Self-image is a mysterious and weird thing. Recently I was
having a conversation about my 13-year-old daughter, and I was explaining that
she is very much trying to figure out who she is right now. Because of that conversation, I’ve been
thinking about being that age and how I was trying to decide not so much who I was, but who
people wanted me to be. Thirteen is an awful time of growing up. One I wouldn’t
ever want to revisit. Yet sometimes, I think that I’m still trying to figure who
I am, too, and watching Lucy navigate some of this has opened up some old
wounds for me. Maybe it’s the underlying itch of being comfortable with who I
am that has never really gone away.
Don’t get me wrong. At 43, I know myself better now than I ever
have before. I am comfortable in my skin, and for the most part, I truly like
this person I’ve become. I am extremely proud of the work I do. I adore
parenting these sweet, funny girls. I am very much in love with someone who
makes me laugh every single day, and even people we meet on the street recognize how happy we
make each other. I love that. I’ve even created a relationship with the girls’
dad that is healthy, and funny, and kind…something I wasn’t sure would ever
happen after our split. But if I think about who I was even 5 years ago, I cringe
a little bit at the things I put up with, at the ways I questioned my own
decisions, and just generally at the way I felt about myself.
I see recent photos of me and I hardly know who that person
is. What happened to the thin, svelte girl who had no reason to be
self-conscious? What are these lines by my eyes? What is this rosacea and acne
that continues to plague me well into my adult years? What are these dark
circles under my eyes that won’t seem to go away? What happened to the days of
putting literally any kind of food in my mouth and never paying the price? I’d
lie if I said that I wasn’t self-conscious even back then. At my most thin I
thought I was fat. As a dance instructor, I spent HOURS in front of a full-length
mirror inspecting every inch of my body, daily, and I often did the worst, most
unhealthy things to keep myself at a certain weight.
I have to wonder, is spending precious time worrying about this
stuff now important? Or, is the person I see in those photos just the new me
and I just haven’t learned how to love her properly yet? I can tell my children all day long that
they’re beautiful. I can tell them that the number on the scale doesn’t define
them. I can tell them that the curve of their hip or the length of their nose isn’t
important. And? I truly believe ALL of those things. But what about the images
being thrown at them via social media EVERY SINGLE DAY? What if even their mom
sees photos of thin women and judges herself against something that is
unattainable, even on her best day? How do I speak about this stuff honestly
and openly with my teenage daughters without being completely full of shit?
I have absolutely no idea.
Today my Aunt Karen sent me a photo of a letter I wrote to my
grandparents when I was right around my girls’ ages. In the letter, I was so
excited to tell them about the books I’d read, about my “SuperSpeller” extra-hard
spelling list, and about how I was thrilled to be wearing a winter sweater! Even
at that age, I was becoming aware of what people thought of me, but in that
letter, and in that moment, that stuff seems SO secondary. I’ve been sitting
here tonight trying to recall the feeling of being totally engrossed in the
good STUFF and not spending one single moment thinking about what I look like
or what people think of me. Sometimes that seems like a hard place to reach
again.
Zoe is very much in this place right now, and if she does
realize that people spend any time thinking about her, she doesn’t seem to care
at all. Not one bit. She owns her awesome weirdness in a way that is refreshing
and sweet and I hope doesn’t ever change, even though I am certain that it
will. One day, someone will point out the things that she likes as being different.
One day, someone will make a comment about her that she won’t be able to
unhear. This is what happens to us. Seriously, fuck the people who do this
stuff. They are the absolute WORST. But for whatever reason, those are the
words that stick in our heads, and those words become the inner voices that stay
with us even when we are grown ass women with children of our own.
When I was a child, my mom made a meal for the family every
night for dinner, and then she sighed and moaned her way through a plate of
iceburg lettuce for herself. It makes me laugh now, because her iceburg lettuce
salad was kind of like eating cardboard in terms of any nutritional value. NOT
bitching about it, and eating what she made us would have been one thousand
percent healthier for her, but she never did that. I made a promise to myself
even back then that I would NEVER do that to my children. I promised that I
would cook FOR them, and that I would eat the same things that they eat. I promised
that I would cook WITH them and instill in them a love of how food can bring people together.
I honestly don’t know what the answer is for any of the
stuff I’ve just thrown on this page, but I think it starts and ends with being
honest with my girls. I believe it’s continuing to teach them to be accepting of
every body. I think it’s teaching them that thin doesn’t equal healthy. That self-confidence comes from trial and error. And that sometimes it takes many,
many, many years to learn how to not care about what others think. Maybe we never actually do.
