My Mom and Women’s Bodies

When I was a kid and teen, my mom loved to watch all of the beauty pageants: Miss America, Miss Universe, all the big ones.

During these shows, my mom would comment her opinions on the contestants' appearance:

"Her torso is too long for her body, she's not proportional."

"Oh she has a lovely smile, I like her."

"Her eyes are too close together."

And on it went.

There was also a plastic surgery show we watched that was on for a short time before it stopped airing, where women underwent full body and facial plastic surgery to completely transform how they looked. We watched this together and marveled at the transformations.

All of this kind of thing was normal in my childhood with my mom, and I never even questioned it until I was much older.

My mom had taught me from a very young age that for a woman, the only thing that really mattered about you was how you looked. How pretty you were, how thin you were.

Your looks were how you got worth. Everything else didn't really matter. The feeling was, don't bother with creativity or goals or intellect, what matters is your waist size and your makeup.

She never overtly said to me, "All that matters about you is how you look", but it was clearly communicated through her comments about other women, and also about her own body, which sadly she also criticized with fervor.

This intense association between worth and weight, and also the massive terror that it created in me about weight gain, was a contributing factor in my obsession with food.

While at times it caused restrictive behavior for me, it also was a contributor for excessive binge eating, too.

The anxiety around food and weight would cause me to binge to quell it. It may seem counterintuitive but is in fact very common.

I would beat myself up so thoroughly for not feeling like I measured up, that I would then want food to help me avoid feeling worse about myself, essentially to comfort me from my own abuse.

It is important to look at what our mothers directly or indirectly taught us about weight and worth. How did they feel about other women's bodies? How did they feel about their own body? How did they feel about your body?

Photo by Katie Sue Photography