Actress Kate Winslet once said: “As a child, I never heard from women: “I like the way my body looks.” Neither my mother, nor my older sister, nor my best friend ever said to me: “I am proud of my body.” I made it a point to say this to my daughter Mia because a healthy attitude towards appearance starts in childhood.” The website OffbeatFamilies has published another opinion of the mother of two young children on this topic.
“Recently, I began to tell my girls that I consider myself beautiful. It is easy for me to repeat to them how beautiful they are, because it is so obvious. Babies are beauty. They shine and dance, and when they sleep, they turn into small fluffy clouds, snow-white lumps in the moonlight …
I am an adult woman, so I am supposed to show and explain everything to them in the life around me. But every morning when my children wake up, I look at them and notice that I see for the first time. They are like new to me. They teach me everything. They are babies, and they teach me, as an adult, what it means to be a person. It’s easy to see how beautiful they are.
I do everything slowly and I get tired. I am round and sagging. I’m always in a hurry. I feel genderless, non-sexual. I’m getting old.
- Beauty through the eyes of a child
And am I beautiful? How can this be true?
I don’t want my girls to grow up believing they’re perfect, and then when their femininity starts to blossom, they remember how I said I was «ugly» and they’ll feel ugly too. As they age, as they get older, their breasts will lose shape and they will hate their bodies, because that’s what all women do. That’s what mom did. No, I want them to become women who remember me as impossibly beautiful. I want to show them an example of beauty in the face of an evil world, a world where we often don’t know who we are or what to do with ourselves.
“Look at me girls! I tell them. — Look how beautiful I am. I feel like a real beauty today.”
I can see in their eyes that they’re checking if I’m right? I can see from their shining brown eyes how happy they are that I believe in my beauty. They love me. For them, I am the personification of love, a mentor, and warm soft blankets, and early mornings. They never doubted that I was wonderful. How lost they must have been when they saw me furrowing my brows in the mirror and sucking in my stomach and sighing heavily.
How confused they would be if I spoke to them like this: “You think your mother is beautiful, but you are mistaken. You are still small and love me, so you do not know how unattractive I am. I know I’m ugly because I look at myself with evil eyes. You are my children and I love you, but I will not allow myself to be beautiful for you. No matter how your eyes shine when you watch me comb my hair and pull the dress over my head. It doesn’t matter how much you want to be like me. I can’t be beautiful for you, and I don’t know why.»
Little by little it works. I even began to hate myself less, a little bit. I’ll be what they see. They look at me with eyes of love, and I will do everything in the world for them. Even this.
I am a beauty.»
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