HOW DO WE TEACH OUR DAUGHTERS TO GET THE IMAGE RIGHT ON THE INSIDE?
STORY BY Heather Kirk-Davidoff ILLUSTRATION BY Kelly Miller
Facebook has given me the chance to reconnect with a number of friends from middle school and high school – but that gift has not been without cost. I cringe each time I get a message saying that one of these friends has “tagged” me in a photo they’ve just posted. Each time I see a photo of myself at 13 or 14 or 15, my heart sinks. In addition to braces and acne, I had a fondness for
bad perms, hair gel and light blue eye shadow, thickly applied. As if that weren’t enough, just about every top I owned seemed to have shoulder pads.
It was the eighties. I was doing my best to look cool according to the fashions of the time. But the perspective of a few decades has shown me that I actually looked ridiculous. I find myself fantasizing about going back in time to urge my 14-year-old self to use fewer products on her hair. That is, until I remember that I have absolutely no desire to revisit those early teenage years, even for a minute.
I have found that almost every woman I know shares this sense of deep embarrassment about her appearance as a young teen. What I didn’t realize until recently is that this embarrassment isn’t just something we share with each other— we share it with our own teenage girls as well. And it doesn’t help them one bit.
Just about everyone is cute as a baby. But like ducklings, we all go through an awkward stage on our journey to adulthood. And unlike ducklings, we are hyperaware of ourselves throughout this transition. Sometimes an adult woman only needs to look at a middle school girl to rekindle the feelings of shame about the way her hair, face, body and even fingernails looked.
But while our thoughts may be about our own unresolved teenaged angst, our words and actions end up directed at the teenage girls in our lives. The same girls who melted our hearts with their adorable cheeks and toes as babies now hear something different from us: “Oh my God! What did you do to your hair?” “Have you been washing your face?” “Oh no, you are NOT wearing that to school!”
How much of that reaction is about the girl in front of us, and how much is about the girl inside of us? When the mothers of teenage girls get together, we complain about the makeup, the hair dye, the piercings and all the other things girls do that, in our opinion, just end up wrecking their appearance. We wish they would just feel comfortable in their own bodies and confident in their own natural beauty. But most of us are still struggling to do this as adults.
It’s easy to blame the media for bombarding girls with images of a very limited kind of beauty, one that rarely occurs without the help of Photo Shop. But I’ve become convinced that we won’t be able to create a body-positive climate for our girls until we find some healing for ourselves. And I’m not suggesting some kind of “It’s Get Better” campaign where we all tell our daughters, “Yeah, I was a hideous mess in middle school too. Don’t worry, you’ll eventually start looking better.” If things are actually going to get better for girls in our culture, adult women need to address head-on the shame that we felt as adolescents, shame that we still carry with us and transmit to the girls around us.
How do we do this? It may seem like that task would require at least a decade of therapy and by that time, our daughters will be adults. So for now, we may need to be content with baby steps. A friend told me a story recently that gave me some ideas of where to begin.
“My daughter and I happened to be in the bathroom at the same time one morning,” my friend told me. “She was looking at a couple of moles on her arm, frowning and poking at them. I noticed what she was doing and kind of whispered to her that she is beautiful. She looked right back at me and told me that she didn’t think her moles were beautiful. She said she thought they were ugly.
“My heart sank. She’s only in third grade and already she was feeling ashamed of her body. So I told her that I had something on my body that I didn’t like when I was a kid — a birthmark on my torso. She asked to see it and I showed it to her. I didn’t really want to, but I knew that I had to do it. And then I told her a tiny bit of a lie. I told her that now I love my birthmark. It’s part of me, I told her, and I’m beautiful.
“Love your amazing body, I told my daughter. It’s the only one you get. And then I just smiled and walked out of the room, very aware that we’d just started this conversation.”
My friend took a baby step that morning, but that first step makes the next one and the next one easier. Maybe in time, my friend’s daughter will catch her mother making a critical comment about her own appearance and remind her how beautiful she really is. Maybe my friend will catch herself and change her words within earshot of her daughter. Maybe these little affirmations will become a running joke between them, a little wink they share with each other. A few steps in sequence become a path that we walk together. *
