Before I understood family, faith, or fear, there was a plastic tiara—and the quiet lesson it carried about shame and sparkle. As I walked into the ballet shop with my mother to buy my first pair of ballet slippers, I saw it—perched high on a shelf above the rows of pastel leotards and tights: a plastic tiara, glimmering under the shop lights.
There was magic in that tiara.
Not the kind of magic you could name at four years old, but the kind you could feel. It wasn’t just a toy—it was a sign, a quiet kind of hope. Delicate and bejeweled, it glowed with a promise that felt like mine.
I wanted it. Badly.
I knew I shouldn’t ask—wanting things wasn’t encouraged, especially not something so frivolous—but I did anyway. My mother stiffened. My father was a minister, and we were expected to live simply.
The tiara wasn’t part of our family’s church uniform.
Still, after enough pleading, she sighed and added it to the little purple shopping bag beside my new slippers. The next week, I skipped into my first ballet class, brimming with excitement.
My mother had pulled my blonde hair into a bun, the tiara perched proudly on top, secured with a cluster of bobby pins. I felt important—like someone who had permission to shine.
But before class began, the teacher strutted over and looked straight at me. “No tiaras,” she said curtly. “It’s not part of the uniform.” My face burned. My throat tightened. I pulled the tiara off—bobby pins flying—and tucked it away in my cubby while the other girls watched.
It was the first time I remember feeling shame. Shame for asking for something beautiful.
Shame for believing I was special enough to wear it. Shame for stepping beyond a line I somehow already knew was there. After class, I climbed into the back seat of our brown Toyota station wagon. “Where’s the tiara?” my mother asked. “I had to take it off,” I whispered. She didn’t respond, but I felt her relief. She had known all along—it was too much. Too showy. Too sparkly. In that silence between us, I learned what it meant to want too much. I had wanted to stand out—and that wasn’t safe in our world.
Attention was a limited resource, something you earned quietly, never claimed outright. That was my first step into becoming the one who didn’t quite fit the family mold. What was only a child’s longing for lightness and beauty was quietly recast as superficial. Vapid. Frivolous.
And over time, I began to live into that label. When no one could see beyond my desire for sparkle, I stopped trying to show them what was underneath. It was safer to play the part expected of me than to risk being misunderstood again. At home, reminders of who we were—and who we were supposed to be—were everywhere. A mix of family portraits and crucifixes.
My namesake, Hannah Lawrence Whitney, gazed down from her gilded frame each night at dinner, her white dress and piercing blue eyes glowing in the candlelight. I always thought she would have approved of a tiara. We lived between reverence and restraint—holding tight to what proved our past while keeping a careful distance from it. But to want anything openly was a threat to the image that held us together under the stability of God—a God my parents believed in deeply, and one who didn’t seem to embrace sparkle.
My father’s devotion to restraint wasn’t just about faith—it was also about fear. His own father, an alcoholic, reckless race-car driver, had lost nearly everything through excess and indulgence—a fall from grace that still echoed in our house. For my father, God was a safeguard against the chaos he’d inherited—a kind of spiritual armor to keep his family’s past from breaking through again. In my father’s eyes, beauty, pleasure, and desire weren’t just dangerous—they were what had destroyed his family once before.
And so, when I reached for the tiara, I wasn’t just defying a family rule. I was waking something in my father he’d spent his whole life trying to forget. It was a quiet inheritance—passed from father to daughter—the burden of carrying what others couldn’t bear to face: the demons of the past.
And later I’d learn there’s a word for that child who holds a family’s unspoken pain: scapegoat—the outlier who carries what others cannot. It’s a story I’ve spent a lifetime breaking apart—and beneath it, I found a quiet, sparkling truth waiting all along. Because somewhere along the way, I stopped confusing sparkle with sin. And I began to understand that wanting light—beauty, joy, expression—wasn’t defiance at all.
The light was never the problem. It was the fear of it that was.
I just wish my incredible father had been able to see that too.