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There is a lot of chatter on social media these days about self images. And how society tears us down before we are even old enough to understand what self image is. When I think back to my childhood I remember my mother always telling me how beautiful I was. But I never believed her, I mean she is my mom. Its kind of her job to tell me that. I also remember total strangers stopping us whenever we were out somewhere and they would tell my mother how beautiful I was. Instead of enjoying the attention, it creeped me out. A LOT.
When I looked in the mirror I never saw a beautiful little girl or even a kind of pretty one. All I saw was a girl with a plain oval shaped face, long straight yellow hair, eyes that were this really weird color that was blue with a circle of yellow in the middle, I saw "chipmunk" cheeks and this embarrassing dent in my chin that made it look like a butt. Now as an adult and I look photos of myself at that age I am startled by just how pretty I was. The hair I thought was nothing special was a shiny, golden blonde. Those eyes that I thought were weird and made me look Asian are to this day one of my best features. They range in color from pale blue to dark green depending on my mood. The chupmunk cheeks I saw were actually high cheekbones that I inherited from my Cherokee ancestors. And that dent in my chin? I got that from the father that I only met a handful of times and cannot remember what he looks like.
But as a child most of the time we don't see ourselves the way everybody else does. Fast forward to age 9 when I got my first period. Yes, I said age 9 and yes, it sucked big time. Luckily my mom noticed my mood swings and saw this coming and had "the talk" with me so I knew what was going on when it happened and didn't think that I was dying. With that change came changes to my body. I was tall for my age, taller than all the boys in my class so everybody assumed I was going to be a very tall woman when I grew up. So now when people stopped my mother and I in the store they said not only that I was beautiful but that I should become a model when I grew up. Something my mother wholeheartedly agreed with. Another changed occurred between the ages of 9 and 11, I got boobs. And not the gradual, need a training bra type of boobs but full blown C cup boobs. Which is still not the biggest they would eventually be but at that age the only girls that had boobs that big were the overweight girls. So by my reasoning that must of meant I was fat. Now, I will not refer to another person as "fat". I think its disrespectful and mean. But I have no qualms about calling myself a mean name.
Why did I think I was fat at such a young age? Because all the girls that were not overweight were flat as a board. Most of them wore training bras but still had nothing to fill them. Meanwhile I was wearing my moms bras and they fit. Then another change occurred. As I continued to fill out, my waist seemed to be getting smaller, and then my hips arrived. VERY large hips. So there I was a 5 foot tall, big boobed, big butt, tiny waist having girl in the 5th grade. None of the girls in my class liked me because of what I looked like and the boys liked me too much. And boys that age only know how to show a girl they like them by making them cry. Once in a great while a boy would be my friend in secret but as soon as anybody found out they had to save face by saying something mean to me in front of the rest of the school.
I say school because in Oklahoma City where I grew up in the early 80's there was a thing they did called busing. You were assigned a school not by how close you lived to one but by districts. So even if there was a perfectly good school 2 blocks from your house, you had to get on a bus and be driven all the way across town. They started doing this when you got to 5th grade. and for some odd reason we had one 5th grade school in the entire city. So the entire school was 5th graders.
Other things changed in my life as well, instead of strangers walking up to my mom and telling her how pretty I was, grown men would approach me when I would go to the store for my mom or when she would be on the next aisle at the grocery store. And they didn't always just tell me I was pretty. I learned at a very early age what being groped was. Because of how developed I was at age 12 I looked 18. Most of the time it was guys in their late teens or early 20's that would approach me and most of the time they were nice and usually asked my name and then how old I was. I could tell who was the nice ones because when they found out my age they bolted out of there as fast as they could.
Others weren't so nice. Some would say some really filthy things to me about what they would like to do with me, or what they thought of my body. One time when I walked to the store that was 1.5 blocks from our house to get an icee the cleark actually came around the counter and picked me up and carried me to the back room and french kissed me. I was in total shock and more than a little scared so I ran out of there and did not return until many years later. So due to my body developing at such a young age I had to grow up fast. While my friends were still playing jump rope and Barbie dolls I was battling menstrual cramps and trying to find ways to make my boobs look smaller. The girls at my school called me "fast". And since we did not have Google back then I had no idea what it meant. Now I know what it meant, They were calling me a slut. Because I had a womans body and the boys paid more attention to me.
