Size 4 Jeans

It’s rare that I pick up a fashion/beauty magazine these days. I just don’t have the time for it, and don’t get much out of them anymore anyway. Once in a while (like once a year) I’ll pick up something like Elle if I’m traveling by plane and just want some fluff to read on the way. I used to read them all the time; Seventeen, Cosmo, Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair. They all found their way into my mailbox at one time or another when I was younger.

I remember feeling like I wasn’t pretty when I was younger, and I had really poor self esteem from the time I was a teenager until I was in my early thirties. I have to say that I think the media and magazines contributed to the problem. Looking at all those perpetually beautiful people in magazines and movies and on TV, I thought I’d never measure up. My mother never understood what the problem was, and never tried to as far as I could tell then or now.

I don’t remember ever having the kind of conversations with my mother that I have with my own daughter about why the magazines and movies and TV aren’t real, and how those people don’t really look like that off the camera, because the photos are all airbrushed and Photoshopped to make perfection seem real. Frankly, I think my mother was jealous of me because I was thin and she wasn’t, and she never wanted to have children anyway (so she’s repeatedly told me), so maybe that was part of the reason for her attitude.

I never thought I was fat when I was younger though, not even when I looked at all the models in the magazines. I was at least sensible enough to realize that “fat” just wasn’t anything close to what I was. In fact, I wished for more curves, because “sexy” to me was a Victoria’s Secret model, and I had bones, not curves and no breasts to speak of at all. I was a stick until I had kids, and I didn’t have any breasts until I could afford to fix that problem with a trip to the plastic surgeon when I was 30.

I may never know exactly what it was that helped me get past most of the self esteem issues, but somehow I just got over it. Part of it was learning more about myself, about what I like and don’t like and learning to live with it. Part of it, I’ll admit, was having breast augmentation surgery (I really just wanted my top to look like it belonged with my bottom, size-wise), and learning to apply makeup perfectly and professionally so that I look my best and am happy with the look. I learned to trust my own sense of style and color when I dress and do my hair.

There are still things I wish I could change (in a perfect world), like the mole under my eye or the fact that I still have a tendency to look pear shaped, since extra weight settles on my hips. But overall, I accept the way I look, I’ve fixed the part I really couldn’t live with, and I am who I am. I don’t look at models with envy wishing I could look like they do, because I’ve learned how to look my best, and if you look your best and project self confidence, you can stand with the models no matter your size or looks.

These are all things my mother never taught me, even though I needed to know and asked her when I was a teen. She didn’t know, I guess, and wasn’t ever willing to help me figure it out. I think I could have been a happier teen if I had felt less gawky and nerdy. I remember envying the pretty girls who always had perfect hair and makeup and clothes, because no matter how I tried I couldn’t look like that. I didn’t know how and there was no one to teach me. It’s hard to project a self confidence you don’t feel, and if you don’t know how to make yourself look like you want to look, self confidence might be hard to obtain. There were other deeper self esteem issues, I know, but maybe those would have been easier to figure out if the (possibly) simpler external things could have been taken care of earlier.

I try to pass these things on to my daughters, but it’s not easy. I tell my oldest daughter how lucky she is that I can share these types of things, because my mother never could. She’s a gorgeous girl, and knowing how to do her hair and makeup so she feels good just makes her even more beautiful. Unfortunately, she still has poor self esteem, and she thinks she’s fat. I don’t see how she can look at some of those models in the fashion magazines she devours and call herself fat in any way. She’s on the edge of being underweight (by the charts anyway), she’s smaller than all of her friends, and still she insists she’s fat and eats like a bird.

Even if she was thinner than she is now, she’ll never look like either those models or like I looked when I was her age, because she has bigger bones. She weighs more than I do now (by all of 3 pounds or something); she’s thinner in places like her hips because she has a teen’s figure, but her wrists and ankles are bigger because her bones are just bigger than mine. So somehow she looks at me and thinks she’s the fat one. Please. Obviously there are deeper issues with her as well, and I’m sure some therapist will eventually tell her that it’s all my fault, just like a couple of them have tried to tell me over the years that it was my mother’s fault. I don’t think they’re completely right, but maybe not completely wrong either. We all do the best we can, and we all try to do at least one thing better than our parents did when they raised us. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

The makeup and hair and clothing tips and knowledge I can share, but the deeper self image issues are much harder. I talk to my daughter all the time about how unhealthy and half-starved some of these models look, but it doesn’t seem to sink in. The media is going to continue to feed us these “perfectly beautiful” waifs who never let a cream puff past their lips and our children are going to keep being affected by it. Whether it’s a girl feeling inadequate because she doesn’t think she’ll ever be as pretty as the models or thinking she’s fat because her ribs aren’t visible in a bikini, it’s not good.