Body Parts
A friend of mine has a six month baby (he's ginormous, and terribly grown up now). She was having a reunion with her ante-natal class, and there were a lot of babies there (that tends to happen with ante-natal classes). One of the woman was looking at her daughter and said "She's got my thighs, she'll have to be careful."
This girl was six months old. Her thighs can't walk, can't run, can't ride a bike, can't climb a tree, can't get out of bed, can't jump, can't skip, can't hop, can't dance. I hope that little girl learns to do all those things with her thighs. But I can't even hope that she won't learn to hate those thighs, despite their strength and usefulness.
I've seen this before and it's disturbing as hell. I always find myself wondering what would have happened to me had my parents said, "She's got my arm" in terms of throwing a baseball, or "She's got my strength" instead of, "Oh, she's going to be a killer, look at those dimples and those eyes!".
ReplyDeleteIt's a sad state of affairs that we're doing this when they're babies *sigh*
Terrifying. Fat phobia analysis at the ready, when I got pregnant with my first child, I was all prepared to encourage her to love her fatty girl body...then she turned out to have a muscle bound body with not an inch of fat. She does love fat, though. I've taught her to understand that fat means people eat well. When we see the billboards of all the scrawny wimmin, we talk about the fact that they obviously haven't eaten enough breakfast.
ReplyDeleteAs far as I'm concerned that mother is going to be abusive. I've seen the damage wrecked on friends with fat phobic mothers. Poor kid.
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