Inherited body hatred
Making peace with my mother in the mirror
She hated her body, if one believed her words, and I believed them because I was a kid. I thought my mom was beautiful…she had long red-brown hair, a big smile, wore pretty clothes, makeup, and jewelry. She was my mom so, of course, she was beautiful. But Mom talked about being “hideous” disparaging her teeth, her hair, her body that was either too fat or too scrawny, too short, too dumpy. She was just too not good-looking enough. Mom related criticisms Grandma would level on her; how Mom unfortunately took after her father’s side of the family - people who were plain and unattractive (according to Grandma) – and how it was ‘too bad’ she didn’t take after Grandma’s more attractive, comely side of the family[1]. Too bad! What a term that is. And it sums up what Mom internalized; her appearance was “too bad”. Words matter.
In spite of her rural living conditions, Mom put a lot of effort into her appearance, with makeup, nail polish, hair care, plus clothes she designed and made herself. She loved to sketch dress designs (thin model included), musing about being a clothing designer to me. But those musings faded and disappeared with the demands of raising four kids, managing a household, and starting a business (not clothing related) with Dad. I never saw nor heard her admire herself, rather I heard her harsh criticism of her body, her clothes, her appearance. She never could get it right, whatever right was.
Mom was not critical of me directly, partly because she was acutely aware of the pain she carried from Grandma’s criticism. Yet, women needed to teach girls how to make themselves suitable for the world they were coming into and that had everything to do with how one looked. Mom confined her condemnation for things that could be fixed. My hair was too “strang-y”- meaning too straight - but that could be fixed with a perm or setting it in rollers or pin curls. My hair was “greezey”, meaning I should go wash it. My face was “pimply”, so I got trips to the dermatologist, food restrictions, and creams to apply. Mom was highly opinionated about what colors looked good together (she was an artist after all) and would send me back to my room to change if I dressed in something that “clashed severely”. These criticisms made me uneasy, often catching me by surprise, and implied something about my lack of judgement, hence my value, on a secret level.
As a little girl, I would play on the floor near Mom’s feet as she sat at her vanity[2] applying her makeup or doing her hair. She would let me go through her jewelry box and try things on while she worked on herself. I just had to be sure to put the things back in their places, something I learned to do pretty well. In mornings before school and evenings before bed, she would have me sit on the vanity seat while she did my hair. Mom would set my hair in various ways at night, and brush it out in the morning, getting my fine, straight hair to fall into curls adding a ribbon here or barrette there. She seemed pleased with how I looked, and I felt pretty under her care.
Mom made most of my clothes when I was young, channeling her fashion design interest into little girl clothes. My clothes were unique with lace, gathers, embroidery, even smocking - which both Mom and Grandma did well. Mom was such a good seamstress that no one ever made fun of my home-made clothes. Even though the fabric was bought on sale or repurposed from other clothes, they looked good. Grandma helped out making clothes for me and for my Barbies. My Barbies were the best-dressed ever.
From this, I think you can see that Mom (and Grandma) did her best to ensure I looked good, yet never too good, so I fit in well enough by appearance with my classmates. By looking good, I made Mom and Grandma look good. On the other hand, Mom never mentioned whether I myself was pretty because that kind of talk could go to a person’s head, you know. One mustn’t be too full of oneself.
I didn’t really know how or whether I measured up. And day after day, I watched Mom do her hair and makeup, as she voiced how hideous she looked.
As I grew a bit older, everyone remarked how much I looked like Mom. As I became a teen and then an adult, people I would meet for the first time would say “Oh, you must be Sylvia’s daughter. You look just like her!”
While I suspect this was usually meant as a compliment or perhaps their wonderment at our resemblance, I was ambivalent about this at best, and filled with aversion at times. Inwardly, I was profoundly confused. I didn’t want to look like Mom, yet I did and that brought me an odd recognition, even affirmation, from strangers. Those people often expected me to be like her, which was fine for them because people loved Mom. She was fun. Me? Well, I’m more of a quiet thinker. Wow, that was confusing!
I never made the connection between my confused feelings and Mom’s hatred of her appearance until I wrote my recent piece where a memory of buying mittens for Mom allowed me to recognize my love for Mom in a new way. I began to grieve what I lost with her death and began to accept what never was and never will be.
Writing that cracked something open in me that had been shut down for years. Suddenly, I realized that I was hating Mom in myself because of Mom’s self-hatred, not mine. How could I possibly make peace with my appearance if I carried that?
As I go through my life, I see Mom in reflections as I pass mirrors. I see and hear her in video recordings of myself, especially my laugh. I’ll see my facial expressions and gestures that are like hers. For as long as I can remember, I have recoiled at these experiences. I mustn’t be like her! Somehow, I must extricate that gesture, that turn of phrase, that way of laughing, I’d tell myself. I consciously changed my accent, my word usage, even how I carry myself to deal with this discord, so that I could be like me, not like her. But I can’t do anything about my resemblance to her. The feeling of this inner revulsion when I received cues that I was being like her was intense, unpleasant, shameful…and mostly unconscious. I’ve been ashamed about having the reaction, while being ashamed that I am like her.
Mom taught me to hate her appearance by mistake but demonstrated it to me over and over. I accepted, on an implicit level, the idea of her ugliness. I absorbed and adopted her loathing accepting it as my own. I aimed it toward myself and toward Mom reflected in my face. I wonder now if Mom hated seeing herself in me or if she felt sorry for me for looking like her. Or was she proud? Likely she was as confused as I have been.
