Linda Carter Facebook ad: “I can’t believe it…”

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My granddaughter drew our family for school. Everyone had a mouth. Mine was gray. She was not being unkind. She is seven. She was lying on her stomach on my daughter's kitchen floor with a box of crayons, working very hard, with her tongue out the way she does. I want to be honest with you from the first line, because this only works if I am. She was right. That's the part that took me eleven months to get all the way around. My name is Nan. I'm sixty-four. I've been divorced twenty-two years, and that detail is boring and doesn't come into this. I have my granddaughter Poppy every Tuesday. My daughter Steph works late Tuesdays, so I do the three o'clock pickup, and we get a doughnut we are not supposed to tell anybody about, and I have her until six. That is the best day of my week, and it has been for four years. The drawing was a school thing all about My Family. Everybody in the family, everybody labeled. She did Steph in pink. She did herself in purple, which is a choice, and she did her Auntie Deb in bright red, which is accurate, because Deb has worn the same red since 1994 and could be identified from space. She did me in gray. Not my dress. Not my hair. My mouth. A gray line, drawn very carefully, because she is a careful child. I said, lightly, the way you say things when you have decided in advance to keep your face still, "Poppy, why is Grandma's mouth gray?" She didn't look up. "That's your color, Grandma." And then, still not looking up, still coloring: "You don't do colors." Do you know what it does to you, hearing a child recite a version of you? Not meanly. Slowly. Carefully. The way you'd recite anything you know for certain. My hair is brown. Grandma doesn't do colors. She wasn't guessing. She wasn't inventing. She was reading it off a record. I stayed for dinner. I did the dishes. I told Steph the drawing was lovely and I drove home and I sat in my car in my own driveway with the engine off for a while, which is not something I do. Then it got worse, the way these things do, when somebody tells you the part you weren't in the room for. Steph called that Thursday. She was doing the thing she does when she's decided you need to know something, starting three sentences and finishing none of them. "She wasn't being mean, Mom." "I know that." "No, I know you know. It's just." She stopped. "Last month she found the album. The one from Deb's wedding." I know the photograph she means. 1994. I'm thirty-two, I'm laughing at somebody off to the side, and I have a mouth on me you could see from the back of the church. "She looked at it for a really long time," Steph said. "And then she asked me if grandmas are allowed to have colors." Allowed. Seven years old. She'd found evidence of a woman with a colored mouth, and she'd compared it to the woman who picks her up on Tuesdays, and she'd concluded that something must have happened. A rule. A cutoff. Some point at which they take it off you. That's what a child does with a gap in the record. She fills it with the most reasonable explanation available. And the most reasonable explanation available was that at some age, you stop being allowed. Here's the part I've had to sit with. Nobody did this to me. There was no year where somebody said, Nan, that's enough now. Nobody took anything. What happened is that for about eight years I said one sentence, over and over, in shops and at parties and at my own kitchen table, cheerfully, like it was a personality. "Oh, I don't wear that anymore." I said it to Deb. I said it to Steph. I said it standing at a counter at a department store with a very nice young woman holding something up for me. I said it in front of Poppy more times than I can count, because Poppy has been in the room for approximately everything since 2019. I meant it as a small joke. Low maintenance. Easy. Nothing to fuss over. But a child does not hear a joke. A child hears data. And I want to tell you why I actually stopped, because that wasn't a decision either. Somewhere in my fifties, everything started failing on me. My lips got drier than they used to be and thinner than they used to be, and the edges went soft. That happens; nobody warns you. So every color I owned did one of two things. It sat on top like a sticker, or it crept up into those little lines by lunchtime and made a mess I'd catch in a car mirror at a red light. So I quit. Not all at once. Eleven or twelve times, quietly, and I told myself each time it was because I don't fuss. Then I said the sentence out loud for eight years until a seven-year-old wrote it down in gray. You cannot argue with that. That's what I kept coming back to in the driveway. What am I going to do, sit a first-grader down and explain that I'm actually a person? Anything I say makes it a thing. Arguing a story about yourself only feeds it. Vi is the one who told me what to do, and she did it in about a minute and a half. Vi is seventy. She ran the front office of an elementary school for twenty-six years. Sign-ins, sick kids, lost gloves, and every single piece of artwork that came through that building. I told her the whole thing on her porch. The gray crayon. Allowed. All of it, as a joke about myself, because that is how I tell everything. She didn't laugh, and she didn't hug me. She said, "I have watched about two thousand children draw their families. Do you want to know what they draw?" I said I did. "Not what you look like. What you do. They draw the dad with a lawnmower who mows twice a year, because they saw it. They draw grandma sitting down, because that's where she is when they come in the room." She looked at me. "Poppy isn't describing you, Nan. She's describing the record." "And who keeps the record?" "You do," she said. "You've been keeping it every Tuesday for four years. You just haven't been paying attention to what's in it." Then she said the useful thing. "So change what's in it, not with a speech. She's seven; a speech will go straight past her. You've got a standing appointment with that child every single week. Just show up in color and let her write it down." I said the honest thing back. I said nothing I own works anymore, and that I've got a drawer of the evidence. Vi went inside and came back and put a tube on the arm of the chair. "It's the Areliaa Signature Lipstick," she said. "That one doesn't come with a color. It makes one." I said something rude, because I am sixty-four and I have been sold things. Vi said, "Put it on. I'll wait." The Areliaa Signature Lipstick went on nearly clear and soft, with no drag, which