The moment the ultrasound tech announced that you were a girl, I burst into tears. She confirmed what my maternal instincts were already telling me.   I had already been mentally designing the nursery, and trying to figure out how many of your brother’s baby clothes we could get away with dressing you in (I mean, who cares if we put you in blue PJ’s?)   I am overflowing with joy.  At the same time, there are worries that creep in when I look into the future. When my thoughts turn to your teenage years, I can’t help but remember my own struggles at that age and worry about how you will navigate your way through.

I hope that you will manage, against the odds, to see how beautiful you are. Of course I don’t want you to base your self-worth on your physical appearance.  But neither do I want you to walk through life feeling perpetually self-conscious about how you look.  This will be an uphill battle; you will be confronted non-stop with airbrushed images of women that will create impossible standards to compare yourself against.  I hope you will be able to see that these women are illusions, and that real women have freckles, scars, and blemishes, thighs that touch and body parts that jiggle.  Our skin will always seem pasty next to the artificially bronzed women Read more ›