We debated whether or not to try on the dress. It was a size too big, and my sewing skills are decided lacking. I tried to push her toward the red one, the black one, but her eyes stayed focused on the champagne-colored princess holiday dress hanging on the rack at T.J. Maxx, the last of it's kind, the wrong size, and six-year-old pure crack.
I sighed, putting it in the cart, knowing it would gape and maybe be scratchy and there was no way I was spending one more Christmas with my kid in a beautiful dress with a t-shirt under it. We'd had a great day, but a long day, filled with errands and running in and out of stores in the brisk Halloween wind and listening to the Nutcracker on repeat over and over and over.
In the dressing room, I helped her into it. The straps needed to be taken up, and the bodice was gaping a little. But the color complemented perfectly her pale skin and red hair. The bits of glitter on the skirt picked up the harsh flourescent lighting and reflected it back onto her face. She stood, staring at herself, twisting this way and that, fascinated by her reflection. And I could see why -- something about that champaigne color brought out all the peach in her cheeks, the blue in her eyes.
She looked beautiful.
I sighed again, knowing I was going to have to figure out the dress, but also because a thirty-year gap existed in my life between when I thought I was beautiful as a child and now, when I'm changing my ideas about what makes a person beautiful, when I have become beautiful to myself again. For me, now, it has little to do with champagne dresses and more to do with looking in the mirror for best features instead of worst.
She stepped down off the dressing-room bench and looked up at me with begging eyes.
"Please, Mommy? Please can I have this dress?"
Of course. I want to remember forever the sincere, not-at-all arrogant look on your face when you saw your own beauty, child. I don't want you to lose that.
I don't want the world to ever convince her she is anything less than what I see.
