The Eye of the Beholder

Let's face it: human babies are, in reality, geeky-looking, squiggley little critters that we would normally find repellant or, at best, amusing, upon close inspection. But probably as a mechanism of species preservation, we instead look upon these helpless, squirming, gelatinous troglodytes as the most transcendently beautiful beings ever placed on the earth.

Because, honestly, if they came into the world as teenagers, we'd probably eat our young.

Now, almost all parents live in ignorant bliss of this irony. (Fortunately, my twin girls are actually beautful, otherwise I would be guilty of some pretty vain hypocrisy here) so I occupy some comfortable distance from which to comment on this odd phenomenon. By the way, I can provide photographic evidence of my daughters' unparralleled beauty (see sample above). Just respond with your email and I will send a few of the 17,000 pictures I have of them. There would be more, but Flash Drive #6 fell into the diaper pail and has not yet returned from being digitally remastered.

OK- so granted the disparity bewtween reality and perception might make it hard for us to be objective about our kids.

That is not such a bad thing.

Imagine how much harder it would have been for all of us to adjust to the vagaries and injustices of the world if we hadn't received unconditional love from our primary caregivers, or occasionally heard our parents say:
"Nice work - in fact, this is the best (fill in the blank) I've ever seen in my life! keep up the good work."

(By the way, this might be a good time to reveal something painful: you probably were not really the "Student of the Month" in fourth grade--sorry)

I remember when I first started playing violin at age 10. My teacher was a master of many instruments, but she was perhaps the best violin and viola player I have ever heard. I know that my early attempts to create something other than painful screeches out of the hand-me-down Steiner knock-off I inherited courtesy of my sister's abandoned music aspirations were probably agonizingly slow to develop. Yet Mrs. Marsh would flash me her approving smile, and, in a business-like spirit of collaboration, play the second part in the regular duets we performed at the end of the lessons.

Here is where it would be nice to say that I was a musical prodigy and eventually became a soloist or concert master, but life rarely turns out that way.

I did, however, use the knowledge and skill gained from four years of violin lessons and school orchestra classes to become a reasonably competent bass and guitar player in my twenties; I even worked professionally for five years--until I realized the odds of becoming the next Paul McCartney were uncomfortably stacked against me.

Still, without the benign half-truths and outright false praise we receive in our formative years, I doubt many of us would acquire the foundation of self worth we need to survive the often cruel reality that follows childhood bliss.

Some might argue that the "tough love" approach is better: helping young people build up thicker skins with which they might survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but it is certainly true we need to feel that at some point in our lives we were all beautiful to someone.