Thanks for your patience while I have been buried in the moving process. I had planned on jumping in and trying to catch up with the series I’ve been working on. And I will get there. The Building Strong Boys series as well as The Last Child in the Woods read along will have new additions soon. But in the meantime, another new addition caught my attention. And I had to write.
Amid the moving haze I caught news that His Royal Highness Prince George had made his grand entrance to the world. Noted, I thought. Great for them. End of fanfare, right?
But then a few days later I began to catch that there had been quite a flurry of snarkiness following young George’s first introduction to his already all too public life.
Hours after his birth, as his mother stood graciously (in a dress and heels no less) to dutifully present him to the world, comments swirled about… her stomach of all things.
As though it was somehow abnormal.
As Emily T. Wierenga so perfectly wrote here, “I thought nothing of your mommy-tummy because goodness, girl, you’d just had a baby and anyone who’s given birth knows that tummy doesn’t disappear overnight, nor should it. Your body’s been stretched nine-months long to hold an eight-pound highness, and it’s been pushed and prodded and bruised over hours of labor and there you stood shining in a blue dress, patting your son and cherishing him with new-mother eyes.”
But to far too many there was something wrong. Some misstep from perfection. So there were tweets and articles and posts about her appearance. Everything from her clothing to her supposed new workout plan. Because heaven knows we can’t let the poor girl just catch her breath for a second.
This all really got under my skin.
And the why is kind of a long story.
As a teenager I had a borderline eating disorder. I didn’t do the crazy things you saw on afterschool specials. In fact, my mom apparently shadowed me one day, eating what I ate, and she said she couldn’t keep up.
I was eating.
The problem was, I was listening to everything and everyone, but my own body. I was a teenage athlete with a generous metabolism and a rigorous training schedule. But I was listening to the voices all around me implying that leaner was always better.
I would read a weight loss article in a magazine that said no cheese, so I started peeling cheese off of everything I ate. I heard about an athlete who didn’t eat after 7pm, so I didn’t either. A friend asked if I had any idea how many calories were in that peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d been bringing in my school lunch for years. So I swapped for plain wheat bread and some carrots.
Before I knew it, I had lost 20 pounds. 20 pounds my already athletic frame couldn’t afford to lose.
I was amenorrheic for over a year, and it was an OBGYN who provided some of the most powerful prodding to get healthy when she told me I would never have children. Not at that weight.
Flash forward through working out a lot of issues revolving around control, perfectionism, and letting go of imagined expectations. I remember soaking in the bathtub sometime in the first months after having my first son. I remember looking at my body.
And I was in awe.
I marveled that my body, the one I had treated so badly, had created something so perfect. That it could carry, develop, deliver, and then provide the perfect food for one of the most beautiful beings I had ever seen.
I don’t remember feeling disgust or embarrassment. I don’t remember lamenting that I no longer fit into the same jeans I wore in high school. The girl who wore those jeans couldn’t do what this woman had done. I felt proud. I felt strong. I was changed, absolutely, but I saw it as purely miraculous in every way.
I suppose that’s part of why what happened to Kate Middleton pained me so much. I felt like having children played a huge role in me finally seeing my body in a healthy way. Finally being fully grateful for how amazing it really is.
And it drives me crazy to think that the same event in someone else’s life would drive her to see her body in an unhealthy way.
And beyond that, it maddens me to see a world that is so consumed with the objectification of the female body that it drives us to a standard of beauty that is entirely unrealistic and unattainable.
And absolutely unhealthy for the young girls who are watching us.
It isn’t normal to have six pack abs the day after having a baby. Just like it isn’t normal for all women to have one standard-issue chest size and shape. Just like it isn’t normal to subsist on 500 calories a day while supplementing with mysterious drops that contain a chemical cocktail we don’t even understand.
And all the while our children are watching.
They see us berating ourselves in front of the mirror. They see us sacrificing health for appearance. They hear us when we criticize, nit-pick, and hold any woman to impossible standards.
Some may explain it away, pointing out that The Duchess of Cambridge and other public figures and celebrities chose to live their lives under a microscope. The trouble is, developmentally our adolescents often go through a state where they entertain the admiration and criticism of what David Elkind called the Imaginary Audience. At the point when they are perhaps most susceptible to the influence of social pressures and media messages, they feel like everyone truly is watching them. It’s as though celebrities are their peers and their competition, and that they are the subjects of the same scrutiny they hear from gossip columns and celebrity blogs.
We’re passing on a media-fueled dysmorphia, convincing our daughters, our nieces, even ourselves, that abnormal, unhealthy, and unnatural presentations of the human body are the only path to beauty.
How can we tell our girls to love themselves and to recognize the strength and beauty of their bodies, while we adults are scheduling surgery to change our looks and downing pills to drop a few pounds? How can we even pretend that it’s normal to expect a woman who just gave birth to walk out of the hospital in the best shape of her life? That’s not even sane.
As Joy Gabriel said perfectly here, “...Because I’m supposed to… pretend this never happened? Is my body supposed to pretend it didn’t rearrange all my organs and open my rib cage and my hips and grow a new human person who has never existed before and then proceed to feed and nourish that person from the very same body that delivered him, whole and perfect, into the world?”
I’m completely in favor of taking care of yourself, of being health-conscious, and I’ll even admit to being a little vain now and then. But I also know what it’s like to substitute fads for real health and to value sweeping social standards over my own physical needs.
