Quite beautiful.

Violet walks up to me with purpose, arms outstretched, so I pick her up and give her a hug. "I love you, Mama," she tells me, nestled into my neck. She pulls back to look into my eyes. "You're beautiful and pretty," she says. I wonder at these terms of endearment she's learned, think of how often I must tell her those words: love, beautiful, pretty. I worry about self-image, worry about the first time someone will make her feel less than those three words, and my heart clenches. I look into her eyes and give her those words back, and more: smart, funny, proud. "I'm proud of you every day, Violet," I tell her. Her legs are so long they fall halfway down my body while I'm holding her. Her teeth are perfect rows, her cheeks so full when she smiles.

::

"Stop being so pretty," I tell Madeleine playfully. A second passes: "Madeleine! What did I tell you? You just got PRETTIER!" Sometimes she laughs at this. Sometimes she denies it. "I'm not pretty," she says. Offhand, after she climbs into my bed in the morning and snuggles under the covers, I ask her: "Why are you so darn cute?" She appears to genuinely ponder this. "I don't know," she says. And I stroke her hair from her face the way she likes, take in her deep brown eyes, dark and bright at the same time, like there is gold at the center. Her features are so delicate, her body long and slim with surprising definition of muscle, especially in her stomach and legs. Every morning when she comes to pull me from sleep I wrap my arms around her and remember the shape she made when she was a tiny thing, all slopes and rolls instead of angles and sharp limbs. She has a small discoloration in one eyebrow, another, much less noticeable, on her forehead. One day she will hate these things, I know it. One day someone will say these marks make her less than pretty, and I wonder how I will fortify her against it. She's so beautiful I feel it like a smile that demands your face, and I want her to feel it, too. I feed her the words I feed her sister: love, beautiful, pretty, smart, funny, proud.

::

My hair is not as thick as it used to be and is abominably frizzy. Clothes don't fit the way I want them to, and yesterday I noticed one side of my waist curves in more than the other. One hip has a pocket of fat that is more pronounced than on the other side. Lines crawl across my face and the pores around my nose are wide. I had a full-fledged zit on my upper lip a few days ago. Hair grows on my chin and my eyebrows aren't even. I have a vicious overbite and a mole on the side of my jaw. I see all of these things every time I look in the mirror. I acknowledge them every single time, and once upon a time, they could ruin my whole day. Ugly, fat, unsexy, lumpy, unworthy.

Today, I acknowledge these words, then carefully place them back down, away from me. My eyes have green and gold flecks, and you know what? My calves are pretty nice, too. No, scratch that. They are freaking awesome. My body can run 4 miles fairly easily, and when it does, I feel wild and strong. My body grew two of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. And if I want them to always feel beautiful, I have to feel it, too. So I give myself the words I give them: beautiful, pretty, smart, funny, proud. Because I'm worth it. Every single one of us is. We are all quite beautiful if we choose to see it, and even more beautiful when we finally believe it. And so I will keep trying.