"Beauty of a mother"

The first time it happened, we're out walk ing: my little boy hold ing my left hand, his older sister on my right, and the baby, six weeks old, asleep in her snugly. We're still at the stage when my taking a shower seems like an accomplishment.

I haven't lost all the weight I gained while pregnant, it's been months since I had my hair highlighted to preserve the conceit that I remain as blonde as I was at 16, I look like I'm getting as little sleep as I am, and I am wearing a nursing bra? In short, not a glamorous moment.

Really, I-don't-need-anyoneto-tell-me-so, drop-dead beautiful. It has taken three children to deliver me to this state, this symmetry of boy on my left, girl on my right, and baby on my breast. Ridiculous, but as we f navigate the sidewalk I feel ra diant, as if I were wearing a dress encrusted with precious stones, reflecting the sun's light.

Wasn't I supposed to feel this way on the day I married my children's father? Photographs suggest I made an attractive bride, but I was so over whelmed by the momentous ness of the occasion that all I felt was scared, not at all sure I was equal to the promises I was about to make.

Perhaps it's all the fairy tales I've been reading with the older children. The princess is always beautiful, she anticipates the arrival of her prince and their union? The point of which is to make a prince or princess of their own.

My mother was 18 when I I was born, an event she associ t ated with stretch marks, vari cose veins, and the encum t brance of a baby she didn't f want? Not with beauty, not at all. What little power she had, she believed, in being desirable to a man, and I had stolen that from her. Tired, worn, perspir ing under the snugly straps, I wouldn't expect to feel even I presentable. But the consciousness of walking forward into life flanked by children is transforming, it is for someone like me, for whom motherhood has redeemed an unhappy past.

From this moment on, I never feel more beautiful than when I am with my children.

Perhaps we've just emerged from the car, rumpled, cross, covered with dog hair? Every mile spent together on the road undoes a minute of primping.

To visit the cousins: I might as well have skipped the shower, the mascara, the hairbrush.

Still, when we walk through the door, I'm smiling from something cosmetics can't deliver. It's the consciousness of my good fortune.

My husband took pictures of me holding our first child, we were in a garden. It was March 1990, and the light had the ten der quality of early spring, pulling forth pale green buds.

I'm not looking at the camera, the baby has all my attention.

Wow, I thought, when I saw those pictures? What a lovely face that woman has. It took 10 years, two more babies, and many more rolls of film before I understood, That's me. That's what I look like. I don't always beam at my children? What mother does? But when I do, I'm beautiful.