Part Two of a Three-Part Reflection

I wished I had blonde hair and green eyes like my mother. I was olive-skinned, with dark hair and dark eyes like my father. My mother was beautiful. Anyone who met her would have said so. But it didn't matter.

When my mother married my father and moved into his home for the first time, she was shocked by the stacks of books that lined the walls. My father was a scholar. She loved his intelligence.

I can't say that I was fond of my father—not even his memory through someone else's memories. It was a difficult marriage, a challenge between different cultures and generations. However, I didn't realize how significant my father's invisible presence was in my life until I recognized that his knowledge, his scholarship, and his achievement were things I admired and strived for throughout my life.

My mother would often say that, whatever challenges they had as a couple, my father loved and wanted each of his children—and me too, even though I was just one month old when he passed.

The only memory I have of my father and me comes from my mother. She said she feared so much that he would drop me as he walked down the narrow staircase of our home carrying me in his arms. He was a large man compared to my mother's petite frame. Envisioning her words, I could see him lumbering down the staircase of the home I would eventually live in for the next twenty-some years, each step a heavy crash on the narrow staircase.

He loved me.

To be honest, most of my life I never felt I missed him. My life felt complete and happy with my mother and sisters—that is, until things go wrong.

But we had his books.

I have his books.

And his writings.

Shelves of books.

Boxes of books.

Books that followed us every time we moved, occupying more of the U-Haul than our furniture did.

Books.

Perhaps then it is natural that I sought learning. I could not go on vacation without lugging 800-page history books with me. I could not imagine sitting on the beach doing...nothing. The very idea was abhorrent to me. The more I learned, the more I realized how much there was still to learn. I'm not sure anymore if it was joy so much as obsession. I consumed books like fire consumes kindling...

But there were other reasons. I needed to be useful. During that period of my life, I looked at decoration without function as useless. I wondered, how could it be so wrong to want knowledge—a fault seemingly so grave that Eve's desire initiated the fall of humanity?

I understood and commiserated with Soviet scientist played by Cate Blanchett in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, who was torn by her desire for knowledge. I felt like her, standing in the middle of the swirling room as she cried out for more knowledge.

And yet, a part of me sensed there was a partial truth in it. Something slightly twisted in an otherwise harmless desire.

What was this need?

But I created my own truth as a child:

If beauty fades, intelligence remains.

If appearance changes, knowledge endures.

I thought I had exchanged one foundation for a stronger one.

Only more recently have I realized I had simply exchanged one idol for another.

One memory from childhood has stayed with me all these years.

My mother subscribed to Reader's Digest. One story, was mind altering for me - it was the story of a young woman whose extraordinary beauty had been burned and disfigured in an accident. Whether memory has preserved every detail accurately no longer matters. What I remember is that she struggled to imagine life after losing the very thing that had defined her—so much so that she considered ending her life.

As a child, I remember asking myself a question.

What if that were me?

Who would I be if I were no longer beautiful?

Children rarely realize when they are asking life-defining questions.

They simply ask them.

Then they spend years living their answers.

That story unsettled me.

If beauty can disappear...

then beauty cannot be enough.

So I studied.

I learned.

I earned degrees.

I filled my mind with ideas that opened new worlds.

I am grateful for every one of them. Education has been one of God's great gifts in my life.

But with time, another realization has emerged.

Beauty of the face is an unearned gift.

Beauty of the mind is an achievement.

But neither, in the end, is enough.

Who are you without beauty?

Who are you without intelligence?

Both are gifts.

Neither is identity.

The beauty that lasts must come from somewhere deeper.

"Que bonita."

At first, I thought she was telling me what I had become.

Now I wonder if there was something even deeper.

She was reminding me of who I had always been...

but had forgotten.