.

After Addy was born, Keith and I had to decide whether or not to pursue treatment for her port wine stain.

It’s odd – you have this beautiful baby girl, and you know she’s absolutely perfect, but there’s something you have to “fix.”

We were 90% certain we would treat the stain… In hindsight, I realize the only reason it wasn’t 100% was because we felt that, by treating it, we were acknowledging that it was a blemish.  And we didn’t want her to see it as a blemish.

But over time, I learned something rather profound: you can both call the error and call it beautiful.  An the fact is, the port wine stain is an error, a mistake that occurred in development; trying to label it anything else deviates from the truth.  But that doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful.

And once you wake up to that truth, you realize how much of this beautiful world is so, not in spite of, but because of the errors.  It’s the deviations from “perfect” that we find interesting, lovely, attractive.  A towering, twisting oak tree gnarled by age and storm; the jagged edges of a rock cleft by violent wind and ancient water; those tiny little pigment mutations sprinkled on the nose that we affectionately call “freckles”.  The tree, the rock, the skin… all deviate from their error-free Platonic ideal, and yet all are more beautiful for those deviations.

So, we face the error honestly.  We zap the invasive blood vessels that have masked our daughter’s face from birth. And yet, every step of the way, we affirm not only her beauty in general, but the unique beauty of her face for the lovely error she she’s blessed to bear.

“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”

— Alice Walker