Letters to My Daughter: Sideways
Sep 14, 2022
Dear D,
I can’t stop thinking about a conversation we had yesterday morning as we ate breakfast on the back patio under a smoky sky. You had just bounded back from the garden where you had been harvesting, filling your skirt with the abundance of the tomato row. When you got back to the table, you held up a tomato and exclaimed, “Look at this beauty! He’s got his underwear on.”
You went on to explain the figure you saw in the slightly flat Roma tomato with a thin section in the middle. “Here’s his spine,” you said, pointing to a mark going down the length of the tomato. “And here is his butt,” you continued; “and his face.”
As we finished our breakfast, you picked up another tomato and had the two of them walking around the table talking each other. I listened in absentmindedly until an explanatory comment caught my attention. “She needs to walk sideways, like this,” you said, “because she’s thinner that way.” The tomato with the underwear was apparently walking side by side with a tomato representing a female figure. You were trying to make sure the female tomato looked thin enough, and since both Romas were slightly flat, having the girl walk sideways accomplished the ”appear thin” mandate.
I know that around fifty percent of girls are worried about being “too fat” by your age.[1] But it still broke my heart a little to realize that you’re a normal kid and soaking in those messages that I want so desperately to protect you from.
They say that listening in on children’s play can tell you a lot. This is not the first time I’ve heard you grappling with messaging about being thinner, controlling your emotional expression, pulling it all in and all together—the sea of messages we swim in as women, starting from the moment our eyes adjust to the light at birth. Everything in me wants to jump in and help you “rise above it!” Yet as I pause and reflect, I realize I just sucked in my tummy yesterday as I was standing self-consciously with a group of other parents in the pick-up area in front of your school. As Caroline Knapp says, “The real struggle is about you: you, a person who has to learn to live in the real world, to inhabit her own skin, to know her own heart, to stop waiting for life to begin.”[2] You and I both—on the journey together, becoming, growing into our skin, getting to know our hearts, and embracing the gorgeous, messy, complicated, abundant life we share.
A blessing:
May you be at home in your own body; and when your body feels inhospitable to you, may you always find your way back home.
May you feel free to take up space; to breath deep, even though our tummies stick out when we fill our lungs.
May you be surrounded by people who practice what the Nagoski sisters call “mess acceptance”—turning toward the mess of noisy, contradictory thoughts and feelings with kindness and compassion.[3]
And may you have the discernment you need moment by moment to know when walking “sideways” will serve you well; and when throwing out your arms, lifting up your voice, and facing full forward is exactly what you want to do. Do it! Because, why not? You, as much as anyone else, are allowed to have a spine, a butt, a tummy, and a face.
Author: Jody Washburn
Read previous Letters to my Daughter:
Letters to my Daughter: Wishes
[1] Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle, page 106, citing Hayley Dohnt and Marika Tiggermann’s article “Body Image Concerns in Young Girls” in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.
[2] Caroline Knapp, Appetites: Why Women Want.
[3] Nagoski and Nagoski, Burnout, page 120.
