Teach your children well

196 pounds
Some of my body issues come directly from my body—its imperfections and flaws—but most of them come from my childhood.

You see, I was raised in a house where one of us was considered pretty and one of us was considered smart.

I'll give you one guess which one I was.

As a result, it's taken me years to understand that it's possible to be pretty and smart and to have even an iota of objectivity about the way I look.

I might have mentioned this on the blog a while ago, but back in 2007, I had a bit of an epiphany about my looks. I was giving a reading and used a photo from myself at age ten for the publicity materials. When the advertisement went out via email, one of my students said something like, "I should have known you were always pretty."

The comment shocked me because until that moment I don't think I had ever thought of myself as pretty. Attractive, yes. Sexy, hell yes. But pretty? Not really. And I definitely hadn't thought of my childhod self as ANY of those things simply because of the dichotomy I was raised under ... Molly smart, Katie pretty.

For years I've thought about this dichotomy—wondered about it, analyzed it, written about it—and sometimes I find myself thinking, maybe it wasn't as bad as I remember. Maybe I'm being too hard on my parents.

But then, one of them slips up and says or does something that puts me right back at my ten-year-old insecure self.

This weekend that honor went to my mother.

I hadn't talked to her in a while, so I was catching her up on what's been going in my life lately. And when I told her that I was going to have a new author photo taken for my upcoming book, she said, "Make sure the camera isn't too close. It will look better from farther away."

Ouch.

I realized immediately I should have been wounded by this comment, but it was so offensive and so like my mother, that it was more laughable than hurtful.

Still, I didn't laugh.

Instead, I decided to send the message that—despite my parents' best efforts—I am no longer nervous about having a close-up photo taken. But my mother wouldn't let it go, insisting that "you don't want it to be too close."

At that point, I was fed up and explained—loudly, I might add—that author photos are never full body shots, that they are always, by definition, close-up.

She got the message—probably because of my volume—and backed off.

But later I kept thinking about it—does she really think I would look that bad close-up? Does she really think I'm that hard to look at? And is this why I thought I was unattractive until I was twenty years old?

It occurred to me then that my mother's comments were more about herself than they were about me. This is a woman who didn't want to join Facebook because she didn't think she had a good enough photo for her profile picture, a woman who looks stiff and unhappy in nearly every snapshot. She didn't want me to have a close-up taken because she never wants to have one taken of herself.

The truth is that it wasn't that my mother believed that only my sister was pretty when we were growing up or that she wanted me to look more like Katie. It was that she wished she looked more like my sister—more blonde and more thin. And she just assumed that everyone would have that same wish—including me.

Sure, it only takes me a few minutes to figure that out now, but when I was growing up, I lacked the critical thinking skills that allow me to understand this. So I walked through childhood believing I was gross.

I suppose that if I had a daughter—or even a son—I would be falling all over myself to make sure I didn't injure her self-esteem because of my own issues the way my mother did with me. But since I don't have any kids, I guess I'll just have to rely on all of you to take care of that for me.

Why we should all see AWAY WE GO

196 pounds

Tonight I had the privilege of seeing Away We Go, the new dramedy about a confused young pregnant couple played by Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski. It was a film I've wanted to see as long as I've known about it but one I'd been D Y I N G to see ever since I saw a gorgeous but very womanly picture of Maya Rudolph splashed across two pages of Entertainment Weekly with an article they wrote about the movie last month. In the picture, Rudolph's skirt was creeping up her thighs to reveal wonderfully fleshy legs, and I immediately admired the hell out of Rudolph for that photo—not only for showing off her regular-sized body, but for doing so in such a sexy manner.

What's even better is that Rudolph was pregnant at the time the picture was taken. Sure, we've seen pregnant woman knocking our eyes out on the cover of magazines before (Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair comes to mind), but this photo was different. Rudolph didn't look like she had something to prove. She looked like she was merely comfortable with herself—womanly thighs and all.

In a recent post, I talked about my wish that more magazines would feature women who are a happy medium between the severely underweight and the severely overweight, and Maya Rudolph is a great example of someone who personifies that happy medium—both in terms of her body and her non-traditional beauty.

Because of this photo, I was hoping that Rudolph would look just as real in the film, and it did not disappoint. Both she and Krasinski go from average to stunning to disheveled at various points throughout the movie.

But what I really want to talk about is a comment made by Rudolph's character, Verona, in the movie. Without giving anything away, I can say that the comment occurs when she and her boyfriend Burt are discussing their future and their unborn daughter. Verona asks Burt to "promise me that you won't care if our daughter is fat or skinny, and that she won't even be the kind of girl who worries about her weight in a cliched kind of way." (I'm sure I'm getting the words all out of order, but the sentiment is what's important here.)

Verona makes this request during a very moving part of the film, and it was this line that put me over the top. I wanted to stand up in my chair, throw down my tub of popcorn and oversized soda, and shout, "Yes, yes, yes! Please teach your daughter not to worry about her weight! Please teach us all to do that!"

Of course, I didn't stand up and shout like that because I was afraid of getting thrown out of the theatre and really wanted to see the end of the movie.

But I did start to cry.

And I'm not sure I really stopped until the credits had finished rolling.

I guess what I'm saying is that this, more than anything, was a movie that really got me, that really understood what's important to me. (If such a thing is even possible.) And I'd like to take it a step further and say this is a movie that gets all of us.

These two characters were simultaneously the kind of lost souls we all feel like sometimes and the generous, thoughtful people we all aspire to be at other times—whether it be their take on their unborn daughter's weight, the way they both embraced Rudolph's pregnant body, or their stubborn refusal to accept the rejection of strollers. No matter how you look at it, these characters were the real thing.

So I'll add it to my list of Movies Every Woman Should See, but do yourself a favor and see this one on the big screen before it leaves the theatre.