Previously published on Grown and Flown
I screwed up this weekend. My daughter told me a story, and all of my learning, all of my grownupedness, all of my feminism went out the window, and I was a teen again, living in my insecurity. I know better than that. I expect better than that. She deserves better than that.
The story: My daughter is 13 and went to the town center to hang out with a friend of hers. While they were walking around, a group of teenaged boys (according to her, much older) walked by and one said, "my friend thinks you're cute," laughed and kept walking. Here's the part where I screw up: She was clearly upset, and I said, "so what, that's nice." Oof. The look she gave me. I could see my failure as a parent, as a woman, in her eyes. It wasn't until later that I understood where my comment even came from.
Like most girls, I was hugely insecure in middle and high school. I hated my looks. In middle school, I looked like a child, while other girls were already womanly. I was tiny (not even 5 feet yet), and flat and strait, and my hair wouldn't perm and my nose was too big and my eyes took up my whole face. In high school, I suddenly grew curves and a C cup and thank God grunge was in and I could hide it all under huge shirts. No one could want me. I was sure of it.
None of these thoughts are or were unique to me.
And then I got a boyfriend and suddenly found my body and saw it was of use, and it became my everything. It was the thing that was attractive about me. Because it couldn't be my mind, or my ideas. Those hadn't changed. My body had. So I lapped up the attention. I broke up with boys and dated others. I laughed when men made comments on the street. I wore tight tops, and hoped for comments, saddened when they didn't come. I put all of my hopes in that body of mine. My mistake came in thinking my body had given me control.
But I gave that body away so easily. To their comments, their leers, their wants and needs. I thought by giving it up, I would gain something, though even then, even now, I can't tell you what. I starved that body. I worked that body into shape. I dressed it up and put it out for show as though the rest of me was useless. I thought that if a boy or a man loved my body, it meant he loved me. So I gave it away again and again, looking for love. But when I finally met the man who would be my husband and the father to my children, I had put that girl behind me. I had put my passions toward teaching and theater and friends. I had grown tired of separating body from mind, and had found a way to work them equally, to sometimes even like them both.
When I was pregnant, I became terrified that I would have a girl. How could I, with all of my past harboring squatting rights in my heart, raise a daughter? How could I strengthen her and keep her safe? How could I let her know her beauty without making that beauty all important? There are so many mine fields. How would I avoid them all?
Now that very daughter is going to high school next year, and she looks just like I did, and God, she is beautiful, and strong, and funny, and insecure, smart, and so much more worldly than I was at 13. And I am terrified. But I have brought her this far. We have almost finished middle school, and I have walked that fine fine line just above the minefield, only occasionally setting one off. But there is no right answer here, as much as I want to have one. I will make my mistakes, and she will make hers. And we will keep walking that line, hopefully together, for as long as we can.
She and her friends, her generation, have a different relationship with their bodies than I did, as a child in the 90s. They wear sports bras to school and show off their midriffs, but it is not for the boys. I believe her when she tells me that. She is comfortable with her body, in a way I never was. She thinks it's gross that a boy, 3 years older, would look at her, or say she's cute. Her body is not for him. It's for her. She is already so far ahead of where I was, and while it doesn't mean I have nothing to fear in the future, she's certainly starting in a stronger place. I think that's all I could ask for.
