vanity

Every weekend for the last year or so, some friends of ours and we have exchanged children on Friday nights.  They have four little children like we do, so we haven't felt we were putting anyone out by saddling them with our herd, since next Friday night we'd be saddled with theirs.  And oh, how lovely to know, when I'm down in the trenches of a hard-slog week, that Friday night's a-comin', and to have visions of a dimly lit restaurant and an hour at the bookstore to carry me through till then.  How dreamy to think that I'll actually be able to hear my husband's voice for a little while this weekend.

Before we go to their house, though, shoes have to be found, coats dug out of the dirty clothes basket, bathroom trips taken, and that knot in the back of your hair brushed out.  While all this is going on, I slip away to my bathroom, where the din is muted, to touch up my hair and makeup.  It feels nice to look nice once in a week.  For once my hair isn't in a scrub-the-counters ponytail, and I'm wearing clothes on which no one has yet wiped a nose.  I'm wearing earrings.  And my makeup is freshly done. 

In this altered state, I come down the stairs, excited for something different, and my 8-year-old says to me, "Uh...why did you go put all that gobs of makeup on your eyelashes and lips?  That just looks a lot like vanity."

Someone has appointed him the Vanity Police, and I am a repeat offender.

If I pull the visor down in the car to check for a makeup line in the mirror, I see his disapproving eyes looking back at me.  If I linger at the jewelry racks in Target, his mouth hardens into a tight line.  He will not sanction this type of rampant vanity.

Yesterday I was cleaning out and packing up my bathroom.  I dumped out the contents of my makeup bag, and was surprised to see how many lipsticks rolled out.  I inspected each one in wonder, setting out tube after tube of mangled-up makeup.  My little boys, you see, have some type of strange lipstick fetish.  And although my makeup is kept behind a locked door, nobody can remember to lock a door all the time, and Momma's pointy red lipstick is the first thing they go for.

All the injustices that are heaped on a mother of four come home to me in the moment when I twist up a new tube of my favorite lipstick color, and the sharp new tip has been ground into lipstick pulp.  Nothing, nothing is sacred.  So I say, "fiddle-de-de", and buy myself a new one.  But they have some type of creepy lipstick radar, and all cannot be right in their world until they've fixed my new tube.  So...I...buy a...new...one.  At $6 a tube, lipstick can't be considered expensive, but two tubes...three...four tubes is getting up there.  I'd far rather have $24 worth of new books than mashed tubes of lipstick, and in the end I quit buying.

So I stand in the bathroom before our date, just dripping with vanity, puckering up and trying...to...get...the...side...of...the...lipstick tube just right so that I swipe my lip instead of my cheek or chin, grabbing toilet paper, wiping it off, trying again, and Father Bird walks in.  "You know, you could fix that with a butter knife," he says. 

And I suppose, after all, I could.  But I have this silly-awful picture of myself, hiding in the corner of the bathroom, taking a butter knife to the top of my lipstick and praying nobody finds out that I've got a newly-sharpened tube of lipstick hidden somewhere in the house. 

Because that, see, would be vanity.

~Mother Bird~