Parenthood is full of epiphanies. Even though I’ve always known that, as her parent, I was wholly responsible for my daughter, the full weight of this realization came when I saw her reaching her arm through the living room baby gate to pet our dog Rufus last night. The thought hit me: because of this, she’ll never know a time in her life when she doesn’t love animals. She is only 15 months old, and she knows to pet him gently because she sees this behavior modeled and normalized for her daily. She pets him according to how she sees her parents treat him.
This is how it happens. For better or worse, this is how people–all of us–are created, and it pertains to every aspect of a person’s life.
The gravity of this is enormous. Everything she is learning, particularly now, comes from her parents. I am not only teaching her to be gently affectionate with the dog. I am teaching her that we don’t eat animal products. I am teaching her that reading books, taking a bath, and cuddling in the rocking chair before bed every night is normal.
I am also teaching her how to treat herself. As a white female incest survivor who grew up in a conservative, sexist home and a misogynist world (and who, as the second person in her family to attend college and the first to attend graduate school, studied Sociology and Women’s Studies) I am deeply intimate with self-loathing. I not only saw it everywhere around me in my family and community, but in the world at large. It remains a destructive force on its own, and even more so when I consider how normal and intentional it was and still is.
Although mediated by class, sexuality, ability, race, and other markers, my daughter, like all women, will grow up in a world that functions to control and devalue her and eliminate her agency and power. It will work to limit her opportunities. It will subject her to myriad negative sanctions, including labels and violence (sexual or otherwise) when and if she objects to this, verbally or otherwise.
Her best hope of withstanding and weathering these things will come from me and other people talking to her openly and honestly about it. It will also come from my ability and willingness to model self-love, self-value, and self-confidence for her, so that it becomes normal for her. How revolutionary would it be to do this? How revolutionary would it be to not only treat our daughters the way we want them to be treated, but to treat ourselves in the same compassionate, loving way?
Thinking of this, I am reminded of the late Audre Lorde’s quote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Everyday life is what comprises our history, our normal. I have to watch how I speak to myself and how I think about myself, now and going forward, because it’s important that she see me be kind and empathic to myself because it will inform how she treats, thinks of, and speaks to herself. It’s about modeling behaviors she will develop and use in her every day life, so she will be less likely to grow up and speak to herself negatively. Avoiding that will not only help her feel good about herself, it may even make it easier and necessary for her to seek out, expect, and demand similar behaviors from the people she brings into her life.
I am struck regularly by how utterly magical my daughter is. Her glee over things like strawberries, opening curtains, and the picture of the three of us moments after her birth that she points to and smiles at every night at bedtime delight me. She is smart, funny and expressive, and altogether extraordinary. I want to do everything I can in my power to encourage and support this magic. She will struggle, she will fail, she will hurt, she will cry. That’s life. But in order to be self-reliant and successful, in whatever way she defines it, she will need a strong sense of self and self-love. And it’s my job as her mother to model that for her.
Sexism and oppressions insidiously evolve and persist. While no individually-based action alone will end these problems (because they don’t address the ways they’re structurally and institutionally maintained), then at the very least they may be able to help us deal with these problems more easily. Also, we deserve every bit of kindness we can get in life.
So to that end, it is incumbent on me and every other mother to model these behaviors. If you’re anything like me, you say negative things to yourself every day for any number of real or perceived shortcomings or mistakes (Way to burn the pancakes, idiot. My face is dumb. I hate my thighs. How on earth was I stupid enough to do that?) And so it goes, on and on, ad infinitum.
This is about becoming cognizant of an issue and working to amend what has, at this point in our lives, become a conditioned response. It’s about thinking, saying, and doing better things to yourself than, if you’re like me, you already do. It’s about treating yourself as kindly as you would treat your own precious daughter(s). Modeling self-love for our children, especially our daughters, is not only revolutionary, it is necessary.
And whether or not it changes the world, I can promise you this much: It sure as shit won’t hurt.