Recently I have found myself encouraging my preteen to believe that she is beautiful and thin and telling her daily that she is FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE. She is 5'6" and just a little over 100lbs and has been asking me again and again if I think she is fat. Do I think she is fat?! I think she is tall and willowy and leggy and gorgeous and fat is not a word that ever comes to mind when I look at her. However, because she is taller than most girls and boys in her grade and because she is much further along the puberty train, she feels big. She feels fat. She feels insecure and inadequate and that kills me. I look at her and see beauty and youth and vibrancy and she looks at herself and sees big and average and blah. My stepdaughter does not ever comment on her outward appearance but spends a lot of time straightening her hair each morning and putting her face on before she goes to school. She also likes to have things. Things her friends have or things people at school have and feels it painfully when they have things she does not. (this happens often)
I want to blame society. I want to blame TV and movies and music videos. I want to blame magazines with their airbrushed visions of perfection. Page after page of shiny hair, tiny waist, white teeth and tan skin. I even want to blame Disney for their teeny tiny princesses with their luminescent skin and their perfect hair and ability to sing and dance and sword fight. I want to blame kids at school and I want to blame the world around us and I want to like every Facebook post that proclaims the world sexist and harming to women. However, as I began to think about this post, I began to see maybe the problem isn't just with the world around us, but the way I react to the world as well.
I would tell you that I am not a vain person. I go out with terrible hair and no makeup more often than I go out with nice hair and makeup. I wear hand-me-downs and shirts I have owned for years and that were not in style when I bought them. I will use the same purse for years. Through all seasons. I don't own a full length mirror because I truly do not care if my shoes actually go with my outfit. I have hosted more than one get together in my pajama pants. I ignore the fact my eyebrows are growing together in between threadings. But when soul searching, as I have been, I have to say I am completely vain in one area and that I am completely guilty of showing it to my daughters. Of telling them that I too believe that I am not good enough for what the world wants. For not believing myself that I am FEARFULLY AND WONDERFULLY MADE. For not practicing what I preach.
I will say that I am more comfortable in my skin at 40 than I have been in the past. I am never going to have long legs or thick, lustrous hair and I have made peace with that. I try to eat right but I also enjoy copious amounts of red wine and chocolate. My vanity, my Achilles heel when it comes to being at peace with who I am, is my face. Six years ago we all had a terrible flu. All five of us spent days on the couch burning with fever, shivering with cold, muscles aching and coughing and sneezing and sleeping. I got the bonus prize of Bell's Palsy at the end of that flu. I seriously woke up one morning with the right side of my face frozen - my eye that would not open or close, my mouth drooped and lopsided. We were afraid I had had a stroke. Once I was diagnosed and was told it would get better with time, we got on with life. I put on a pirate patch to keep my eye protected and told everyone "Oh well, it's just my face." I had a hard time eating (go give a dog some peanut butter and watch him eat, it looked like that) and lost weight and said "See, there is a plus side!" Or when it hurt so much as the nerves regenerated, I would think that was okay because it meant I was healing. And I did heal and it got better but my face was never back to 100%. This was recently commented on by my doctor who said "Huh, I guess it never went back to 100% did it?". Huh, I guess not jackass.
For the most part I just go about my day and my life, but I will admit to being a freak about my face in pictures. I hate pictures. I try to use as many pictures of me before the BP as I can. I hate the way my right eye droops and the way it seems to be attached to the right side of my mouth. I hate the way the left side looks happy and the right looks a little less interested. I hate meeting new people and wondering if my face is doing that Crypt Keeper thing when I smile. And I have showed my girls this again and again and again. Take another one, I will plead. Or "Man I hate that picture!" The bravado of "It's just my face" replaced with "Ugh, my face."
Maybe owning up to this will help be more patient with the 12 year old who just wants to be like everyone else. And perhaps I will try to understand that sometimes having things makes us feel better about other areas of ourselves. Or I will listen to my wonderful husband who sang me a beautiful song about angry mirrors and beauty that made me and all the kids cry while I was walking around like Patchy the Pirate and sad, and I will believe him. It could be possible that the only one thinking about how weird my face is is me. Maybe I can show my girls that we all have things about ourselves that we would like to be different. That we all have insecurities that threaten to overwhelm us or overtake our general air of contentment. Maybe owning up to them keeps them from owning us.
But I still blame Disney.
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