"Is her hemangioma continuing to fade?" Alexis' pediatrician asked me at her annual exam back in February.

It felt like a trick question. If I said, "Yes," would the conversation go away? The conversation that required that I acknowledge that my kid isn't perfect? If I said, "No," would there be a magic bullet? Some sort of instant treatment that would make the spot on her forehead disappear?

I knew the true answer. I just didn't want to admit it.

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I don't see it. I never have. In fact, back when it was bad, notable, and maybe even a little frightening, I was frequently thrown off guard when looking at a photo of Alexis. I would stare at the photo, the bright red strawberry very obvious, and look at Alexis, wondering why it photographed so differently than reality.

The answer, of course, is that to know Alexis is to truly see Alexis. When you have lost yourself in her blue/green eyes and swam in the waves of her charisma, you just don't see the mark. Photos don't even come close to capturing the personality that is bigger than the hemangioma.

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Alexis and I stood patiently in line at the grocery store waiting to pay for our Lima beans and bread. Our turn finally arrived and the cashier glanced up at us. "Hi, honey! Ohhhh, how did you get that booboo on your head?" she asked.

Alexis looked at me dumbfounded. She doesn't know that she has something on her forehead that makes her "different."

I don't see it, but other people do.

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I've never talked to Alexis about her hemangioma. It seems so stupid, so shallow. It's just a couple of blood vessels that aren't quite right. They are no cause for concern, not any sort of danger, just purely a vanity issue. I don't care that the red mark is there, and she certainly doesn't care. However, kids can be cruel. Kids have the power to make her care. Kids have the power to make her hurt.

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I've ignored the pediatrician's recommendation to call the pediatric dermatologist to discuss follow-up for the hemangioma for five months now. Really, it just seems so dumb to even care about it when there are kids with much bigger battles to fight. A simple Google image search of the word "hemangioma" is like a drop in the ocean of potential awfulness. Alexis is nearly perfect.

We are so very lucky.

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I ran across this photo today. It was taken a little over a year ago.

It's a great photo of Alexis, certainly one of my favorites. Given that I have thousands of photos of the kid, that's saying something. But, the problem with having thousands of photos of your kid's smiling face is that you can't ignore the evidence. The mark stopped fading a long time ago.

It's time that I confront that which I don't see.

But I don't want to.

Alexis is beautiful exactly the way she is. Hearing a doctor tell me otherwise doesn't make me happy.