Day 1: Subject in Her Bathrobe

I've been thinking a lot about appearances recently.

It isn't any one thing that has provoked this line of thought, but rather several. It's the article I read saying that I shouldn't tell my daughter she is beautiful. It's the way that some of my male friends just don't get it when I tell them not to call me pretty--to call me charming instead. It's the posts about body image and acceptance that sometimes fail to acknowledge just how hard that acceptance can be, and the other posts that are about making yourself over into something perfect, so you don't have to struggle to feel acceptance for yourself anymore.

Except, of course, you kind of do.

I tell my daughter that she's beautiful a lot. I know the arguments against it--that I'll teach her that her appearance is a thing worth commenting on, or that she ought to seek approval for her appearance on a regular basis--but I've given the matter careful consideration, and I think the truth is that she'll learn those things, anyway. I did. My parents always valued my mind and abilities, and yet from the day I first made contact with the world outside my childhood home I was learning the lesson that is plastered on every billboard: Your appearance matters--maybe more than anything else. I'll never forget when I was ten years old and saw a teen beauty pageant on TV, and I started crying while watching a fourteen year old girl--tanned, blonde, and rail thin--do a simple tap dance. It didn't matter to me that she wasn't particularly talented, or that the whole idea of being a pageant girl sounded excruciatingly dull to me. I cried because I knew I was never going to be like her. I was never going to be one of the beautiful people, and the realization of that knowledge hurt.

So I tell my daughter she's beautiful every day, because if the world outside my door is going to teach her that beauty matters, then I want to teach her that what she is--short, round faced, and gap-toothed--is beautiful.

I do hope, though, that someday she will look at me and say "Mommy, why do you say that? It's not like it matters. Why don't you tell me I'm so good at puzzles?" Because I tell my daughter that she's beautiful, but I also tell her that it's not the reason I love her. That everything else that she is matters so much more.

It's a lesson that is hard to internalize, not just for women, but for men. Women have a hard time not obsessing over whether they're "pretty enough." Men have a hard time understanding that their validation is not required. I am a slow learner. It took me a long time to move past my ten-year-old's pain of not being beautiful. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that I started telling men that I didn't need to hear that I was pretty. That I'd rather be told I was charming, or clever, or funny. More often than not the response is a puzzled look from the man in question, and a reiteration. "But you are pretty."

It's hard, too, because remnants of the ten-year-old are still in there. There are still people in the world who I really want to find me attractive. But those remnants are small, and rest of me wants to bang my head against a wall that men I know and like think that the most positive compliment they can give me is about how I look. I'd be more upset, but I know that one of the problems is that we're all trained to go fishing for compliments by bashing ourselves.

And we--not just women, but everyone--have a tendency to bash pretty hard. Recently I was listening to a male friend complain about how he looks, and I was wondering to myself why everyone seems to think this is a female specific trait. We ALL have insecurities, and we ALL have a tendency to say those insecurities out loud, in the hopes that someone will correct us. I saw an article making the rounds a while ago that was addressed to the mothers of young girls, saying that we have to stop. That we are teaching our daughters self-loathing, by focusing on what we like least in ourselves and reviling it out loud. Sometimes we're hoping someone will contradict us. Sometimes we're just wallowing in our own insecurities. But either way we're teaching our children (not just our daughters) to follow in our footsteps, and we have to stop.

As a mother, I've got to say, I feel like I have enough of a job already. I don't really want to take on the task of rewriting generations of mental conditioning. It seems like a pretty big job.

But, on the other hand, I really, REALLY don't want either of my kids looking in the mirror and EVER saying, "Ugh. I hate my ____."

So I guess I'm gonna give that "rewriting mental conditioning" thing a go.

I don't think it's enough to stop hating on ourselves, though. I think, if we really want the message to come across, we have to start treating acceptance as an active, not a passive thing. And that means being happy with who we are, whether it's the "ideal" or not.

I'm going to start posting more pictures of me. Unphotoshopped. Unfiltered. Unposed. Just pictures of me, being me. I am not going to get rid of the ones that make me look tired, or like I have a double chin. I am not going to consider if the angle makes me look plump or svelte. I am just going to post pictures of me. They will all look like me. And that will be fine. Because there is nothing wrong with me.

It's like a 365 Challenge, only instead of a different subject it's always the same: Acceptance. 365 Days of Acceptance.