I would like to say as the years progressed this sort of thing changed but it did not. Fast forward thru middle school which was its own special kind of hell, to High school. My body had pretty much finished developing. and BIG surprise, I never grew another inch in height. To this day I am still the same height that I was in the 5th grade. Oh and my perfectly straight hair became a mass of curls overnight. So now when I looked in the mirror I saw a short, fat, frizzy haired girl. I looked nothing like most of the other girls my age. Most of them were still flat chested and they had acne. To my horror I never really had acne that bad. So there was another thing that made me different and in my eyes made them hate me even more. I had a few close friends but most of the girls I went to school with were girls I knew but never hung out with. And even my friends called me names like "Thunder Thighs, or Horse Hips" The really mean girls just flat out called me fat. And I believed them. up until my last year of high school I wore baggy clothes so people could not see my body. In fact in my last year of school when I started wearing skirts and more fitted clothing everybody thought I just lost a bunch of weight.
Gym class was the ultimate hell. I was never athletic and the gym teachers always seemed to dislike me so I was always having to do extra reps of this or that exercise. One teacher used to make me do suicides whenever I couldn't make a basket when he would make us play basketball. So naturally I started finding ways to get out of gym class. Which usually involved leaving school grounds with a bunch of guy friends in one of their cars. So the fact that I had a lot of male friends branded me a slut. Not only was I almost 18 when I had sex for the first time but I was the very last of all my friends to do so. But, I somehow was the sluttiest girl in school.
So here I was in high school hiding behind my baggy clothes and I wore fake glasses to conceal my face. Once in a while one of my girlfriends would tell me that if I lost the glasses and did my hair and makeup I would be the prettiest girl in school. My reaction? NO THANK YOU!! to me that just enlarged the target on my back.
Sometime in middle school I found another thing that I would get made fun of for. I was smart. really smart. The school wanted to skip me up a grade level 2 different times back in elementary school but my mom refused because she didn't think I should be with older kids. Looking back I might have actually felt like I fit in more with the older kids because my body had matured so early. But even though I was smart I started to do a really dumb thing. I pretended to be dumb. People seemed to like me better when I acted dumb. So started failing classes which aggravated my mom to the point she just gave up on me in that area. I screwed up in school so much that I ended up being 2 yrs behind my class so there was no way I would ever graduate high school. Which I did not. I ended up taking my GED instead and even though it only took me 1/2 the allotted time I scored extremely high on every section. Except Math, I barely squeaked by on that one.
Fast way forward to present day. I'm 43, the mom of a 11 yr old boy that is genius level smart and his face and hair look exactly like mine at that same age. He is breathtakingly beautiful and going to make me hate teenage girls someday soon. But he is called "weird" because he is so smart. Because he would rather play video games on his computer or read a book than play sports. And because he decided to grow his hair out so he could donate it to locks of love he gets called a girl all the time. Sometimes its an honest mistake because he is so beautiful but most of the time people are just being assholes. He is also Autistic. So he doesn't understand how to play all the silly social games that kids play. He doesn't understand why somebody is shunned because of the shoes they do or don't wear. Or why he gets called "gay" because he cares about other peoples feelings.
He thinks he is ugly, much like I did at that age. Even though he is told quite often how handsome he is and yes, total strangers comment on his looks all the time. I think I struggle with all of this more than he does because not only do I hurt for him but the memory of what all that was like for me comes flooding back and I just don't know how to make it easier on him or how to convince him not to give a damn what others think of him. It took me 30 yrs to stop caring what people thought of me and to stop seeing myself in a negative light.
So while I think its great that people are taking a stance on negativity and trying to make kids today feel good about themselves I don't think we really know the proper way to do that yet. No matter how many times we tell them positive things about themselves they will only see what they see. And as was the case with me, sometimes being attractive brings unwanted attention or it can still bring negative comments from peers. And I don't even know if we can actually change how kids treat each other. I am facebook friends with many of the females I went to school with and some of them were just downright nasty to me. But as grown women they are the kindest and caring women I know.
Or I could be wrong and the answer to it all could be that if we make people feel good about themselves they won't feel the need to tear others down. At some point in my life I finally figured out that a lot of times when somebody is saying something mean to you its because they really don't like themselves very much. But lets be honest, getting everybody to not raise their children as assholes is about as realistic as world peace. Its a lovely thought but it hasn't been in effect since the dawn of time.
Thanks for reading my insomniac ramblings. and I know I haven't written a new blog in almost 3 years but i've been kind of busy with homeschooling my child and health issues which is a long winded blog in itself.
