What the Gods Give

“Lilacs or tea roses, my dear?” 

Mara was too busy in her dressing room mirror to hear her mother calling her from down the hall. She turned from side to side for what seemed like the 20th time. The dress was too short...she must have grown again since they had it altered. The hi-low hem of it now sat in an awkward place on her calves when it was supposed to be longer, creating a train behind her. It made her calves look so wide. The bust was awkwardly tight too, now. She had tried to do her own makeup as well, going for pinks and purples and warm tones to bring in both the color of her dress and her eyes, but it looked very patchy and hamfisted to her. Everything was just off about her look. She pouted at the mirror.

“Mara? Did you hear me?” 

The clicking of heels came down the hall now and the door swung open. “Mara? What are-” the woman stopped. Mara had already begun hastily untying her dress and smudging her face roughly in her hands. She hastily yanked out the pins that were holding a messily-done updo. The woman stood in the doorway for a minute watching her daughter try to shrug off her dress in anger, but ultimately failing to get it over her chest and crying out in frustration, throwing her bracelets across the room. 

Mara hadn’t noticed her mother until she had finally walked over and put her hands on her arms. “Mara, what’s the matter, sweet pea?” her sing-songy voice was smooth and soothing, but Mara still struggled to save face. Her watering eyes gave her grief away. “It’s not right, mama! Nothing!” she wailed, voice breaking. “I can’t get anything to look how I want, everything looks so wrong matter what I do! I can’t even make up my own face right! I’m thirteen, I should be able to do it myself by now but- but I’m too…” The words caught in her throat. Her mother pulled her into a warm hug. Mara clung to her, taking fistfulls of pink silk into her hands. “I hate it, mama. I don’t want to go…everyone there is going to look so beautiful, and I’m going to look like a hag.” 

She felt her mother’s hand rubbing her back. “Don’t say such things, my dear. Come, show me what you had planned.” Mara pulled back and met her mother’s gaze. Whatever makeup she had put on her face had been smudged in every direction from her outburst. Half her hair sat haphazardly pinned on top of her head with the other half undone, and her dress straps halfway down her arms. Meanwhile, her mother looked like Sharess herself; silken hair pinned perfectly back and decorated with golden beads and flowers, makeup perfectly symmetrical and complementing both her green eyes and rose-colored dress. It was just perfect. All of it. Mara let out an exasperated sigh and forced herself out of her mother’s arms. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all gone now. I ruined it already.” Her voice was bitter as anything as she walked to her vanity and sat in the chair with a huff, removing her necklace and the rest of her jewelry. 

“Mara, please. What’s the matter with what you had? You were so excited about your ensemble last night. What happened?” Her mother stepped over to her again. 

“I put it on my body, that’s what happened,” Mara said sharply. “I look like someone tried to make-up a horse’s face! And my dress is too small again, both at the hem and in the bust-” she pulled the straps of her dress up to show proof. 

Her mother couldn’t help but chuckle which made Mara shoot her a dirty look. “I’m afraid you got your bust from me, my dear. Sorry about that. I struggled with the same thing when I was your age, as did your grandmother,” she said, taking her daughter’s strawberry blonde hair in her hands and beginning to brush out the tangles and unpin the rest. “Beauty is both a blessing and a curse Sharess puts on mankind. Many children in Faerûn feel the same as you do when they look at themselves in the mirror.” Mara had stopped resisting her mother’s touch. She only sat in the chair and watched in the mirror. “If you don’t feel your best, you don’t have to come.” her mother said, not unkindly.

Mara pulled a face at that. “I can’t just not go to my own birthday party! Everyone will be here soon, I just…” she stopped and sighed. Deep down she did want to salvage her ensemble somehow but was fresh out of patience. If she had to try one more hairstyle, one more dress, one more dab of makeup, she would explode. “I just...don’t even know where to begin. Every step makes things worse.” She slumped back in her chair. Her mother was beginning to pull locks of hair up and weave them together behind her head, picking up a cluster of jeweled flower pins to hold in her mouth and take as needed. 

“Mara, you are only thirteen. You can’t be expected to be able to perfect something new on the first try. No one can. Not at thirteen, not at thirty. What would your deva have to say if they heard you treating yourself so harshly?” Her mother took a few pins from her mouth and secured the first half of the updo. 

“They don’t say anything!” Mara clapped her hands in her lap in an exaggerated shrug. “And if they did finally decide to say something, they won’t be able to fix my horse face or alter my dress or give me a chest that fits in normal clothes.” 

“Of course not, that isn’t what they do.” Her mother started on the other side of her hair now. “The devas of Sharess — or any deva for that matter — don’t speak with you. They send you dreams, visions, and gut feelings. They aren’t a voice in your head that tells you what to do. They give you the tools, and you must follow your instincts.”

Her mother leaned down so her face was right next to Mara’s in the mirror, tilting Mara’s chin up a little with a finger. “They are not guiding you on how to fix your problems this time because, perhaps, they are not problems at all.” Mara’s amethyst eyes shifted between her reflection and her mother’s. People had always said she would be just as beautiful as her mother, if not more so thanks to her radiant soul, but she usually just brushed it off as false platitudes. However, even through her mucked up makeup, compared to her mother’s flawless application, she was able to see it. The long face and big forehead Mara insisted she had, her mother’s was proportioned similarly. Their jawlines both had a steep curve, and their eyes were both set in their face the same way. Even their hairlines had the same shape, now that her mother had pinned her hair back in the same way she had hers. Mara’s expression softened and she wiped her eyes, leaving smudges of mascara in the corners.

“Never let anyone — or anything — make you think you aren’t beautiful, Mara. Your body is yours to love and yours alone. The gods may give you your body, and people may tell you you’re beautiful, but no one, not even a celestial, can give you the gift of self-love. It must come from you. And so long as you believe you are beautiful, others will see it tenfold, and you will shine.” She kissed her daughter’s hair and pulled two flower blooms from her dress pocket, putting each to Mara’s hair and interchaining them, smiling reassuringly. “Now, tell me dear: lilacs or tea roses?”

Mara sat up straighter.