today i am 18 weeks pregnant with little peanut. we find out the gender in 2 weeks and it is seriously the longest 2 weeks of my life!!! pretty exciting times around these parts :)
to start off my trail of thoughts, i have been thinking a lot about social pressures and societal acceptance. growing up (especially freshman year of high school) i felt so much pressure to be this idea of "skinny". what even defines this "skinny"? where did i even get this desire to be skinny? when (if) i ever reach 'skinny' how will i know? will i finally be happy with myself just like that?
im thinking it's a lot to do with self confidence/self image which is honestly the hardest thing sometimes. i sometimes wonder why it is that some people seem so confident in their own skin while others are so clearly fighting this battle. maybe everyone is fighting the battle, some just hide it better?
so when did it all start? i can still remember a few occasions when i was younger that someone thoughtlessly said something regarding me being fat. when i was 9 i was at my bff's birthday pool party and one of her friends' little brother was there. after we finished singing happy birthday he kept singing the "and scoobydoo on channel 2..etc" part of that song. when he got to "...and a big fat lady on channel 80" he looked at me saying "and YOURE the big fat lady". i was so confused. i can honestly say that i never saw myself as fat up to that point, and i sometimes wonder if i EVER saw myself at that age.. i really was the chubbiest kid ever. what can i say, i LOVE food. on another occasion a friend on my bus ride home from school told me i was a "big fat liar, especially the fat part". where do kids even come up with such awful things to say? still it took me until i was 14, going into my freshman year of high school, to really see myself as "too fat". i was in freshman p.e. and it was our day to run the dreaded 1 mile...24.5 minutes later i finally crossed the finish line, surrounded by all the fit kids cheering me on and running beside me. "you can do it heidi" "you got this". while you'd think this would be so encouraging, but to put it plainly i was utterly humiliated! so that experience, along with a young women activity on healthy eating convinced me it was past time for me to get skinny. at first i would just work my tail off in p.e. and do the best i could. as far as eating goes...basically i started cutting out sugary foods: ice cream (which is a big deal in my family!), brownies, cookies, etc. then i would only eat salad or a salad wrap for lunch with minimal dressing. one day i decided that since my p.e. class is right after lunch i couldn't eat lunch anymore or else the physical exertion of said p.e. class would make me sick. sometimes i would just nibble on some jalapeno potato chips until lunch time was over to avoid all the questions. soon it became a game of how long i could go without eating. i would sleep in so i "didn't have time to eat breakfast" and just take something on the way and shove it in my backpack. then i would pick at my food all lunch time, or just skip it all together. i would come home from school obviously exhausted and sleep until i was awoken by hunger pains or the smell of dinner cooking. i remember trying to fake sleeping so i could avoid the dinner table all together, but that usually didnt work--either my mom or siblings would come wake me. i was never a calorie counter and honestly never could be! but i would be so picky at dinner and just say everything made me feel sick. that was a lovely fight. but honestly eventually certain things really did make me sick, i just never could pin point what it was until my first thanksgiving home from college. now obviously this sort of eating habits cant last long, and my parents would often threaten to charge me for every skipped meal "to pay for hospital bills", or they would just tell me theyre taking me to the hospital if i didnt eat. so i would eat in front of them, and then summer came around and it was a lot harder to go without eating. i lost over 60 ibs in that one school year, but i honestly never once felt "skinny" or in love with my body. i still felt just as fat as i did at the beginning of the year.
basically what i am getting at is that i have almost always had these self-criticizing glasses on, and it's extremely hard to take them off! i have heard countless talks and quotes about loving yourself, "you are you", you are special, you matter, etc. but nothing seems to stick for very long. i guess it's like anything in life; if you stop working on it, it dies.
SO my goal is to work really hard on loving myself in this precious transitional time into motherhood (pregnancy), so that i can have a positive experience and love myself as a mother. obviously i will still have hard times, and down days, but i never want to be so sick that i would justify starvation or hurting myself or my baby. I am enough! I am beautiful! I am literally growing a human being inside of me!!