So until next time I have a lot to say and nobody awake to listen, Hope wherever you are while reading this you are happy and healthy!
Love,
A.
When I looked in the mirror I never saw a beautiful little girl or even a kind of pretty one. All I saw was a girl with a plain oval shaped face, long straight yellow hair, eyes that were this really weird color that was blue with a circle of yellow in the middle, I saw "chipmunk" cheeks and this embarrassing dent in my chin that made it look like a butt. Now as an adult and I look photos of myself at that age I am startled by just how pretty I was. The hair I thought was nothing special was a shiny, golden blonde. Those eyes that I thought were weird and made me look Asian are to this day one of my best features. They range in color from pale blue to dark green depending on my mood. The chupmunk cheeks I saw were actually high cheekbones that I inherited from my Cherokee ancestors. And that dent in my chin? I got that from the father that I only met a handful of times and cannot remember what he looks like.
But as a child most of the time we don't see ourselves the way everybody else does. Fast forward to age 9 when I got my first period. Yes, I said age 9 and yes, it sucked big time. Luckily my mom noticed my mood swings and saw this coming and had "the talk" with me so I knew what was going on when it happened and didn't think that I was dying. With that change came changes to my body. I was tall for my age, taller than all the boys in my class so everybody assumed I was going to be a very tall woman when I grew up. So now when people stopped my mother and I in the store they said not only that I was beautiful but that I should become a model when I grew up. Something my mother wholeheartedly agreed with. Another changed occurred between the ages of 9 and 11, I got boobs. And not the gradual, need a training bra type of boobs but full blown C cup boobs. Which is still not the biggest they would eventually be but at that age the only girls that had boobs that big were the overweight girls. So by my reasoning that must of meant I was fat. Now, I will not refer to another person as "fat". I think its disrespectful and mean. But I have no qualms about calling myself a mean name.
Why did I think I was fat at such a young age? Because all the girls that were not overweight were flat as a board. Most of them wore training bras but still had nothing to fill them. Meanwhile I was wearing my moms bras and they fit. Then another change occurred. As I continued to fill out, my waist seemed to be getting smaller, and then my hips arrived. VERY large hips. So there I was a 5 foot tall, big boobed, big butt, tiny waist having girl in the 5th grade. None of the girls in my class liked me because of what I looked like and the boys liked me too much. And boys that age only know how to show a girl they like them by making them cry. Once in a great while a boy would be my friend in secret but as soon as anybody found out they had to save face by saying something mean to me in front of the rest of the school.
I say school because in Oklahoma City where I grew up in the early 80's there was a thing they did called busing. You were assigned a school not by how close you lived to one but by districts. So even if there was a perfectly good school 2 blocks from your house, you had to get on a bus and be driven all the way across town. They started doing this when you got to 5th grade. and for some odd reason we had one 5th grade school in the entire city. So the entire school was 5th graders.
Other things changed in my life as well, instead of strangers walking up to my mom and telling her how pretty I was, grown men would approach me when I would go to the store for my mom or when she would be on the next aisle at the grocery store. And they didn't always just tell me I was pretty. I learned at a very early age what being groped was. Because of how developed I was at age 12 I looked 18. Most of the time it was guys in their late teens or early 20's that would approach me and most of the time they were nice and usually asked my name and then how old I was. I could tell who was the nice ones because when they found out my age they bolted out of there as fast as they could.
Others weren't so nice. Some would say some really filthy things to me about what they would like to do with me, or what they thought of my body. One time when I walked to the store that was 1.5 blocks from our house to get an icee the cleark actually came around the counter and picked me up and carried me to the back room and french kissed me. I was in total shock and more than a little scared so I ran out of there and did not return until many years later. So due to my body developing at such a young age I had to grow up fast. While my friends were still playing jump rope and Barbie dolls I was battling menstrual cramps and trying to find ways to make my boobs look smaller. The girls at my school called me "fast". And since we did not have Google back then I had no idea what it meant. Now I know what it meant, They were calling me a slut. Because I had a womans body and the boys paid more attention to me.
