#beautiful
my mom is the most awesome, cool, funny and creative mom ever! She cooks the most awesome food ever. I like when she cooks hamburgers.
-M (my 8 year old daughter)
Awarded the colored in trophy titled: #1 awesome, cool, funny and creative Mom Ever
I don't feel like an awesome mom. I picked up my teenage daughter's cell phone to turn up the volume so when I called her at the time she needed to get up she would hear the phone ringing. She's always been very hard to awaken. I saw several alarms on her phone screen starting at 4:00 am and continuing straight through until 11:00 pm every 15 minutes. They read: "Don't eat" "No breakfast" "Stay strong" "Don't eat, get skinny" "You are not hungry, be skinny" "Throw out your lunch." "Don't eat, go for a run" "be skinny" "only eat a little at dinner" and so on and so forth. How does this happen? My heart just broke and I started to cry. My daughter is kind, beautiful, caring, smart, imaginative, creative, talented and she hates herself. She is 5'7", with thick, blond, loose curly hair, and blue eyes. Then, I remembered being a teenager and hating the way I looked, I wanted to be skinny (I've never been thin a day in my life). I wanted to have a boyfriend that loved me that gave me all of his attention. I wanted my peers to like me. To have friends and fun and love. When I had my children I knew "They are beautiful!" As my children grow I continue to think they are beautiful and kind and smart and talented. I know that I am biased but I also know that my children and yours are all of these things. I deleted all of the alarms she had set and replaced them with: "You are beautiful" "I love you" "Eat HEALTHY" "Don't throw out your lunch" "You are smart" "Exercise" "You are funny" "I love you more than life" "You are beautiful" "You are kind" "You are caring" "Love yourself" "Eat Your HEALTHY Dinner" "Have FUN" "LAUGH" "I love you" I talked to her later and told her it broke my heart that she doesn't think that she is beautiful. I told her I understood, I told her stories about myself as a teenager, about how I feel about myself now. We talked about society's standards of beauty about finding love. We talked about working together to eat healthy and exercise together. I support her wanting to be thin and fit, but she should be healthy, thin and fit. I love her and I want her to be healthy and happy. She's got to start by loving herself. Tell all the girls you meet the are beautiful. |