My Mother is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World

Flip it over and it's "I Saw the Sea Come In," which, as the children needed to go to bed before we got through that half, I haven't yet read (believe me, I will--my copy is in the mail).



Written by Becky Reyher, this story is utterly charming and delightfully named. A little hardworking girl from a poor family loses her parents in the field. The only way she can describe them is by saying, "My mother is the most beautiful woman in the whole world." They bring the most beautiful women to the lost little girl, but none of them is her mother. When she finds her mother, we learn that her mother isn't actually the most beautiful, strictly speaking. But she is, in the sense that, as the proverb in the book teaches us, we don't love people because they're beautiful, we think they're beautiful because we love them. This is a truth I firmly believe (I get absolutely confused when it comes to the attractiveness of people I love). But this doesn't make beauty relative; rather, it shows that what is one's own is more important and more dear than what is abstractly, "objectively" the most beautiful. It is a lesson in the virtue of loyalty.



Also, you can't see how beautiful someone is until you know him well--in this sense, my mother is the most beautiful woman in the world.