All the Love You Cannot See By Laura J. Oliver

My dog Leah can see a squirrel at night and people approaching a mile down the road, but she can’t see herself in the mirror. I hold her up to it, and she acts as if the mirror is repellent. She’ll look anywhere else.

This is how I feel about Zoom. I’ve never wanted to teach online and now I have to. It’s like being forced to look into a mirror for hours at a time. It’s demoralizing for the non-photogenic and I’m wondering how old you must be to not care how you look in mirrors and photos. (I mean, other than clean.)

Whatever the age, I’m not there yet, and apparently, I have the same aversion my dog has seeing my own image.

It probably started when I was working at the Chesapeake Boatman Magazine, and the editor, Mike, saw a photo of me tossed on my desk. He was visibly startled. “Whoa!” I remember him saying as he looked from me to the photo. “Never let anyone take a picture of you.”

And just like that, I had learned something about myself I hadn’t known. Thanks, Mike.

Later, I was made aware of the difference between being beautiful (as is my friend, Dar) and in being “no slouch,” as I once heard my boss refer to me. He and an advertiser had been commenting to each other on the loveliness of our receptionist, Mary. “Oh, and that’s our associate editor, Laura,” I heard him say as I walked by. “She’s no slouch.” Which I interpreted as “That’s our associate editor, Laura. She is good at standing up.”

For the record, I still excel at this.

Committed to promoting the non-superficial, my parents put no emphasis on how my sisters and I looked at all, except they did make a big deal about the fact we looked like each other. As if we were, perhaps, more appealing as a set. Virtually every photograph of us in our youth is a stair-stepped group shot.

What’s interesting is that you share the exact same number of genes with your children as you do with your siblings—1/2. So, your chances of having children who resemble you are about the same as having siblings who resemble you. In my case, siblings are batting 100 and children zero.

But no matter how you feel about being photographed, there is something profound about having another person in the world who resembles you. I had a writing client who was adopted, and in writing the story of giving birth to her first child on a stormy Caribbean night, she observed that with the arrival of her baby, she was meeting her first blood relative. The first person in her world who might look like her. I was undone by that.

As my mother aged, she loved looking at herself in photos and continued experimenting with her appearance. One day, I went to her assisted living facility to pick her up, and she came cruising down the corridor behind her walker, looking like Maverick. “Whoa. Mom. Where’d you get the aviators?” I asked.

“What? Oh, these?” she responded airily, touching her shades, “I found them. “How do I look?”

Like a thief wearing Top Gun’s sunglasses?

And one Saturday, I knocked on her door and Groucho Marx opened it. My mother had taken note of a younger woman with lovely brows in the facility’s dining hall one evening and inspired, had gotten her hands on a marker of some kind and drawn two thick black lines above her real eyebrows. It was startling. We stared at each other, me shocked and trying to mask it, and her waiting for a reaction to her new look. I went into her apartment and pretended she appeared normal while strategizing ways to wrest the marker from Maverick.

There is a whole behavioral science called Mirror Talk. You repeat affirmations while gazing at your own reflection. This supposedly raises self-acceptance and self-love. Apparently, we are hardwired to feel love and compassion from faces and eye contact. Even our own.

So, I wonder if I stand here gazing in the bedroom mirror and say, “You are photogenic!”  I will believe it. And in so doing, become it? What if I say, “You are doing the best you can? You are living out your soul’s plan?”  A researcher did note that there is a difference between an affirmation, and a prediction. “You are so smart” is okay; “It’s all going to be fine” is not.

I actually don’t agree with this. I think predictions are their own form of spiritual alchemy. Light is both a wave and a particle until observed. Let’s collapse the wave with attention; give intention form.

I will be your mirror, and you will be mine. That’s what stories are, right? Reflections of each other?

Look into my eyes.

Angels attend you. You have much to do, and you have time.

You are racing towards joy.

Love leaves no one behind.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.