Mother Nose Best

I was eleven, in the church gym, trying to find my silhouette that I'd made for a mother daughter activity on the wall. I examined the half dozen or so pictures, but not one of them looked like me or at least how I thought I looked.

My friends giggled and "kindly" helped me identify my likeness. "Yours is right there; the one with the big nose."

I was mortified. From that moment, I knew I wasn't as good, wasn't as pretty as the rest of them and I felt embarrassed, almost ashamed, that I had not been aware of this before.

 It was also at that moment that I mounted a continual, relentless effort that ruled my thoughts and actions to shield the world from the unsightly horror that was my nose. During school, I literally kept my nose in a book, or hid by my hand, or my arms by putting my head on my desk. Anything to hide the horror that was my honker. I even took up sleeping on my face thinking that I could force a little bit of it back inside my head. Of course it didn't work, but for years I sported a line--just like a minus sign--across my nose.

I worried that people were staring at my nose. My bigger worry was that they would think I didn't know how ugly it was, so to eliminate any confusion, I made jokes about it.

If this wasn't bad enough, at thirteen I discovered I had chicken lips. This was pointed out to me by my "helpful" Young Women leader who was teaching us how to apply make-up. And I quote, "If you have chicken lips like Jill, you can blah, blah, blah. . ." The rest was kind of lost on me because just like the silhouette nose thingy, I had no idea my lips were offensive too. I had no clue that full lips were what I was supposed to want. Heck, some of my best friends were chickens. Seriously. But that's a different story.

So why am I writing all this? Because 40 years later I finally like who I am. I finally feel beautiful, not because of how I look, but because of how I feel.

I'm throwing out the "b" word because of that Dove commercial where they have the "beautiful" door and the "average" door and women have to choose which one to walk through. Beauty has got to be more than how we look. We all know people who are visually appealing but are "ugly" and plain or average people who are beautiful, glorious in fact. We can choose to be beautiful.

I am writing this because my beautiful daughter, who looks so much like me but is so much better in so many ways said she wanted a nose job. I was crushed. How much of my "nose" paranoia had rubbed off on her?

So my dear "T," forget about your nose, embrace beauty. A nose job might make you look different, but it would also contradict everything that I love about you: your ability to see the beauty in others; your ability to help others see the beauty in themselves; your abundant joy and happiness with life and its many opportunities; your ability to triumph over adversity; your ability to not take life too seriously. If you changed your nose, I'm afraid you wouldn't be able to see past the end of it.

I wasted so many years worrying about my nose, focusing on myself, that I couldn't focus on others. Nobody cares about your nose. They only care about how you make them feel. So, forget your nose (or your hair, or your weight or your crooked teeth--insert whatever insecurities you have here--and leave them here) and be beautiful.