I have struggled with my body image for as long as I can recall. My internal image of how I should look versus how I feel inside versus what my mind decodes when I see my reflection in the mirror have never aligned, causing me stress and distress. I’ve engaged in cruel criticism of my body, just like Mom. I blamed this struggle on our thin- and beauty-obsessed culture. As I try to free myself from this cultural mental illness of body image distortion, I’ve been working on accepting my body. I’ve been consciously trying to calm this horrible, critical voice often amplified painfully by mirrors. Becoming aware of this, I recently covered the mirror on a vanity where I dress with a blanket, hoping for some relief. I am surprised by how calming, how much more peaceful I feel as I dress myself without that darn mirror reflection. Now, it’s just a blanket covered piece of inert furniture that has no opinion. I can begin to feel my body from the inside, reassuring myself and my body that we’re ok. I won’t let that (inner) meanie keep attacking us, I promise myself.
I’ve always been a quick learner, and I learned these body image distortion lessons all too well. How could I look like Mom, and not also learn to hate the ways I resemble her? I readily accepted her projection of her own distorted body image onto me, believing it to be my own. Mom hated how she looked; of course she hated her appearance in me. I learned I was supposed to hate both. And so, I did. Unlearning these lessons is hard; the blanket over the mirror helps.
I can’t begin to describe how transformative this awareness is for me. I have hated something in myself for my whole life because of Mom’s body hatred. It’s hers, not mine. I neither hated her body, nor do I hate mine. I can now disown that hatred.
Of course, my relationship with Mom is more complicated than our body distortion problems. I had more awareness of those inner conflicts (as I wrote in a post a while ago). These conflicts were conscious; I had a measure of choice.
But this - this new possibility of making peace with my own body - is brand new for me. Now upon seeing my own face when I glance in a mirror (mirrors seem to be everywhere), I still have this ‘whoosh’ of revulsion, that life-long response to the wrongness of seeing Mom in my appearance. But I recognize the reaction and can challenge it. I feel softer. That’s just my reflection. I can adjust what I see and how I respond. I can see my resemblance to Mom, remembering I loved her, whether she loved herself or not. It wasn’t my fault she had that hate, projecting her self-hate onto me. After all, she absorbed her belief from the world she was born into, like her mother before her, and her mother’s mother…
I refuse to continue to perpetuate Mom’s body hatred and shame; I refuse to continue to enact this on my own body.
All these years, I thought my resistance to being like Mom was from within me, something I chose. I believed I was trying to be different to free myself of the limitations imposed on the women in my family because we were female. And that would be true. But much of my aversion was never mine. It was Mom’s all along. It was her struggle with herself, her belief that she wasn’t pretty enough, good enough, thin enough, whatever enough. Of course, I wouldn’t want to be like all that not-enoughness. And yet, she transmitted it to me, and I expressed it unwittingly.
No more! This ancestral hatred of our bodies transmitted inadvertently generation to generation for reasons long forgotten, serves no useful purpose. It has tormented us all for long enough.
It stops here, with me.
In time, I am confident I’ll be able to look into a full-length mirror with softness, care, and respect for this body I live in. For now, I’ll leave the blanket over the vanity and practice living in this body from the inside out.
[1] These ideas of beauty and ugliness, plain and comely, are sad cultural distortions that, unfortunately, imprison many if not most of us. I am often shocked when I learn that someone I love sees themselves as ugly or unattractive even as I continue in my own body criticisms. Hating on myself hurts everyone, especially my friends and loved ones.
[2] What a word for a piece of furniture…vanity! They’re also called dressing tables, and are basically furniture with a big mirror, drawers, and a desk-like top sized so that one can sit in front of it and tend one’s appearance. Here are some examples on Pinterest. The one I’m talking about had a huge round mirror, and glass that covered the wooden tops. There was a lower shelf in the bench were Mom sat as well as a low self in the vanity where her jewelry box lived…just the right size for a four-year-old girl to crawl around amongst. From there, I could look up and watch in fascination as Mom put on foundation, mascara, or do her hair or nails. As I grew up, I would never be able to wear much make up because of skin allergies, so I made not wearing makeup into a virtue to cover for my lack of choice around it. I still have fond memories of watching Mom. It was like having an insider’s secret view into a part of her world, which I suppose it was.
What an in depth investigation of self body hatred and all the attenuating beliefs surrounding that position, Cynthia! Your writing is so remarkably full of concrete remembrances of your past that allow us to relate to how that same body loathing has impacted our own lives. For me, growing up in a religion that saw women only as baby makers and slaves in the kitchen, I struggled always with my authentic sense of self. At one point, I began to notice that when someone at church was being called ugly without saying it, they would say it in code, " Oh she has such a sweet spirit.". Well, I started noticing that my mother said that quite often to me, so I ASSUMED that I too must be ugly! I so internalized the perception, that I genuinely believed that was true. It took someone in my twenties, loving me enough to stand me in front of a mirror and say, "You are going to stand here until you see how beautiful you are!" And he meant it.. About five hours later, I burst into tears and cried between tears out loud, "You know I really am beautiful!" ending a lifetime of mis-perception and sadness around that. That epiphany awareness didn't end my perception of being FAT which has been a life long struggle to work with. And that awareness didn't end the insecurity that had been axillary to that mis-perception, that took another ten years of self awareness and working with that shadow pattern before I busted through that one too.. Now at eighty I KNOW that i am also beautiful in THIS version of myself! Hallaylujah!!!! So thank you Cynthia for once again, bringing us the opportunity to investigate the self and question how we define and limit our reality with unconscious beliefs that inadvertently run the show of our lives! I treasure the clarity of your expression!!! ariel spilsbury