Everyone Is Beautiful

by Katherine Center

That was what I wanted Peter to understand—that everything you did for your children was filtered and refracted through their personalities.

There was nothing you could take credit for. You just tried to hold yourself together, give them lots of hugs, get them in the tub at least once a day, and hope for the best.

What I needed so desperately, and did not have in my life, was something I could point to and say, “I did that.” Something that...

Because the truth was, there was a dark underbelly of terror to motherhood. You loved your children with such an overwhelming fierceness that you were absolutely vulnerable at every moment of every day: They could be taken from you. Somehow, you could lose them.

The threats to your child were infinite. And the thing was, if any of your children’s lives were ruined, even a little bit, yours would be, too.

As for getting skinny, I never really made it. After all those months of working so hard to bring myself back into my body, after trying so relentlessly to recover that lost version of myself that I couldn’t stop mourning, I finally found a stopping place—and settled out at a mom size. Not a high-school-girl size, not a college-girl size, but a mature, woman’s, now-I-really-get-it size. I got stronger, and maybe trimmer, but I never actually returned—as I confess I’d been hoping—to my pre-mom self. Which made sense. Because I was not that self anymore, and I was no longer even close to that self. In the end, that was a good thing.

I believe the eyes see everything through the heart—and nothing in the world feels as good as resting them on someone you love. I have trained my eyes to look for beauty, and I’ve gotten very good at finding it. You can argue and tell me it’s not true, but I really don’t care what anyone says. I have come, at last, to believe in the title I came up with for the book: Everyone Is Beautiful.