Ode to joy: a celebration of motherhood in three parts (part two)

Part Two

Painted women

Ode to my mom

I’m sure he remembers that night. Oh, he’d like to forget. But somehow the image lingers. One lazy summer evening about 22 years ago, Dad returned from work to find two women who looked familiar, almost like ridiculous versions of his wife and daughter, but he couldn’t be too sure at first. Opening the kitchen door, he set his lunch bag on the table and announced his arrival. 

Peering around the corner into our dining room, he was greeted by dark, unnatural faces, eyes that appeared larger than life, drowning in the midst of clumps of black goo and surrounded by glitter in all colors, not to mention the rosiest cheeks and the darkest painted lips that he had ever seen. After dismissing the notion that clown burglars had invaded his home and transformed his wife and daughter into one of them, he had to ask.  

“What is going on here?” he wondered aloud, not yet sure if the creatures sitting before him could understand English.

To which Mom and I, or some semblance of ourselves, burst into laughter and recounted the messy details. I was fresh out of college, working for a local newspaper and living at home to pay off my student loans. I had just begun to sell Mary Kay on the side, just for fun.

Upon arriving home from work, I decided to try out my new Mary Kay products. After all, the beauty of that kind of business is that you can, as they so simply put it, “try before you buy.” I had just received my first order of samples, and Mom and I wanted to play with them. 

So we spread them out on the long dinner table in huge piles – eyeliners in every color from indigo to slate in one pile, blush in shades from camel to berry blast in another stack, eyeshadow with colors ranging from goldenrod to cranberry and even some tubes of eye glitter, and rows of lipstick samples that covered nearly one-half of the table.  

We began tentatively, trying colors we thought we’d like. We had a large supply of applicators and tissues to apply and then remove each color before we tried a new one.  The only problem was that the particular colors we had chosen refused to budge from our lips, cheeks, and eyes.  

At first, we were oblivious to the problem, but after several times of Mom trying one color, turning to me, saying, “How does this look?” and me thinking to myself, “Exactly the same as the last color,” we realized that something was wrong. Once we admitted that each color looked more and more like the last, we started scrubbing the lipstick off of our lips, which naturally made them redder just by the effort.  

Then, of course, we became a little giddy. Every time Mom would look at me with her bleeding lips and eyes that were sagging from far too many coats of eyeshadow, I would laugh until my makeup started running. It didn’t run off of my face as I hoped, but instead, it ran just enough to smudge the various caked substances into dark lines.

So then we decided to just go for it and try even the really ugly colors. Once I applied a lipstick named currant, which literally looked like I smashed berries on my lips, that was the end of it for me. I scrubbed my lips until they hurt, and yet the color stayed on, and it looked like I had been drinking Kool-Aid nonstop for about a week.  

Mom’s chocolate brown lipstick was also a major disaster, leaving her with the look of a child who has just consumed a plate of fresh, fudgy brownies and has left evidence for the world to see. In Mary Kay’s defense, I’m sure those colors would have been the perfect fit for other women out there, but Mom and I, as pale as we are, looked plain ridiculous.  

We completed our new makeovers with foundations that were way too dark for our skin tones, thereby giving us the complexion of a bag of Cheetos, and I hardly need mention that our necks were their original color, which created a dual-tone effect. The laughs we enjoyed that night still ring through my mind whenever I apply a shade of lipstick that was simply not meant for me. 

Of course, the kicker was the expression on Dad’s face as he discovered his wife and daughter in the midst of a scientific experiment gone horribly awry. I suppose it could have ended worse, though. Dad could have shipped us off to join the circus, although I must say, I don’t think they would have accepted us.

My mother and I may not have looked beautiful that night, but the memory of cackling together as two hot messes filled to the brim with makeup and sheer joy is one of my loveliest memories.

**Stay tuned for Part Three, coming tomorrow!**