And I know what it’s like to finally just let it go and be honest with myself.
Until we can get real with ourselves, until we can honor our bodies for what they really are and what they really DO, and until we can stop this insane competition with one another and with reality itself we will miss out on passing something to our daughters they can’t get anywhere else. A sense of strength and value and security that comes when you honor your body for the inherently beautiful, amazing, divine creation it truly is.
More Must Reads:
Kate Middleton and the Mom in the Mirror {Joy Gabriel}
A Letter to Kate Middleton on the Postpartum Body {Emily Wierenga}
And for those with a funny bone: Fotoshop by Adobe
I really resonated with this. For me it also took being pregnant and the birth of my daughter to just accept my body the way it is/was. I felt glorious in my pregnancy. I have always been overweight but carrying that child was one of the best experiences ever. I loved my belly!
And now when she looks at me and says Mama you are beautiful I can 100% agree with her. I am working on losing weight, but not because I feel fat or ugly or any of those horrible things I would have thought about myself before hand. Now its to feel healthier and live longer. Because no matter what to the people that matter I am beautiful.
Like you I was thrilled to see Kate with her beautiful post baby belly. It was no natural and a beautiful moment that they choose to share. I hope that she doesnt read or buy into the vain commentary of others and is just enjoying her baby and her new family dynamic.
Thanks for sharing this – we need more voices like this to change how we view ourselves in the mirror.
Thank you for sharing your story, Adrianne. I’m always so happy to hear about women who have embraced a healthy body perspective….and who are passing that on to their daughters!
Thanks for sharing this. We women continually need these reminders!!!
Thank you, Leah!
Thank you so much for this article. It has been sitting in my inbox to read and I’m so glad that it was today I chose to read it. Just the other day, I was at the beach with my kids and I won’t say I necessarily have body image issues, but I do tend to feel generally uncomfortable in my bathing suit. But this time I actually had a feeling of peace wash over me and I was watched my kids playing, I started to really appreciate this beautiful body of mine in the ways that you have described in your post. I just felt compelled to add to the conversation that, for me, finally reaching the point that I truly honour my body has only occurred now that my children are a little older (almost 3&5), which seems to be inline with me feeling more and more confident as a parent. I, too, went through similar stages as you in my teenage years and whenever I look back at photos of that time, I wonder why I felt like I was so “big” when in fact, I was very average. Probably media-fueled dysmorphia now that I think about it. Thank you so much for prompting me to think about these things while my children are still young.
Thank you so much for sharing, Beth. I really do appreciate hearing about how this connected with you, and relate to so much of what you described. Thank you!
What a wonderful post, Amanda. Like the previous commenters, your message resonates deeply with me. I have personally made a lot of changes over the past few months specifically because I want my daughters (17 months and 2 1/2) to have a very different (and much healthier) relationship with food, exercise, and their bodies than their mother. I recognize that it is not enough to simply model and teach healthy behavior. . .I have some major psychological and emotional work to do. Children have a fabulous way of seeing through our attempts to teach anything we don’t truly believe ourselves, don’t they? I’m far from the finish line at this point, but I’m on the journey! I have been particularly impressed with the work of Ellyn Satter, a researcher and advocate for healthy feeding and eating in families. Just in case others are interested, her website is: http://www.ellynsatterinstitute.org, and I found her book, “Secrets of Feeding a Healthy Family” to be life-changing. Her approach deals with much, much more than nutrition, meal planning and food preparation. She advocates for practices that lead parents and children to have positive emotional relationships with eating and exercise. Potentially helpful for anyone, but especially for parents who have a history of a guilt-ridden relationship with food and/or disordered eating.
Thank you for sharing your journey and your resources, Lisa. It is certainly easy for parents to pass on their own “issues”, but it isn’t impossible to turn them into strengths either. Thank you for your efforts and for sharing them here. Best of luck to you and your girls!
It is great that you shared this information. Women have such a hard time with body image and to help them love their body after pregnancy is great.
Thank you, Carol!
Now that I have a daughter, in particular a daughter whose body doesn’t necessarily look like everyone else’s, I pay far greater attention to what’s said about body image. This includes what I say too. I’ve really tried to focus on words like healthy, strong and confident. But I wonder if, in years to come, my words will drown out the other things she hears around her.
As a mom, I think what you say will be more powerful than you can even imagine. Thank you, for working to raise a strong daughter!
What a great post Amanda. This is what I am trying to tell women all the time. Your message is perfect, and I so wish every mother could read it. We are passing terrible ideas down to our daughters often without meaning to. This will probably make no sense, but my degree is in Dietetics, and I got really good at the details of food…but there is a whole portion of health and nutrition that is missing when we turn food into calories and burning calories and bad foods and perfect image… Two random books that have really changed my views about food are “French Kids Eat Everything” and “The Surprising Power of Family Meals”. I read both books in a sort of awe…where did we lose the sense of what nourishing our bodies is really about? Family time, people time, calm time, conversation time…nourishing our families and teaching them all sorts of things that can only be taught well sitting across from each other day after day. Hard to explain but really excellent books on the subject.
No, I think that totally makes sense. I think there’s a huge connection between moralizing food (good food/bad food) and unhealthy relationships with food. I know that was a lot of it for me. I think the books you mentioned sound fascinating! Thanks for sharing!