mattered more than I expected, because half of what's in my drawer goes on like sidewalk chalk now. Then, in Vi's hall mirror, a color came up out of my own mouth. Warm rose, deeper in the middle, going soft at the corners. Not sitting on top of anything. Coming from underneath, the way color does on somebody who has never bought a lipstick in her life. And my lips had an edge again. I didn't draw one. I've never been able to draw one. That's a skill I do not have. It was not a color I'd have picked off a display. I'd have walked straight past it. It didn't exist until it was on me. Here's what I did with it. Nothing clever. I wore it on Tuesday. That's it. That's the entire plan. Three o'clock, school gate, doughnut, six o'clock. And it was still there at six. That's the part I hadn't allowed myself to expect. A doughnut, a juice carton I finished for her, an hour at the park, and the Areliaa Signature Lipstick was still holding at the edges when I checked in the car mirror on the way back. Nothing had climbed up into those little lines, which is the thing that had been happening to me for a decade and which I had quietly decided was simply what my face does now. I wore it the next Tuesday. And to Sunday dinner. And to the thing at the school in November where you sit on chairs built for children. Do you know when it stopped being a decision? Around week seven. That's the thing nobody tells you. The fiftieth Tuesday looks exactly like the ninth. It stopped being something I was doing and started being Tuesday. Poppy said nothing about it for months. Children don't announce. They just quietly amend the file. And I started noticing the fence. There are more of us at that fence than anybody thinks, grandmothers, three o'clock, four days a week, every school in the country. There's a woman called Dolores who's there for two of hers, and one afternoon in the spring she looked at me and said, "All right, what've you got on? I've been trying to work it out for a fortnight." I told her. Areliaa Signature Lipstick. She wrote it on the back of a permission slip. Nobody asks the crossing guard, but the crossing guard could tell you exactly who shows up. I kept the gray drawing. It's folded into quarters in my wallet, behind my library card, and it has been there the whole time. It's gone soft at the creases. I take it out about as often as you'd expect. I'm not sentimental about much. I'm sentimental about that. In May, Poppy's class did the family drawing again—different teacher, same assignment, the way schools do. Steph texted me a photo of it from the corridor at the parents' evening. No message, just the picture. Everybody's there. Steph in pink. Poppy in purple. Deb in that red. And me, with a mouth on me. Not gray. A sort of warm dark pink that isn't in any crayon box I've ever seen, and I know that for a fact, because at Sunday dinner I asked her about it. She said, absolutely matter-of-fact, already halfway out of her chair: "I had to make it. It's not in the box." Then she went to find the dog. I sat there with my fork in my hand. She had pressed two crayons over the top of each other until she got something close enough. Because the color she was trying to record didn't come in a box, and a seven-year-old worked that out entirely on her own. I did not say anything to her. There is no version of, let me tell you what this means to me, that a child needs. Later, at the sink, Steph was drying, and I was washing, and she said: "When did you start wearing lipstick again?" "Last summer." She dried the same plate for a while. Then she said, "I stopped too. I didn't even notice I'd stopped." She's thirty-six. Thirty-six, and already about four years into writing the same record I wrote, one cheerful little sentence at a time. I told her what it was. I told her the only interesting part, which is that she won't get my shade. It'll come up as something else on her, because it's made out of whoever's wearing it. She said, "That's the weirdest sales pitch I've ever heard." I said, "I know. Try it." She ordered one on her phone while she was still holding the tea towel. Hers came up a clear coral, nothing like my rose, and the first thing she said when she saw it was, "Oh. Okay. I understand now." I'll be straight with you, because I'm sixty-four and I don't trust anything that promises to change a life. It's a lipstick. It didn't give me my thirties back, and I don't want them. I was exhausted the entire time. And I'll tell you what it didn't do, because I think this is the bit that matters. It didn't make me feel like myself again. I already felt like myself. I have always felt like myself. That was never the problem. The problem was that nobody could see it, because I'd spent eight years telling them there was nothing to see, and one of them was seven and believed me. It didn't give me anything back. It gave a child something to look at. So. If any of this is yours. If you've caught yourself saying Oh, I don't wear that anymore, cheerfully, in front of somebody small. If your lips have gone drier and less defined in the last ten years and everything you own either sits on top or has crept into the lines by lunch, and somewhere in there you decided that was a fact about you rather than a fact about the lipstick. If somebody you love has said something perfectly accurate about you that you did not like hearing. You can't argue it. I promise you. I sat in a driveway with the engine off trying to find the sentence, and there isn't one. You can only out-show-up it. Whatever your Tuesday is, the school gate, the Sunday table, the pickup line, the front row, you already have the appointment. That's the whole advantage. You don't need a speech, and you don't need a new life. You need to be in the room, in color, often enough that the record changes on its own. And you need one that will still be there at six o'clock. That's the whole reason the Areliaa Signature Lipstick worked when the drawer full didn't. It isn't a shade somebody picked off a chart for four hundred million mouths. It goes on soft, it develops into one color out of your own lips, and it holds its edge through a full day instead of climbing into the lines. Fifty-one Tuesdays, in my case. I still have the gray one in my wallet. I'm going to keep it, because it was true when she drew it, and because a seven-year-old was the only person in my life honest enough to tell me. And I have the other one on the fridge. She had to make the color herself. It wasn't in the box.

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I can’t believe it…

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