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I watched my 14-year-old daughter Carolyn twist in the mirror, trying to catch a glimpse of the protruding knobs of her spine. "Am I sick?" she asked, eyeing the sharp juts of her shoulder blades. “The internet says I’m sick.”
An hour earlier we’d gone out to lunch and I watched her house a Caesar salad with double dressing and a bowl of quad-fromage mac and cheese the size of her face, washing it all down with a lemonade and finishing with some gooey peanut butter chocolate confection while I flaked a piece of salmon over two heads of little gem lettuce.
“No, you’re not sick,” I said. I touched the ridges of bone along her back. “They’re spines,” I tried, “like a dragon.”
“I’m not a dragon,” she snapped. She pressed her arms back, watching as her collarbones pressed into her skin. “Why do I look like this?”
I spent most of my life believing I was ugly, hating my body, and seeing my hatred justified and encouraged by every TV show, movie, and magazine around me.
I’ve spent my entire life being told my body is a problem. When I was seven, my mother sat on the edge of the bathtub and pointed out the rolls in my stomach, warning me that if I kept eating, they’d get bigger and then no one would love me and want to marry me. For weeks after, I refused to eat anything except apples, until she told me that even apples were 100 calories each. So began a pattern of disordered eating that followed me through adolescence but never resulted in the thin body my mother prized in herself. I spent most of my life believing I was ugly, hating my body, and seeing my hatred justified and encouraged by every TV show, movie, and magazine around me.
Elizabeth and Car
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Imagine my surprise over the years when Carolyn lingered in the single-digit percentile for weight on her growth charts. Her pediatricians were constantly on edge, but I watched her take a delighted interest in food from an early age, eating with abandon and at volume. I suspected she’d inherited the mysterious skinny genes that lingered in my family and popped up here and there in cousins and siblings, genes I’d begrudged my brother for inheriting, genes I’d longed for when I was a kid.
Watching her grow into a lean, lithe teenager, I was relieved. She would be spared the unending discourse that follows large bodies. I had not condemned her to a life of struggle and flagging self-worth. And I worried, too, Will she be ashamed of me? As she grew, I watched for signs. Did she shrink away when I stepped out of the car to pick her up from school? Did she give me a look when I stood with the Pilates moms at the mother-daughter dance? She didn’t have to live under the umbrella of my body’s complications if she didn’t want to, and I wouldn’t fault her for any embarrassment or desire to distance herself.
I was not prepared when, at 14, after seeing piece after piece plastered across the internet, she asked if something was wrong with her body. She came home from a friend’s house wielding photos of some celebrity’s arms, sinewy, thin, and she held them up against her own. “Look!” she said. “Everyone’s saying if your arms look like this, then you’re sick.”
When Carolyn was eight, she was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent years in treatment. We know what sick looks like, and it isn’t her right now.
“You’re not sick,” I reminded her. “You’re just a skinny person. You’ve always been that way.” I didn’t remind her that when she was eight, she was diagnosed with leukemia and underwent years in treatment. We know what sick looks like, and it isn’t her right now.
A week later, sitting on the couch with her gaze locked onto her phone, I peered over her shoulder and saw a still from Ariana Grande’s music video, “Petal.” Carolyn stared at the photo, then down her own shirt at her sternum, tracing a finger over the ridges. “Is my…this…showing too much?”
It took everything in me to remain calm. “There is no such thing as too much as long as you’re okay,” I reminded her. “You’re exactly the way you’re supposed to be.”
It was a reassurance I'd longed for as a kid; there is nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful. I'd spent so much of my life aching to be told those things, so long that eventually I'd learned to tell them to myself, and eventually believe them.
My daughter deflated, leaning back on the cushions, looking defeated. "But why don't I look like you?"
There is an enduring promise that if you can get small enough, the scrutiny will ease.
Amid the swelling conversations around thinness—who’s on what GLP-1, whose collarbones and arms mean what—I’m watching my daughter navigate the same hell I waded through for most of my life, but from a totally different vantage point. It has turned my understanding of body image and body discourse upside down. For so long, I’d assumed that a benefit of my daughter’s thinness would be fewer body issues. It’s a message that is delivered over and over. People who have lost a lot of weight catalog the benefits: people are kinder, movement is easier, energy returns. There is an enduring promise that if you can get small enough, the scrutiny will ease. Emotional fallout over public body discourse was something I’d only ever experienced as a large body’s burden.
Of course, disordered eating is dangerous. Of course, being underweight can be, too. But a person’s health and body are a matter between them and their doctor—never the public. Speculation, condemnation, derision dressed as concern: It all amounts to the same thing, which is a young girl looking in the mirror and believing something about her is wrong.
My daughter’s body is the ideal I reached for, starved myself toward, for most of my life. Growing up, I saw models in magazines and longed to look like them, regardless of what it might cost me mentally and physically. Even with all that longing and torment, I never got anywhere close.
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I’m 38 now, and I’ve finally shed my shadow of self-hatred. I learned to love what I look like, to relish all the advantages of being in my body. I love walking into rooms and commanding attention naturally, love the space my body takes up. I feel beautiful more often than not, and I think my daughter is beautiful, too, in a different but no lesser way.
I did not expect that the years I'd spent enduring exhausting conversations about large bodies would prepare me to support my daughter as she navigated exhausting conversations around thin bodies. But I’d always been taught to see myself as a body first, and I recognized that trap as soon as I saw it open under Carolyn. I had to learn what I did not expect to learn: to see my daughter as more than her body, too.
At the end of the last school year, my phone rang. Carolyn’s art teacher introduced herself, sounding friendly but cautious. I stalled. A month prior, a boy poured paint down Carolyn’s sink drain and clogged it, and she’d retaliated by soaking a sponge in paint water and squeezing it in his face. I’d handled that conversation with measured diplomacy, privately thinking Carolyn did all the right things. What now?
“One of the girls pulled up a photo of the Venus de Milo to use as a reference for her sculpture because she said it represents the most beautiful woman.” Where was this going?
“Carolyn laughed and said, ‘ You haven’t seen my mom.’” She paused. “I just wanted you to know that she’s always telling people how beautiful you are.”
My daughter and I are looking at one another across a spectrum of bodies, and though we've taken different routes, we've ended up in the same place. Ultimately, no matter what you look like, public conversations about people's bodies bring us all to the same mirror and the same doubt. The only recourse is to love one another through it, to see, above all, beauty in ourselves and in each other.
