Aura Points
BY MARGO STEINES
“Are you okay sitting there?” I ask my kid, not for the first or even the third time since we got into the small room. The walls are millennial pink, the lighting bright blush, but the floors and the corners reveal the particular laxities of the beauty economy. $425 flat fee Botox comes with bespoke branding and an Insta-ready icing station, but not a gut renovation.
We wait together, my stomach tangled in all the parenting values violations I have committed to arrive here, sitting in the pink light of an anti-aging mill next to my tiny and highly impressionable young child. I had to stifle the urge to make a terrible “baby’s first Botox” joke upon arrival. I am so uncomfortable. I want this child, my child, to grow up free of worry for what she might encounter when her beauty starts to fade. Her own beauty, not even fully activated yet and clearly more potent than my own, a thing I love and fear and marvel at. To be beautiful in this world is such a liability, but so is to lack beauty—there are no winners, here. I want my child to be so in her body that she could forget it exists as an entity for anything other than her own sensory experience. I wish for a science fantasy in which her body is not visible to others unless she specifically invites their gaze.
Her legs are so small that, seated on the small rolling stool, they stick straight out. Her hightop sneakers match my hightop sneakers, because the pleasure I take in twinning radically outweighs my understanding of matching your kid as the cheugy side of cringe. It is nice, sometimes, now, to be so tired that I am no longer capable of giving a shit. In the pink of the light her skin glows with collagen and human growth hormone and a joy that hasn’t yet been killed by capitalism. She’s had three bites of a challah roll, a smidge of almond butter, and a sip of water today. Her existence is as marvelous and baffling to me as that of a plant: how are you alive, how are you real? Astonishing to think about any given group of small children, and know how fucking disrupted at least one adult is in each of their wakes. Nothing I used to know feels like the whole truth, since her.
The small silver tray of needles, vials, and gauze glints. What should I say to her about why we had to drag our asses out of bed and walk in the 20 degree weather at ten in the morning to come here? So that there would be less evidence of how much I’ve smiled?
The problem with parenting in the actual world is that it is very easy to inadvertently hold yourself to the standards of some imaginary or ideal world. I’m not sure what I would say to this tiny person about why we are here spending a car payment correcting my forehead’s excessive mobility if the world were as it could be, and women had value no matter their age, and appearance was one of many metrics that determines a person’s worth, and your body is yours and only yours. Here in the actual world, maybe the more useful lesson is start getting preventative Botox at the first hint of lines, so that your youthful beauty will always hover around you, protecting you like an armored aura, ensuring that you receive the best. I don’t fucking know.
The nurse, hotter than me even in her face mask and mechanic-style onesie, picks up the needle. My daughter stares.
