Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Enough.

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.

2 comments:

  1. Enjoying your writing and your insights again. Keep reflecting. It's good for the soul. Kiss, kiss, M

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  2. It's so weird what we remember and what we don't. I recall a lot of what you've written about here but I don't recall your mother eating just salad and not what she fixed for us. Which reminds me of one of my father's oldest stupid jokes. Do you know what a honeymoon salad is? Lettuce alone. Love, Dad.

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