Do you see what I see?

“I look weird.”

Not me, that is. (I just look like I have a budding spare tire, thanks to way too much holiday food and drink — on the heels of way too much Halloween candy stolen from my children, and the fact that between illness and work and weather, I haven’t been able to run as much as usual. Ugh.)

It’s Clio. And she doesn’t look weird at all. She just thinks she does.

She’s been such a trooper all along about the changes in her appearance due to chemo and steroids — losing her hair, gaining weight and getting puffy cheeks due to steroids, not growing at all for basically two years while her sister and her peers shot up like dandelions around her.

She complained occasionally about the way other people saw her: she didn’t like it when other kids stared, or said she looked chubby (aren’t children darling to each other?), or mistakenly thought she was a boy. But her distress, for the most part, seemed to be externally focused — it was about how other people saw her. She didn’t complain a whole lot about how she saw herself.

Lately, though, she’s started saying that she looks “weird.” That her cheeks are chubby. That her hair is too thin. That she isn’t pretty.

What’s crazy is that her cheeks really aren’t chubby anymore. That is, they have all but completely lost their steroid puffiness. She’s always had a fairly round face, and the shape is almost all the way back to what it was before she began treatment. Her body has returned to its petite little shape. Nobody would look at her and say she was fat.

Her hair, yes, is thinner and coarser than it was before she was diagnosed, but I think to most people she probably just looks like a kid with a cute short haircut. (Especially since she’s started asking for barrettes in it. Adorable!)

Our church does a nativity play on Christmas eve  — which is a little funny since it’s a Unitarian Universalist church, and Jesus is viewed as a great teacher, but not any more divine than you or me, but what the hell. It’s Christmas, right? So we watch the kids dress up, adorably, as shepherds and angels and magi, and we sing bowdlerized Christmas Carols and, in the case of many of us in the congregation (myself included) feel nostalgic for the various Christian churches we fled.

Anyway. Elsa has done it for the past two years (angel, then magus) but Clio has sat it out, preferring to watch from the pews. This year, though, she expressed interest in participating. She’s gotten really into theater, and is even doing a serious children’s theater production that she had to audition for and everything.

Specifically, she wanted to play Mary. I told her that usually an older girl played that part, but asked anyway. And none of the older girls had bitten, so Clio was given the honor. Elsa, meanwhile, nabbed lead angel, which means she gets to hold the big star and look regal and sublime. (We’ll see how that goes!!)

But then Clio balked. “Everyone will look at me,” she said. I’m not pretty enough, she said. I look weird. She held her hands against her cheeks. “I have a fat face.”

What am I supposed to say to that? I mean, forget trying to convince her that it doesn’t matter, and beauty is on the inside and alla that. (Which we do tell the girls on a regular basis.)  Seriously, she does have a lovely face. Round — but not fat — and lovely. Right??

But it’s so hard to see yourself as others see you. When I weighed 105 pounds in high school, I was convinced I wasn’t thin enough. I didn’t see what a twig I already was.

So, I don’t know. I’m probably going about it all wrong to try convince her that she is, in fact, beautiful, instead of just telling her that she radiates inner beauty, or whatever the parentally PC thing is. (I’m sure the internets will tell me.)

But last night at a friend’s tree-trimming party, while a big group photo was being taken, I was looking at her from the side and she looked so sweet (Mary-like!) and lovely (as did her sister, sitting lead-angel-like above her) that I just had to snap a picture. I don’t know why it came out so blurry, but you get the idea.

I haven’t shown it to her yet. I don’t know if she’ll see what I see, anyway. (And yes. I am making a Christmas carol reference with that phrase. Clever, eh?)

Having known the pain of not feeling pretty enough (as do most girls at some point, I assume), it makes my mother’s heart hurt that she’s feeling that — and at so young an age.