It was an
unseasonably warm fall day and two-year-old Jamie and I were in the backyard. I
had turned the hose on so that she could water some flowers, but Jamie had
other ideas — she quickly found our plastic wading pool left over from the
summer and began filling it up. When she had a few inches of water in the
wading pool, she wriggled out of her sundress, whipped off her diaper and
climbed in.
As naked
Jamie splashed around in her outdoor bathtub, it struck me as to how completely
unselfconscious she was. Every so often, she’d get out of the pool and run to
another part of the yard to get a toy. Sometimes, on her way back to the pool,
she’d stop to drive her kiddie car around the patio. It didn’t occur to her
that there was anything unusual about this, that there was anything to be
embarrassed of. And as I watched my
daughter, I felt wistful. For a flash of a second, I felt as God might have,
watching Eve in the garden of Eden — hoping it could last forever. It’s not
that I didn’t want my daughter to someday have appropriate modesty for her
private body parts. It’s just that I knew that soon after children are old
enough to realize some body parts are private, they begin to gauge their own
bodies against what they see as an ideal. Girls especially begin to find fault
with their bodies.
My
daughter, who is so comfortable in her light brown skin right now, may someday
feel that her skin is the wrong color. Someday, she may compare her legs or
belly to someone else’s and find fault in her own. While now, she is no more
conscious of her tush than her toes, someday, she may put a dress or a swimsuit
back on a rack because she doesn’t like how it makes her behind look. Even
though my plans for my daughter include helping her see herself as beautiful
and complete, I know that that it will be hard to compete against magazines
filled with gorgeous models and a culture that has a very limited vision of
what female beauty can be.
One of my
favorite school Masses last year included a song by my son’s first grade class
that had this line: Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less
than beautiful; don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re less than whole. The
song made me cry, and as I looked around, I noticed the other first-grade moms
around me were tearing up as well. I think our tears came because all of us, at
some time, had been made to feel less than beautiful. To hear our children sing
those words, was to wish, for a moment, that our children might escape that
hurt. The chorus gave voice to the unspoken hope of every mother that her child
would always be seen as precious.
I can’t
help but think that part of my job for my little daughter is to keep her living
in her Garden of Eden as long as I can. I have to believe that every year of
early childhood that she feels positively about her body is one more year to
fall back on when she is an anxious pre-teen. I plan to tend to her little
Garden of Eden by limiting her TV, by not bringing fashion magazines into the
house, by not buying into the little girl make-up sets and telling Barbie and
her friends to come back when they have more normal proportions. I don’t know
if all this will work. I’m hoping that if I couple it with giving my daughter a
taste of outdoor life and sports — and a sample of dance and drama, that she’ll
discover that bodies are for work and for play.
And maybe, when she’s in first grade, her teacher will have her class
sing that song: Don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re anything less
than beautiful; don’t let anyone ever tell you that you’re less than whole.
My beautiful daughter. I pray she will
always feel whole.
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