About… face!

I’m confusing my child.

I know it, and I can’t help it, and I wish I wasn’t doing it… but I am.

You see, I’m talking about The Little Helper, who is 10.  Well… 10 going on about 14 or so.  She’s way too mature for her age, although I have to admit that her peers are just as much to blame as anything.  Kids here in the UK mature way faster than kids back in the US do, I think.  I remember when I was 10, I was still playing with my Barbies and playing dress-up.  TLH, she really WANTS to still be playing with toys, but she recognizes that if any of her friends found out that she was, she would be absolutely vilified at school.  So while she really wants to stay a kid, part of her thinks that she has to grow up this fast, because “everybody else” is, too.

The problem is that she’s gained some weight in the last couple of years.  It’s been a gradual thing, not overnight.  And it all seems to have settled in her belly.  Her butt and legs don’t seem to have gotten much bigger at all, but her stomach has swollen so that she almost looks pregnant.  (I should also point out here that she has physically matured earlier than I thought she would: she’s been having her period for a few months now, it started back in June, I think.)  This presents a problem, because she wants to be all stylish and shit, just like the other girls, but having gained all her weight in her belly, it becomes hard for us to find things that not only fit but look good on her body shape.

What’s confusing for her is that for the first 10 years of her life, she’s heard me say nothing but negative things about my own body and my own fat, and now all of a sudden I’m telling her that it’s okay for her to be a few pounds overweight.  That there’s nothing wrong with the way she looks, and that if she wants to dress nicely we’re just going to have to experiment and find out what looks good on her body’s shape.

But I honestly think that even if I hadn’t discovered Fat Acceptance, I would be telling her something similar.  Because I don’t want my children to grow up with the same body-hatred and self-hatred that I grew up with.  I try my very damnedest to make sure that I don’t say a negative thing about the way they look, because I don’t want to do to them what was done to me.  (Body-hatred, like charity, begins at home.)  And I know it’s got to be confusing for them, but honestly, I just never thought that my hating my own body would affect my children at all.  In my self-absorbed view of my own world, my saying that *I* was fat and *I* was disgusting had absolutely nothing to do with my children at all, because I wasn’t talking about them.  I was talking about myself, and therefore nothing I said would affect them one iota.  Right?

Wrong.  I didn’t think about how children hear everything that goes on around them and internalize a lot of it (case in point: shortly after my husband confessed his affair, my then-4 year old looked at me and said: “are you happy now, Mommy?  You’ve been sad for a long time.”  Both of us had gone to great lengths to try and not let on that anything was going on, but even at 4 years old, The Little Chatterbox still knew something was wrong.  She might not have known what, but she knew it was something).  And now I’m hearing the self-hateful things coming out of The Little Helper’s mouth and I realize that I’ve done this to her.  I never meant to.  I didn’t think I was.  But I did.  And now I’m trying to undo the damage I’ve done, and I know I’m confusing her.

But I cannot – and will not – let her grow up with the same self-hate and body image issues that I grew up with.  It nearly killed me (literally; seven suicide attempts didn’t come from nowhere).  I will not allow the same thing to happen to my daughter.