It's Wednesday, and I'm writing letters...Dear Mama,
So you’re in the dressing rooms with
your tween daughter. It’s that sort of purgatory where the minutes tick by while
she decides that something is too see-through or too baggy or too tight when
none of it is and it’s not. It’s the place where it takes so much longer than
you could ever imagine to try on a pair of mesh jogging shorts and a sports bra
and decide whether they’re the right fit. You want to help, you are here to help, so you fetch different
sizes and run them back to the dressing room. You describe the sizes, the fits,
the colors; you make your recommendations. Finally, the two of you narrow down
the yesses and you pile up the nos. In the silences of waiting on such decisions, you notice how beautiful she is—how she glows with the energy of the
sun, as if she’s absorbed it all those hours at the pool and the beach and the
backyard, and she radiates it back through her rosy skin and glossy brown hair.
She’s growing up. She’s a mini-you, sort of; you can see all the likenesses and
all the differences and you think about yourself at this age. Her image, under
these fluorescent dressing room lights, is for you at once nostalgic and
prophetic, conjuring what was and proclaiming the possibility of all that
is to come.
Here in this same space, you catch a
glimpse of yourself in the mirror as you sit on the bench in the long hallway
outside her changing room. These glimpses prove you’re different than that
sundrenched younger woman you once were. Also, those five pounds you keep
trying to lose for good just keep creeping back. And weird, spidery webs are
whispering into the veins on your legs, something you never in a million years
imagined could happen because you were young and you were going to stay young
forever. Hormonal changes have turned your hair, once glossy, into a frizzy
nest that you work so very hard to keep straight, and your eyes show the tiredness
of three babies, ministry, a marriage, life.
These observations run in your head
as you wait, and you remember the women who mothered you, standing in front of
mirrors, placing critical hands on stomachs and sucking them in; you remember the
frenetic attention to the shapes and sizes of various body parts (the ThighMasters, the Buns of Steel videotapes?). But you determined long ago that you
would not be that kind of mother. You knew in your guts even before you were
able to articulate it aloud: What your daughter needs more than mesh running
shorts and a sports bra is for you and all the other mamas to gag the reel of our internal commentary and criticism.
You know that the gift you can give her right now--that will last the rest of her
life--is that you Lock It Down and Honor Yourself in her presence. You’ve probably
done a great job up ‘til now, Mama, setting a new trend in your generations.
You’ve barely heard a single self-critical comment from your tween’s mouth because she hasn’t learned this kind of
criticism from you. You’re doing great. But she needs you and me to do great
longer. To continue to resist joining the endless and predictable moaning and
woeing over our changing mama bodies that are beautiful and wonderfully made
and transformed by all of the glories and trials we’ve borne. Her future, 35-year-old
self needs your help right now,
because when she stands in the mirror juxtaposed with the bursting youth of her
own children, you want her to embrace herself whole-heartedly; you want her to
love not just her hair but her beautiful wisdom and her hospitable way of
being in the world.
Also, your daughter’s right-now security and confidence hinges
very much on what you say and how you carry yourself in the world. Even though
she’s not asking out loud, Am I Okay?,
I’m sure she’s she’s wondered silently at times. Mama, if she can just stand in
the aura of your own self-acceptance—along with your spidery veins and squishy tummy from all those babies—she will be able to do the same for herself.
If you can love yourself so generously, then of course (as her logic will flow)
you can love her, too. If you can gaze back at yourself in that dressing room
mirror without flinching and without reproach, well by God, she could expect
you to do the same for her, beholding adoringly not just her glorious physical being,
but her thoughts and her heart, when she Fails and when she Falls Short (and she knows
as well as you do that she will and she has).
Do you remember your own
grandparents, all mole-speckled and wrinkle-creased? If you had the right kind of grandparents, then you know that you and they weren't all
tripped up over their age. They offered something
infinitely more significant than sun-bursting youth: It was Acceptance that began with their
very own selves and oozed out into a wide chocolatey puddle that clung to your glorious tween ankles. We can do the same, Mama. If we feel we have no script of our own to speak from at this moment in the lives of our daughters and in our own maturing womanhood, we can at least channel Grandma. Our scripts may be in production, but we'll have them in hand soon. Some of them, right now, are just being workshopped.
Here’s to you, Mama. And to our girls.
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