I have a slightly different comment to make: I found the repetition of "I am as implicated as anyone else" a bit heavy-handed. I think it would be more effective if you limited its use. I think the first two could be dropped without any change in the meaning of those sections.

I think the opening anecdote is a good one, but I wonder if it is possible to add some more detail: what was the weather like? What is the park like? Plastic slides, or wooden/metal ones? Lots of sand? Normally packed? Normally not? Can you set the scene a bit more, use some of your fiction chops to really help us see it?

This: "You should know, however, that I feel as uncomfortable as I feel pleased, usually even more so, when people exclaim over my daughter’s good looks" could be rewritten a bit more tightly as "You should know, however, that I usually feel more uncomfortable than pleased when people exclaim over my daughter's good looks."

This: "I imagine you are feeling one or the other or both, since people who have not gone through childhood as a social outcast usually assume you must have done something to provoke it, or at least did not do enough to stop it." For one thing, some--perhaps many--of your readers will have gone through something similar. For another, even if they have, they may not respond the way you expect. I was definitely a social outcast, I felt neither pity nor condemnation, and it irked me a bit to be told I probably did.

This: "Just to teach me a lesson, I got a beauty." it sounds to me like you're saying your daughter was born to teach you a lesson, which, as the mother of a girl with a fairly significant difference, I normally hear myself with other undertones and it bothers me. I don't believe our children are born to teach us lessons, no matter who they are, even if they do end up doing so. To me, that's peripheral. This is not, by the way, said to create an argument but to point out how this might be taken by readers.

My daughter is a dwarf. Becoming her mother has taught me many things, most noticeably about my own hypocrisy. The lessons are valuable. Nonetheless, she is not here to teach me those lessons. She is here to live her life.

Overall, I enjoyed the piece. Your ruminations on the subject of beauty placed in the context of your history and your relationship to your beautiful daughter were interesting and often lovely. I liked that you treated it as a complex situation in which you also play a part. The above are nitpicks, really, and it seems that no one else shares them. But there you are.

Thanks for sharing it.

Andrea

Frances's Big Adventures: http://www.athenadreaming.org/Beanie
http://www.thewholemom.com

Very nice -- tightly written.

I have only one comment, which you do not have to listen to (I'm still waiting to be confirmed as God, but the paperwork keeps holding me up.) I don't think you show what you mean by "I am as implicated as anyone else." I think I get what you mean, but I don't think that anyone who doesn't already get it will understand what you mean.

I'd look for someone to publish this.