I would like to say as the years progressed this sort of thing changed but it did not. Fast forward thru middle school which was its own special kind of hell, to High school. My body had pretty much finished developing. and BIG surprise, I never grew another inch in height. To this day I am still the same height that I was in the 5th grade. Oh and my perfectly straight hair became a mass of curls overnight. So now when I looked in the mirror I saw a short, fat, frizzy haired girl. I looked nothing like most of the other girls my age. Most of them were still flat chested and they had acne. To my horror I never really had acne that bad. So there was another thing that made me different and in my eyes made them hate me even more. I had a few close friends but most of the girls I went to school with were girls I knew but never hung out with. And even my friends called me names like "Thunder Thighs, or Horse Hips" The really mean girls just flat out called me fat. And I believed them. up until my last year of high school I wore baggy clothes so people could not see my body. In fact in my last year of school when I started wearing skirts and more fitted clothing everybody thought I just lost a bunch of weight.
Gym class was the ultimate hell. I was never athletic and the gym teachers always seemed to dislike me so I was always having to do extra reps of this or that exercise. One teacher used to make me do suicides whenever I couldn't make a basket when he would make us play basketball. So naturally I started finding ways to get out of gym class. Which usually involved leaving school grounds with a bunch of guy friends in one of their cars. So the fact that I had a lot of male friends branded me a slut. Not only was I almost 18 when I had sex for the first time but I was the very last of all my friends to do so. But, I somehow was the sluttiest girl in school.
So here I was in high school hiding behind my baggy clothes and I wore fake glasses to conceal my face. Once in a while one of my girlfriends would tell me that if I lost the glasses and did my hair and makeup I would be the prettiest girl in school. My reaction? NO THANK YOU!! to me that just enlarged the target on my back.
Sometime in middle school I found another thing that I would get made fun of for. I was smart. really smart. The school wanted to skip me up a grade level 2 different times back in elementary school but my mom refused because she didn't think I should be with older kids. Looking back I might have actually felt like I fit in more with the older kids because my body had matured so early. But even though I was smart I started to do a really dumb thing. I pretended to be dumb. People seemed to like me better when I acted dumb. So started failing classes which aggravated my mom to the point she just gave up on me in that area. I screwed up in school so much that I ended up being 2 yrs behind my class so there was no way I would ever graduate high school. Which I did not. I ended up taking my GED instead and even though it only took me 1/2 the allotted time I scored extremely high on every section. Except Math, I barely squeaked by on that one.
Fast way forward to present day. I'm 43, the mom of a 11 yr old boy that is genius level smart and his face and hair look exactly like mine at that same age. He is breathtakingly beautiful and going to make me hate teenage girls someday soon. But he is called "weird" because he is so smart. Because he would rather play video games on his computer or read a book than play sports. And because he decided to grow his hair out so he could donate it to locks of love he gets called a girl all the time. Sometimes its an honest mistake because he is so beautiful but most of the time people are just being assholes. He is also Autistic. So he doesn't understand how to play all the silly social games that kids play. He doesn't understand why somebody is shunned because of the shoes they do or don't wear. Or why he gets called "gay" because he cares about other peoples feelings.
He thinks he is ugly, much like I did at that age. Even though he is told quite often how handsome he is and yes, total strangers comment on his looks all the time. I think I struggle with all of this more than he does because not only do I hurt for him but the memory of what all that was like for me comes flooding back and I just don't know how to make it easier on him or how to convince him not to give a damn what others think of him. It took me 30 yrs to stop caring what people thought of me and to stop seeing myself in a negative light.
So while I think its great that people are taking a stance on negativity and trying to make kids today feel good about themselves I don't think we really know the proper way to do that yet. No matter how many times we tell them positive things about themselves they will only see what they see. And as was the case with me, sometimes being attractive brings unwanted attention or it can still bring negative comments from peers. And I don't even know if we can actually change how kids treat each other. I am facebook friends with many of the females I went to school with and some of them were just downright nasty to me. But as grown women they are the kindest and caring women I know.
Or I could be wrong and the answer to it all could be that if we make people feel good about themselves they won't feel the need to tear others down. At some point in my life I finally figured out that a lot of times when somebody is saying something mean to you its because they really don't like themselves very much. But lets be honest, getting everybody to not raise their children as assholes is about as realistic as world peace. Its a lovely thought but it hasn't been in effect since the dawn of time.
Thanks for reading my insomniac ramblings. and I know I haven't written a new blog in almost 3 years but i've been kind of busy with homeschooling my child and health issues which is a long winded blog in itself.
So until next time I have a lot to say and nobody awake to listen, Hope wherever you are while reading this you are happy and healthy!
Love,
A.
