She has a way about her

Tonight, as Seren brushed her teeth, perched on my hip, I looked into the mirror. I brushed my hair away from my face and scrunched up my nose. "I look tired." I thought to myself. Almost instantly, Seren did the same thing; she brushed her own hair back from her forehead and made a face.

My mom is a beautiful woman. She has short, brown, curly hair. She has kind green eyes and warm, loving hands. I will always know her hands. These are the hands that held mine as a little girl, helped me learn to sew, wished me well when I moved out and massaged my back as I birthed my own daughter.

Growing up, I would watch her getting ready to go out. She would mumble and "humph" about what she saw in the mirror. Too fat. Too tired. Too "frumpy". This has continued for years and years.

She had a nervous energy about her as she got ready for a party. Things had to be "just so" and her appearance was often the last straw in her frustration before a party got started. She always said she was too overweight. She would tap her hips as if tapping them would make them smaller. Later on in life, when I grew much taller than my mom and had yet to grow my own post-baby pooch my mom would say to me, "I am living vicariuosly through your body" as she would hand me a bag of new clothes.

I don't know what she would recall from these times but I just saw Mom. I always thought she was beautiful. I remember telling her that. "You look so pretty Mom!"

"Oh no, I just wish I had pressed this skirt. Or just gotten new shoes. I just need to loose 5 more pounds. It is those damn cookies. Oh well. Lets go."

But I was serious. She was Mom with a capital M, so beautiful, my everything. I used to love drawing her as a member of my family because I got to use a black crayon for her hair and a green one for her eyes. The rest of us required brown crayons for hair and blue for eyes. Mom was different. Which only made her more beautiful.

Maybe mom did know, deep down inside, that she was beautiful. Maybe my comments as a young child made her feel loved and gorgeous. I don't know. But as a mom now, I hope that if Seren every looks at me with the look of admiration that I used to give my mom and tells me that I look pretty, that I'll listen.