Girls, stop picking on yourselves
Still don’t have a working computer. Still unpacking and organizing. Also, throwing a party for my oldest tomorrow. Will blog more . . . sometime.
For now, here, you can enjoy this little tirade of mine. I wrote it as an email to a friend a few months ago. She was pregnant and slightly lamenting about her figure, which was in the not-fully-blossomed-but-just-sorta-puffy phase. Well, today I took the girls swimming with a local homeschool group. Putting on my swimsuit for the first time since my baby was born (um, four months ago), I realized that my figure didn’t just completely jump right back to it’s pre-pregnancy state all by itself like it did the other times. Before I let my mind run away with any insane thoughts about how my post-three-kids body doesn’t exactly resemble that of a super-model, I remembered this email.
Now I share it with you, in all it’s exclamatory, soapbox, rambly glory:
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Girl, please don’t think anything but wonderfulness about the changing shape of your body! I hate, hate, hate the media and what it has done to women and our views of our bodies! It is so wrong. Your body is changing just the way it is supposed to. And at that, your body started out just the way it is supposed to be, even before you were pregnant. You are not the least bit fat!
You are just how you are supposed to be. Bodies come in so many different shapes and sizes and it’s ridiculous and crazy-making to try to fit everyone into one [teeny] mold.
I truly wish every woman could love the body she is in–and I loathe the media and Hollywood for making that pretty much impossible. Anyone who is not a ridiculous size 2 is going to feel inadequate in some way–myself included! Even though I’ve always been nothing but skinny, skinny, I’ve complained about being fat since the time I was 10–how’s that for insanity? I actually looked unhealthily and unattractively skinny, and there I was worried about fat on my stomach!
It just proves how much damage our society does–if it can make a skinny, toothpick of a ten-year-old think she should stop eating so much! My goodness. Even now I still find myself complaining about my enormous ribcage, ugly knees, chubby face–it’s all so ludicrous! We’ve been given this ideal image that we are all impossibly striving to become! And I really feel sad about it all–and mad at Hollywood–when beautiful, healthy girls like you are made to feel fat! I can’t say it enough, and I know you won’t believe it anyway because we are all so brainwashed by the media, but girl, your body is perfect! Embrace it!
Okay, and I’ll get off my soapbox now!! But I have been forbidden by Matt to say anything negative about the way I look in front of the girls. We are doing our best to shelter them from media images that portray ONE certain type of beauty, or give any impression that people “should” look a certain way. I hope against hope they can grow up without this complex that pretty much every woman of our generation has, but it’s probably futile. My sweet, perfectly made little girls are one day going to pick apart their bodies, compare them to their friends or movie stars, and feel inadequate. What can be done?
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And with that poetic exposition, I say to you all, good night!
Filed in: health • self-reflection | July 29, 2009
grannie
does that mean I can put up with this blubber around my lower abdomen? Thanks for the pep talk.
Nat2
I might be outnumbered, but I really seem to have escaped this problem. I mean, sure, I think my cellulite looks gross, but I don’t worry about it. When I am weighing myself and I’m pregnant, I get so excited that I’m gaining weight and things are happening the way they’re supposed to. I just don’t think about image very much. (In fact, perhaps not enough? I mean, we do need to comb our hair on occasion, right?) I am not sure how I “escaped.”
On the other hand, being pregnant has made me aware that I do not ever want to get fat, not because of image necessarily, but just because I can’t do anything when I’m fat! I can’t bend over, I huff and puff, it just reduces the quality of life. So I think there are definite benefits to trying to keep up muscular and aerobic systems. But image is pretty much a useless function of the body, I agree.