The difference between pretty and beautiful

Kara Tippetts on December 4, 2014

I am raising three amazing daughters and it feels like walking the edge of a cliff. Recently I took my daughter, Eleanor, to dinner to have a discussion about beauty and modesty. We went to dinner and we laughed, giggled, took selfies together, and ate hamburgers. She chose a giant bacon, onion, barbecue something. It was unreal. She devoured it, and evidence of it covered her entire face, it was everywhere. I laughed so hard. I told her what a fun date she would be one day. I told her how in my day, girls tried to act like they didn’t eat much food. She was stunned, she said, “Mom, isn’t dating about eating great food?” I love it, that’s my Eleanor. No frills, just real, and I think she’ll be exactly the same on the date, covered in hamburger, laughing loud with her infectious laugh, and seeking joy.

I talked to her about modesty. I talked frankly about the differences between men and women, how we may love short skirts and low cut shirts, but they result in becoming a place where men look. We talked through the gift of her physical beauty, because it is a gift. I told her how I loved the beauty I see in her face, but I talked of the beauty of her heart.

My perspective of beauty was challenged from the outset of my treatment. I didn’t think losing my hair would be that dramatic. A life-long tomboy, I just didn’t think the loss of my naturally long blonde hair would much matter to me. After all, I was the one who rarely even remembered to brush my hair. I thought myself impervious to such fuss. I was wrong. Or just naïve. When I started treatment, I had no idea how bald would meet me.

Before I met bald, my hair was long, thick, lovely. I hadn’t known really how lovely until I lost it all one day. It never returned, it never will. Chemo utterly changed my very DNA. I meet a stranger every day in the mirror. I saw my hip bones that had been buried under years of baby bearing softness. The soft that met my children in a warm embrace vanished, and I became all corners and harsh. Many days I passed the mirror, I could not look. I felt like I looked like a giant thumb with big, dark eyes. I remember hearing a young woman say she would be fine if she lost her hair. I quietly sighed, hoping she would never know the pain of the ugly I was facing. I did not admonish her ignorance, only silently prayed she would never have to look for the grace at the end of her day to meet herself in the mirror utterly changed by chemicals. It’s a bottom I don’t want another to know, but even at that bottom, there was love. Unbelievable love.

As it is those closest to you who can wound the deepest, it is also those closest to you who can love the most profound. To have my children kiss my bald head, to have my oldest daughter Eleanor encouraging me to brave bald in public, to have Jason pursuing me, even finding me attractive and loving me in that desperate low…this was all something I didn’t expect. I learned the heart of beauty in my terrible ugly. I learned a confidence and footing in my life in the unlikely desperate place of bald and harsh in appearance. And in it all, I heard the voice of my eternal Father accepting me even as He was stripping me. I was becoming more beautiful as I was outwardly diminishing. I didn’t expect the new challenge of bald, and I also didn’t realize the way I would be seen there, as someone beautiful. But I was.

I am sitting quietly on the bed of my eldest daughter, Eleanor Grace. I have learned the hard art of waiting on her to share with me. She carries a weight I cannot understand. She confessed that she has very few moments without fear of losing me. We both finally let go and spilled our words, shared our hearts, and expressed the burdens weighing us. We wept together. I told her how I lacked imagination for words, but I knew God’s grace would meet her there. I told her I was fighting to believe the goodness of our story that seemed anything but good.

Too much reality for too tender an age. I cannot change the story, and I’m so ill-equipped to protect her from our pain. She admits that she’s carrying it for the littlest one of us. She fears for the little attached girl, Story Jane, waking one day without a mama. She feels she has had much of me with her, but she fears the littlest will only have an understanding of my essence. She wept that Story Jane will not get to know me like she does. Her tender heart was breaking for another, introducing me to a new depth of beauty and love I had not known in her.

Jason recently said in a sermon: We want suffering to be like pregnancy, we have a season and it’s over, and there is a tidy moral to the story. But I’ve come to sense that isn’t what faith is at all. What if there is never an end, what if the story never improves and the tests continue to break our hearts? Is God still good? How does our story of love change when we look head on at my absence from this life? How do you live realistically when you feel like your moments are fading, fleeting, too momentary? How do you fight for normal in the midst of the crushing daily news of more hard? How do you seek hope without forgetting reality? How do we wrap our children in our love story and continue to live intentionally, getting salty tears in the baked ziti? How do we share the story being written for us with our children while we try to protect their childhood?

Bald can lead to such beauty. But it is never, ever pretty.