Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

Sweet toddlerhood memories haha.

I hate to say it, but I will. Children, despite their infinite charms, are an absolute assault on a marriage. They don’t mean to be, but they are. We’d held up pretty well under the siege, and there was certainly still a lot of love, but it was nothing like the crazy, tingly, I-can’t-breathe-without-you love we’d kicked things off with.

everything you did for your children was filtered and refracted through their personalities. There was nothing you could take credit for. You just tried to hold yourself together, give them lots of hugs, get them in the tub at least once a day, and hope for the best.

What I needed so desperately, and did not have in my life, was something I could point to and say, “I did that.” Something that was a direct reflection of me.

I was coming more and more to believe that women’s desire was different from men’s. Women’s desire seemed to come from their feelings—a physical ache in the heart that ravaged the body.

Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them. You could stop at the corner to buy a newspaper when a drunk driver veered onto the sidewalk. You could feed your child an E. coli–tainted hamburger. You could turn your head for a second while one darted out into the street. The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children’s lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours would be, too.

“You know what I want?” I said. “I want Peter to put his hand behind my head when we kiss.” I looked at her. “Do you know the kind of kiss I mean?”

though I couldn’t imagine this was actually true, I couldn’t help but feel that our children had some kind of sixth sense for moments when Peter and I were focusing on each other. Even sleeping, they could tell when we turned our thoughts, even momentarily, away from them. It was discouraging.

“Put protecting the marriage before everything else.”

Some aspects of marriage were shit work. And many aspects of parenting were. Literally. But the payoff for the drudgery—the laundry folding, the toilet plunging, the prescription filling, the trips to the dry cleaners—in theory, at least, was intimacy. Something you could not buy, or pick up at a bar, or have a one-night stand with. Something you could earn only by putting in the man-hours.

Everybody had marks on their bodies from years of living—a trail of life left on them, evidence of all the adventures and sleepless nights and practical jokes and heartbreaks that had made them who they were. In that moment, I suddenly loved us all the more for our flaws, for being broken and human, for being embarrassed and lonely, for being hopeful or tired or disappointed or sick or brave or angry. For being who we were, for making the world interesting. It was a good reminder that the human condition is imperfection. And that’s how it’s supposed to be.

But I kept going to the gym. I established a rhythm—a deeply syncopated one, but nonetheless: an hour at the gym and an hour in the darkroom every weeknight between the kids’ bedtime and mine. One hour for my body and one hour for my soul—as if those two things are somehow not the same. Time set aside to strive for that impossible balance between excitement and exhaustion, between longing for and having, between giving yourself away and hanging on to yourself, between how things are and how they ought to be.

And here, after all that, is what I have come to believe about beauty: Laughter is beautiful. Kindness is beautiful. Cellulite is beautiful. Softness and plumpness and roundness are beautiful. It’s more important to be interesting, to be vivid, and to be adventurous, than to sit pretty for pictures. A woman’s soft tummy is a miracle of nature. Beauty comes from tenderness. Beauty comes from variety, from specificity, from the fact that no person in the world looks exactly like anyone else. Beauty comes from the tragedy that each person’s life is destined to be lost to time. I believe women are too hard on themselves. I believe that when you love someone, she becomes beautiful to you. I believe the eyes see everything through the heart—and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I’ve gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it’s not true, but I really don’t care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful.

I was interested in all the same things back then—love, compassion, family, sacrifice—but

I’m still totally obsessed with stories about human connection, and resilience, and the healing power of love.