My teen daughter is appraising herself in the mirror with her new braces, and I know what she sees. Or, more to the point, what she doesn’t. Because it’s the same thing I didn’t see when I looked in the mirror this morning. Perhaps you didn’t, either?

Like the Cheshire cat, for her everything has disappeared except for her teeth. Her good grades, her compassionate nature, her power – all shrank beside that glare of metal.

It’s something I understand almost too well. When I glanced in the looking glass this morning, I disappeared, too. All that was grinning back at me was my stomach, which I judged as too round, too large to be comfortably put in its place with a snap of a button.

I didn’t “see” my feet, didn’t appreciate the miles they had walked yesterday along a trail dripping with pink mimosa petals, let alone mundane marches from kitchen to mailbox. I didn’t stare in wonder at my hands, tendons pumping as I kneaded dough and blossomed it into food. Nor did I appreciate the half moons of my hips, angling out far enough to carry babies and sacks of groceries.

What would happen, I wondered, if I started appreciating instead of judging? What if I sat and really looked at my wrists. Noticed how they bend forward and backwards, unlike Barbie dolls where the plastic arms connect to the hands in a permanent wave. What if I kept looking and really noticed the thin skin just below my wrist, the delicate, unruly forest of blonde hairs?

What if I saw my body the way my 10-year-old daughter Chloe sees hers? As we were driving the other day, I asked her what part of her body she liked the least. She had never thought about that before. Well, what do you like best, I persisted? She paused, then said she liked her arms and legs, because they had grown strong through gymnastics. She also liked her eyes. Aha, I thought, here comes the vanity. But no, she liked them because she could see small things with them, like street names on maps.

As I thought about it, I wondered what life would be like if we grew brave enough to stop focusing on the 2 percent of us we judge as flawed – inside or out -- and instead look more often at the 98 percent that is beautiful and capable? And then if we went that extra step and accepted that 2 percent? Even loved it? After all, as Oscar Wilde says, “It’s not the perfect, but the imperfect that is in need of our love.”

Perhaps then I could look at my stomach and instead of fighting it I would revel at how it efficiently it processes food, how it curves sensually like women in a Reubens painting, how it’s rounded like a fine porcelain bowl. I could see the white slip of a stretch mark tattooing my belly as a badge of courage.

Imagine if when we looked at ourselves in the mirror, the image reversed? Instead of imperfections, what if the only thing grinning back at us, Cheshire cat-style, was our brilliance? What if we looked in the mirror and saw the moon and the stars and the bright snap of sunflower within us?

As my daughter grimaces in the mirror, I walk up beside her. She still sees her braces. It is up to me, in this moment, to reflect back her inner beauty. I see it gleaming before me, just as I reach to see my own.