Recently, I was getting ready for an event and none of my clothes were agreeing with me. Mountains of them strewn all over the closet in protest. Big piles of nope and not today and various other reasons that felt tight and uncomfortable. I shut the door and cried, alerting my husband who had been waiting patiently for me to be dressed and heading toward the car.
He knocked gently on the door.
“I can't let the kids see me upset with my body right now, it’s not allowed.” I sobbed into the door.
As a mother, a moment of low self esteem was a luxury I felt like I was no longer entitled to. Children are always listening and absorbing. Teaching your kids to love their bodies is hard enough without putting on a one woman show of negative talk and shame.
A few weeks later I taped a television piece, and the cameraman was adjusting his shot of me from a lower spot on the ground. Upshots, in general, are extremely unflattering, but when I politely said something to him, he laughed, asking me where all that body love I’d been preaching about was.
Because I love my body, I'm not entitled to have a say in how it's portrayed, and I have to like every shot of it, or I fail at self love. It’s ridiculous to say that out loud, but it’s true. Saying I am body confident automatically sets me up for failure when I falter or question how others present me. To the camerman, body advocacy means I should blindly allow myself to be represented by those around me.
Last night, I laid in bed and let this all process, and I've come to the conclusion... it's all wrong. Here I was getting more and more upset about the feelings I'm not supposed to be entitled to, either because I'm a mom or a confident woman, what have you, I don't get them anymore. Thinking about how these emotions were yanked away from me, I just got angrier.
I do love my body, and I am confident in my skin, but I missed those feelings. They weren't fun feelings or even proud feelings, but they were human feelings that I need to feel to remind myself that I'm flawed and I'm growing and that I can't feel guilty when moments of body hate slip in there every now and then.
I can't pretend as a mother or as a woman that they don't happen, I can only model how to bounce back enough that the love moments outnumber the hate moments. And that is a beautiful thing.
