My friend Carol and I are in a book club together. Except that I haven’t been to a meeting since my mother died 3 years ago, and Carol had actually moved away 10 years ago, so we hadn’t been in the club together for a long time, is what I’m saying.

I know, that sounds random and disconnected; I quit going to book club when my mother died. But it was my mother’s book club. I just crashed it at Carol’s invitation some 14 odd years ago. Most of the women in the club are older, in their 60s and up, my mother’s peers and friends.

When she was there, I thought it was cool to be in a group having intelligent conversation with her peeps, many of them movers and shakers in our town.

But after she died, the club was a painful reminder that she was gone, so I stayed away.

Now Carol is back, and she is applying that subtle pressure again. I feel a tug to reconnect. But it feels like a selfish reason. The club started a book writing project years ago, when Carol was still in town the first time, I was still active in the club, and my mother was very much alive. I think I may want to return to the club so I can be part of that book.

Carol told me of her writing homework. I remembered our sessions where we were directed to write for 5 minutes straight on a topic, then read what we wrote aloud to the group. We never discussed editing this stuff. I’m embarrassed by some most of what I wrote. But they’re using some of my stuff as a sample.

Then Carol told me she didn’t know who wrote this piece on beauty. It began: “Beauty is a thicket I’ve been tangled in my whole life. . . ”

I got a shiver down my back. I would know that writer anywhere. It was my mother. As Carol read on, I remembered the evening we wrote those passages, and I could hear my mother read it.

She wrote, “my mother and her sisters were beautiful in the traditional sense. They had light skin and long hair, and with my brown skin and nappy hair, I was sure that I was not. . .” And I was plunged back into my mother’s pain. I felt the weight of her perception of her inadequacy the whole time she was alive.

I remember talking to my friend Claudia after the funeral. She told me that she knew my mother, or had seen her. “She was what they call a handsome woman,” Claudia told me.

I think my mother would have been surprised to see how hard her cousin Tona, whom she envied forever, took her passing. How Tona felt she’d made a spectacle of herself kissing the body and weeping openly.

My mother had tried to keep me away from Tona and her family for many years, so I could avoid the pain she’d felt growing up being compared to her porcelain doll of a cousin. When I’d been born very pale, some of those people tried to welcome me into their group. My mother resisted them, and we didn’t see much of them as I grew up.

I may have had some of their coloring, but I got my mother’s nappy hair, so I wouldn’t have completely fit in over there anyway. My mother passed on her own ambivalence about the hair and the beauty. Beauty was not a priority for her, even though she did keep herself well stocked with Barbara Walden cosmetics.

It was weird getting a hippy-type programming about beauty from her and then rubbing up against her mother, who thought beauty was important. She gave me this ancient girl’s book about beauty etiquette, and wrote this dedication: “Dearest Angela, I expect many thing of you. Beauty is one of them.”

I was an angry teenager, and didn’t want anything to do with that book or my grandmother’s demands. I was completely irrational about it. When our church started a library, we donated that book.

I discovered it much later, when I was a wife and mother of 2, taking my hungry baby to the church library to nurse him during service. I thought the 50s girl book was so charming and quaint. I couldn’t believe how wrong I’d been in judging my grandmother.

I find myself struggling with some of the skewed beauty values I’d gotten from my mother when I deal with my daughters, especially the oldest. She likes to experiment with make-up, wigs, and costumes. I am uncomfortable about all that. I hear my mother’s voice chastising me for constantly looking at myself.

But I know that at her age, my daughter is trying to find out who she is. It’s a good time to do that, before she’s got a family to take care of. She has a sense of self I never had. She knows she is beautiful—she doesn’t know she’s gorgeous, but I think she’s getting an inkling. She needs to continue her exploration until she finds what she’s looking for.

I look in the mirror sometimes and I see my mother looking back at me. It startles me. Did she know she looked like that? Did she know how many times I am told I am beautiful? And I look just like her?

What beauty issues do you have? How do you pass them on or stop yourself from passing them on to your daughters?