Guest Post: A mother of young twin girls shares her struggle with body image, and how very strange it all can be.

I’ve always thought of negative body image as the default position, a right of passage for every American woman, inevitable.  But as I raise two strong, confident daughters who know none of this negative information, I wonder why anyone would think it “normal” to infect them with such negativity and self-hatred.  I worry each day whether I am doing enough to prevent what I have always seen as inevitable and normal.

Recently, I was going through photos to submit for The Legacy of Beauty Project.  As I turned the pages of photo albums, memories washed over me.  I saw myself, a 5 year old girl, afraid to be picked up by an adult because I thought I was too heavy.  Apparently, I have had body image issues since I was in preschool.  Preschool?  Yes, and for some reason I did not recognize it as strange until now.  I won’t go into how such things happen or why.  I just thought it was normal to compare yourself, in every way, to everyone around you.  As a result, I saw myself as bigger than all of my friends, in preschool.

In the subsequent 27 years, I never thought it was wrong to constantly feel like I wasn’t measuring up.  I always had a goal to be better in some way.  Then, I got pregnant…with twins…identical girls to be exact.  When I realized I was having twins, I immediately began to worry (as most twin parents do) about my children constantly comparing, and being compared, to each other.  When we found out they would be girls, my heart sank thinking how hurtful it could be to feel like the “fatter twin.” 

When we started feeding the girls solids at 5 months, I became obsessed with feeding them equally.  In a moment of pure honesty, most likely a result of lack of sleep, I told a friend of mine that I obsess over how much my daughters eat in comparison to each other and how eating disorders run in my husband’s side of the family and how it terrified me to think of them growing up in competition with each other.  This particular friend would make an amazing psychologist.  But when she mentioned the possibility that I was transferring issues of my own onto my children, I thought she was crazy.  I didn’t have any issues!

My daughters have always eaten as much as they needed.  All parents find out, usually the hard way, that you cannot force a child to eat.  Balancing out my daughters’ food intake never did work.  What they choose to eat is out of my control.  Although they both inhale fruit and grudgingly eat vegetables, one daughter would be a vegetarian if hot dogs did not exist, and she could live on noodles.  The other will eat any type of meat you put in front of her, and lots of it.  But they both get what they need when they need it.  They expend different amounts of energy at different activities.  One daughter runs like the wind and the other tires more quickly.  One is an iPhone genius and the other is still trying to figure out how to turn it on (how I wish neither would touch my phone).  And yet, the girls have always been within 6oz of each other in weight (they take turns being “the heavier” child).  They know how to eat when they are hungry and to stop when they are full.  They intuitively understand what their bodies need.  And they are a marvel to me.

My daughters are 3 1/2 years old.  They are nearing that age when it all began for me.  I am very aware of what I say about myself, my body, their bodies, anyone else’s bodies or food intake, etc.  I listen carefully to what people say in their presence.  We talk about loving our healthy bodies all the time.  Children are born completely comfortable with who they are.  They don’t “know enough” to be ashamed of their bodies.  I hope mine never “know enough” because knowing has been the challenge of a lifetime to overcome.

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