The Girls in the Locker Room

This is an open letter to the four girls in the locker room at the public pool last week.

I live in a small, rural, Midwestern town so even though I do not know their names, I know that this will get back to them, their parents, and their friends eventually. I hope in some small way, or even a big way, that this messages changes them.

You are beautiful. You are exactly what our society holds as our ideal of beauty! Youth, slender frame, shiny hair, and health.

When you came in from pool side my eight year old and five year old girls had just finished changing from wet swim suit to play dresses, I was still getting my jeans on, and the baby was trying to take his diaper off. At first my girls were confused by the idea of bikinis and thought y'all were in your underwear.

Then one of you stood in front on the mirror and started pinching your tummy skin and twisting to look at your own butt.

The word fat was used. The words I hate the way .... looks  were used several times by all of you. My girls stood confused waiting for me to try and button my mother loving jeans over my post Cesarean section, three baby, scarred and squish belly. Before that day, they thought that belly was a miracle of life and beautiful. They hoped to have the same belly someday, fertile and life giving, stretched and well loved. I grew them inside that belly.

Fat.

Fat with all that our society weighs and burdens that word. 

Oh, but it gets worse. Then you all started talking about the sunburn, the lobster look, one of you had acquired quite severely. I turned to look out of concern, it was a very bad burn. Painful. It had to be.

The discussion between you all turned quickly to tanning and burning. Each of you said the burn and pain was totally worth it for the tan. That one of you does it on purpose. Then all nodded. This kept going.

Let me put this in context.

1) A spray on tan looks the same. The look is the goal right? Normally I am all for the natural look, but if the choice is between self harm and spray on? Go to the salon. Seriously, I beg you.

2) How is this different from cutting? This is self harm. Serious self harm. Here are four lovely young girls hurting and causing intentional self pain just to, what, look brown? Burning. Intentionally burning. Laying poolside covered in products SOLD to them to amplify the effort full of cancer causing chemicals, have any of you ever looked at tanning lotion?

And this is the crux, the process you are using is socially acceptable. This is your cover story, your alibi. Children who cut do not have this. They bleed, hide the cuts with long sleeves. You wear this burn and pain, even brag about it, and no one bats an eye.

I am calling you out.

Normally I would let you off the hook, what you do to your self, your own body, is your business. This time though, there were my little girls in the room. This time they took in every word of your self hate, every grimace, every pinch.

They both refused dinner that night and the next. Over the next few days they asked about their own bodies. Are they fat? Are they the right colour? Are they pretty? They stood, each on their own in the bathroom or in front of room mirrors copying your pinching, your critical looks, and your.....self loathing. What they saw changed their world view.

One of my girls asked if I was going to try and make my belly not fat. My beautiful squishy life giving belly is now just fat. 

When I was teaching for a local college last semester, I designed for Women's American History all about body image and advertisements, I found article after article stating that eating disorders are a mental illness and not caused by outside influence like ads or peer pressure, that they are based in an OCD type illness.

No. That is wrong. I call bullshit. I don't care how many textbooks tell us this. It is bullshit.

We do this to each other everyday, to our little girls when they see the people they look up to hate their own bodies. I can fight off the ads, shelter them from magazines and television ads for as long as I can, but I cannot hide them from the people we live with in our own community. Their aunts and grandmas shoulder this burden directly because I know them and they know my intentions on this subject. My friends know this too. My girls will know the variety and beauty of all human bodies, that we are all different and changing. They are beautiful, even by society's messed up standards of expectations. They are gorgeous.

You girls do not know this. I hope that when this letter gets to your parents that they hug you. That they see you for who you are and love you unconditionally. I hope that they see past whatever excuse you try to use to hide your self harming. I hope that everyone in your life sees the beautiful you and takes time out of your every single day to tell you about the things you are good at and what they like about you.

Here is an example of what I whisper to my girls at the end of every single day....You are loved. You are brave and capable and kind. You are clever enough to ask questions and slow down when something is difficult. You are sunshine to the world, lighting up the darkness with your smile and your laughter. These things make you beautiful.

I hope your boyfriends are man enough yet to tell you you are beautiful without hurting yourself this way. That they are the kind of men who will be strong and kind and love you when your body changes with age and with all the turmoil of life.

I hope your neighbours shower your doorstep with organic sunscreen. I hope that someone offers to take you to a salon that does spray on tanning. I am all for changing your own body to look like what  you want, after all, and I know this will verify for you exactly who you are and I am, I have bright pink hair and I am a midget and yes, I heard one of you call me a living troll doll. Mama, you look nothing like a troll, don't they know what fairies look like?

These are the beautiful children you changed the world for, and I will fight like hell to set it right.

I realize now that I cannot do that in a bubble. So this message is for you, you are beautiful. People are more attracted to confidence and a bright smile than what colour your tan is or your BMI.

This message is for everyone in your life. Someone changed your world at some point. Maybe a babysitter or a friend or your own mother crash dieting and lamenting that these jeans make my butt look big. What you all say about yourselves is soaked up and internalized by little girls all around you.

Fat. Ugly. Too big. The only ugly here is heartbroken little girls who at some point said those words to themselves after hearing everyone else say it to themselves. My girls also heard what you called me. That will actually help them recover from the blow faster, I think. They fiercely love me and that is because they have been so loved all their lives. We have enough to share with you. Please stop inflicting burns, stop pinching your skin looking for imperfection, please stop thinking there is anything wrong with your growing bodies (that includes starving yourselves, because my gut tells me that at least one of you is also doing this). Stop.

There. The living troll doll has said her piece.