The Mirror Doesn’t Lie 7 comments

By Kelly Foster

Since I was young, I’ve kept quotes as reminders on all my mirrors, to look at when I look at myself. As a teenager, I kept poems, prayers, Bible verses—about love and waiting, about the meaningfulness of suffering and bad days. The words helped me get up, ready, and out the door. The promises sedated me before bed.

I’ve had the same antique bedroom suite since I was a kid, an inheritance from a great aunt who died when I was an infant. My mother has refinished all the furniture at least twice since I’ve grown. But the time-stained vanity has functioned as a sort of reliquary for me. I can still see the traces of Scotch tape removed and reapplied as new words arrived to replace the old.

When I moved back in with my parents after leaving my husband, one of the first things I did was to tape a copy of the twelve steps of recovery for codependents on my mirror (pretty much the same as those for AA or NA), along with the lyrics to the U2 song “One”:

Did I disappoint you or leave a bad taste in your mouth?
You act like you never had love and you want me to go without...
Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come here to play Jesus to the lepers in your head?
Did I ask too much, more than a lot?
You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got…
You ask me to enter, but then you make me crawl,
And I can’t keep holding on to what you got
When all you’ve got is hurt.

Maybe it’s the fate of those who for too long have believed lies. Maybe it’s the fate of those doomed to always want to believe the unrealistic best in people, to deny their own intuition. Maybe it’s the fate of those doomed, in the parlance of codependency recovery, to “magical thinking.”

But I needed those particular words at that particular time, because despite the ample evidence available to me, I still had to remember daily, hourly, that what had happened to me was that bad—that it had necessitated the radical break I had made, that I really could not have stayed one second longer without sustaining a holocaust of the self.

If it’s true, for the most part, that mirrors don’t lie, however much we might wish them to, perhaps it’s appropriate that I’ve always kept truths plastered across their surfaces.

You don’t have to dig too deep into the Christian narrative to know that somehow love and pain are uncomfortably mingled, from Jacob’s bruised hip to the ubiquitous crucifix and its mangled Christ. There’s a rhetoric, dangerous when made too simple, rooted in that marriage of love and suffering, that seems to equate the two.

Love is work. Love is a choice. Love is hard. These may be perfectly valid statements taken at face value, but how hard is too hard? What about when love doesn’t just involve suffering but becomes suffering?

What about when what we would like to call love becomes more than just a daily donning of our proper crosses and becomes instead a daily exercise in the diminishment? We are not taught to know how to answer those questions or even to know where that line is, because I’m not sure anyone knows exactly what that line is. Except when you’ve felt it. Maybe you’ve felt it for too long and you regret not acting sooner, but finally you feel it and you can’t not act, because all of a sudden it’s clear as crystal: you get out or you die.

It was only after my divorce was finalized and life began to assume an unfamiliar, stabilizing calm, that the rhetoric on my mirror spoke more of the evanescence of resurrection than the stolidity of death, more Easter than Lent.

“O my people, says the Lord, I will open up your graves and bring you up from them.”

“I will make the Valley of Achor into a door of hope.”

“Your brother will rise again. Your brother will rise again.”

We need not seek suffering. It comes. Just as, fortunately, love also comes unbidden, undeserved. We stand in front of our mirrors, brush our teeth, our hair, then shuffle off to bed, and we hope for better mornings when we can learn to believe, with less wavering, in all that we see.