I maintain something of a bicameral approach with regard to writing about my children: I write about them, but I don't use their names (their last name is different from mine, which helps); I write about them, but I write only happy things, or uplifting things, or things that are far in the past. Nothing that would embarrass them, nothing that is truly personal and private. I owe them that, I think. They didn't ask to be born to me.
Today I'm going to break down that wall, though, because I believe my own daughter's well-being actually, in a very broad way, depends on it. If you know my girl, or if you ever meet her, I'm asking you here and now: Please don't discuss the following with her. It would, genuinely, make her sad.
But how am I to remain silent, when she sits in the back of my car, tears streaming down her face and wondering, in a tiny and strangled voice, if anyone will ever love her?
The girl.
The girl is tall, and broad, and strong, and round. She is 10, and as she has throughout her young life, she has a belly. It's not small -- it's a real belly. The kind of belly that many young girls have until they reach puberty, and which is usually eclipsed by the appearance of breasts. As girls grow into women, our shapes change -- but they don't usually change entirely. Mine didn't. If you were born big and soft (9 lbs 3 oz, and she was four weeks early), you're never going to become anything much different, unless you literally do physical damage to yourself in the effort.
"Do you think I'll ever be skinny?" she asked in that same car ride.
No, honey, no. I do not think you will ever be skinny. "Skinny" (like "fat") has no real value, it tells us nothing about the worth or even the health of the person, it's a descriptor. It's like "tall" or "blue" or "left-handed" -- it describes something, it doesn't tell you that thing's worth. Or, worse yet, we've made "skinny" (and "fat") into a weapon, a weapon we use to wound people.
These are almost exactly the words I used with her in the car, words very similar to words she's heard her whole life -- or, at least, since the first time she was called "fat" and understood it to be intended as a cruelty, when she was 4. When she was 9, she could already use the phrase "objectification of women" correctly.
And the other day, in that car, tears streaming down her face, she finally said "I know, but you're training me. You're not training the whole world."
My daughter is exactly as God and her genes intended her to be: She is funny and lights up a room and won't take no for an answer. She is very smart and loves being very smart and can sit in a corner and read for two hours at a stretch. She will spontaneously dance to just about anything, and will run around the playground with her friends all afternoon if time and homework allow. She is a person of healthy appetites, in all senses: She would like a bigger bite of the world, please, and also some more ice cream, while you're up. She thoroughly enjoys her food, except when she doesn't, at which point she can't be bothered to have another bite. She knows that too much ice cream isn't always good for her body, and she is learning that sometimes "no" is the best answer -- but she's always heard "no" from time to time, and always had that "no" acted upon. Her diet is healthy, and she knows that, too, and likes it. She is also, if I may, beautiful. Gorgeous, in fact, with milky-peachy skin and deep brown eyes and hair that falls in waves all around her beautiful smile.
But the girl lives in the world that her father and I cannot reach, she doesn't live within our arms. She lives in a world where 10-year-old girls are already so bone-deep aware of how we treat women who do not fit a certain, very narrow, paradigm that they worry they will never be loved. She worries -- a lot -- what strangers think of her when they see her from a distance; she worries that the people who know her are kind only because they know her.
She is 10. She is healthy. She is strong. She is wicked smart. And she sat in my car, weeping about her body.
There is only so much her father and I can do, only so much real science we can bring to bear on the lies and misapprehensions peddled by the diet industry and swallowed whole by those around us. There is only so much we can do about the fact that every adult woman she comes in contact with is steeped in the same lies and misapprehensions, the vast majority of them openly bemoaning their sacred bodies and bonding over self-loathing. "I'm getting fat!" one of the girl's friends said at school the other day, a friend who is so slight she might blow away on the next strong wind.
There's only so much I can do. It's already in her. And even though I never say it out loud, it's in me too. I hate it, but there it is, telling me how little I'm worth because I refuse to punish my only body for being something other than that which I am told it should be. I cannot tell you how much it hurts me, how furious it makes me, to know that this is what she feels and what she faces. I'm weeping as I type. And there's almost nothing I can do. I cannot train the world.
But maybe, maybe -- if we all work together, maybe if we're kinder to ourselves and each other, more loving toward these fabulous machines that move us through our lives, less willing to accept shaming that cloaks itself as wisdom -- maybe together, we adults can make the world in which our little girls are growing into wonderful women a better place. Maybe.
Please help me. We're the adults. My daughter, and probably yours, needs our help. They need our love.
Emily L. Hauser blogs at Emily L. Hauser In My Head, where this first first appeared.