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. Read the rest of this entry »