Every woman needs a full-length mirror in their home don’t they? I have been living without one since I moved into my house four years ago. Recently I went to Target, picked out a mirror and installed it as soon as I could remove the shrink-wrap. It looked great on the wall. I could not have been more pleased.

A few days later I decided to test the mirror to see how my shoes looked with my dress. As I looked into the mirror, I did not have to ask,”Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all.” I knew it was not me. I was supposed to be looking at my shoes, but I couldn’t take my eyes off something else. It was my width! Why did I suddenly look so…large? Had I gained weight in the last few days? Why did my cheeks look so fat? Something was not right. I could feel it. I walked into the other room and looked in the bathroom mirror. As I suspected, I looked thinner. To me it was actually ‘normal’. Strange.

I returned to the full-length mirror. Yup, just as I thought, I looked 20 or 40 pounds heavier. This was worse than being on television! I had the misfortune of having installed what I can only refer to as a ‘fun house mirror’. It was like the mirrors they have at the amusement park where you look at yourself and you look really tall or really wide? I now have a fun-house mirror to look at myself every day!

As I dress for an evening out, I can only use the mirror to verify my clothes and shoes match because how I ‘look’ cannot be taken seriously. The mirror is definitely more ‘fun’, than functional, but better to label the mirror ‘fun’ than to be hung up on the way the mirror made me look. Life isn’t supposed to be about how we look on the outside, but how we feel on the inside. I guess as long as my shoes match my dress, I am satisfied with how I look no matter what mirror I am looking in.