Fat, ugly and stupid

I received an email yesterday that reminded me of something I've wanted to write about for a very long time. It was the sweetest and kindest email I've ever received from a reader of my blog.

S.R. wrote me that she reads a lot of blogs and had never written to a blogger before. She went on to say I was "stunning/gorgeous". Wow! That got my attention. No one ever says that about me!

Then she said something I know is so very true, "when I read your blog, I hear such a negative self-image at times....so sad".

S.R. is right, I have a really bad self-image. I'm always criticizing myself, putting myself down, saying I'm fat and ugly and stupid. That I'm boring and uninteresting. Sadly, I believe most of these things.

The funny thing is I know why I'm like this. It's because of my mother. Now I had the most amazing mother you can possibly imagine. I was blessed with incredible parents. I won the lottery when it came to parents. I grew up being told I was smart and pretty, that I could do or be anything I wanted in life. I was told this over and over from the time I was a young child all through my adult life.

So what happened? Why am I like this? It's really simple. Even though my mother told me how great I was over and over, she said just the opposite about herself. She said she was fat, that she hated how she looked. She said she was stupid.

My mother was really pretty with a beautiful smile. I look at pictures of her when she was young and she was gorgeous. She looked like a movie star. She had a weight problem after having three kids, but she was still very pretty. She lost 100 pounds when she was 65 and kept it off during the last 20 years of her life. She still said she was fat. She was 5' 8" and weighed 145.

About her being stupid, it wasn't true. She was really smart. She skipped two grades in high school and graduated when she was only 16 years old. Yet she said she was stupid and dumb, when really she was one of the smartest people I've ever met.

My point is you can tell your kids anything you want, but it's really what you say about yourself is what they're going to hear and copy. They will grow up to be like you. If you say you're fat and stupid and ugly, I guarantee you're going to hear your kid say that same thing about themselves.

So if you can't have a good self-image for yourself, at least fake it the best you can for your kid. When you look in the mirror, and your child is watching you, don't say, "oh, I'm so fat, I just look awful" or make comments that you're stupid. That's probably the greatest disservice you can do to your child.

I don't blame my mother for how I feel about myself. I know she did the best she could and would never have intentionally said those things if she knew I was going to take them on as my own image. The really sad thing is that I can't seem to change it. I know it's not really true, yet I hear that little voice in my head constantly telling me that I'm fat, ugly, and stupid.