyway. I no longer have time to wonder what people think about the fact that all my clothes come from Target. I’ve realized that all the tacky baby crap I used to vow would never darken my door has benefits that far outweigh having mod-looking décor. Superficial junk like that just doesn’t seem like it could be any less significant to my current life. I realize this in sudden, piercing moments, like when I’m talking to my single friends or when I’m watching my son ogle himself.

Of course, as my friend Emily has pointed out, I haven’t become a Person Who No Longer Obsesses…I just obsess about different things, like my child’s eating/sleeping/pooping habits. *sigh* Some habits die hard, others just get reassigned.