Girl at the Mirror

Girl at the Mirror

If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that’s all that you really are. Time erodes all such beauty, but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind: Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage. These are the things I cherish so in you. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world. But I know you’ll make it a better place. ~Marmee, Little Women

Dropping the fistful of Q-tips back in the drawer, my twenty-three-month-old daughter watched as I applied makeup. Then she stretched one dimpled hand and cried, “Some!”

I shook my head, swiping my lips with Burt’s Bees. “No, baby,” I said. “You don’t need this stuff. You’re beautiful the way you are.”

I set the lip balm down on the sink and stared at myself in the mirror, struck by the inconsistency between my actions and my words.

My daughter may be a cut and paste of my husband’s image, but she shadows my every action. Therefore, I must always remain conscious of providing her with a healthy body image.

The importance of which, I know all too well.

In early adolescence, a well-meaning family member told me to never let myself get fat for my husband. A boy who I had an all-consuming crush on during junior high said—while watching me sneak a cookie after choir practice—that I would become a blimp.

My freshman year in college, after an excruciating week of cheerleading workouts, we were paraded in a line and asked to step on the scales. We were congratulated for losing weight, for being deemed skinny enough to stunt with a guy instead of an all-girl group.

When I gained some weight my sophomore year due to stress, a cheerleader asked me to again step on the scales. He said nothing afterward, but he didn’t have to. I stepped off the scales onto the padded gym floor in my stocking feet, humiliated, feeling like I would never measure up.

At 5’2”, I weighed 115 pounds.

I don’t believe you can or should find inner healing through another person. But after my husband and I married, he helped convince me of my self-worth, and I stopped striving and started to relax in his love for me. As marriage is a reflection of our relationship with our Creator, I began to relax in God’s love as well.

To be frustrated with my body, was to be frustrated with the Artist who had formed it from dust and called my cells into being. To not embrace the gift of aging—of smile lines, pregnancy stretch marks, silver hair—was to not enjoy the rhythm of a life lived well.

I am determined, for love of my daughter and for myself, to embrace it all.

Because, right now, that daughter of mine is across the living room, sitting on my husband’s lap, and he’s saying, “Where’s your nose? Where’s your eyes . . . your ears? Your belly?”

She smiles and tugs at her ears; she points at her belly button, the soft indention concealed beneath her bright peach onesie.

Right now, she does not judge her nose, her eyes, her ears, and her belly according to cultural perfection, and I pray it will always remain thus.

I pray that we, her parents, will have the knowledge to teach that her worth is not determined by the makeup she applies or the number she reads on the scales.

Her worth is found in the beauty of her spirit, and how she shares that true beauty with others.

I pray, also, that as I teach my daughter this truth, I will continue to learn. . . .

Have you also struggled with seeing your true beauty? Can you share some of your journey with us?

Image: “Girl at Mirror” by Norman Rockwell, 1954.