It has been a long time since I posted in this blog, largely because I am not sure what to do with it. At times, I am tempted to post things of a more personal nature and at times I feel that this should be completely apersonal. I dont know where it is going to go. Perhaps there is a brilliant line between personal and worldly (not that I believe they must be totally seperate, or that they are even at seperate ends of a binary).
I had the pleasure of spending Thanksgiving up in Seattle, Washington with my mother;s family. I hadnt seen many of them in 5 years, which isnt that long with regards to the adults, but when we are talking about my little love bundles of cuteness that some people call cousins, it is forever!
Both of my little muchkins of love are of normal/typical size for their age/height. For anonymities sake, I will henceforth call them lovemonkey (9 year old female) and spazmuffin (13 year old male).
Both lovemonkey and spazmuffin (who are brother and sister) live about an hour outside the city on a farm that their family runs themselves.
One of the first things out of spazmuffins mouth to lovemonkey was that she was big boned. Please note that this is not the case whatsoever. I quickly shut it down, saying that it wasnt true and wasnt something you said to a person.
I do not know how this topic is normally dealt with in their family. I do not know if this is a constant barrage of misinformation. I do know that lovemonkey mentioned about 4 or 5 times throughout the week that a) she needed to exercise or b) she was too fat to be a model or c) her jeans were tight because she was getting fat (um... your supposed to outgrow your clothes when youre a little girl).
It was so sad for me to hear/see that my little love monkey already has these thoughts. Eating disorders run through my family like RuPaul runs through Gay Pride, but I absolutely positively do not associate it to genetics alone.
And I sit here, a week later, pondering what I can do about this situation. I live far away and do not get to see them often. How can I explain to spazmuffin, who is a very sweet and caring young man, that saying these things to any woman or man in his life is highly detrimental. How can I make sure lovemonkey gets the support she needs to not head in the direction that I did... that her mother did... that 99% of my family did.
Perhaps all I can do is love her and be someone she can talk to, even if it is only on the phone.
1 comment:
I think you have it right: just be there. If she knows you are there to talk, that is A LOT. Trust me. I've felt that way in the past. It meant the world to me several times over.
On another note, the beauty of having your own blog is that you can do whatever you want with it and it can take as many directions as you choose. Wherever you decide to take it, I am right here with you and will be reading whenever you post. Since you mentioned being tempted to write things of a personal nature at times, you could do what I do: have a personal blog like my One Page at a Time and a blog about fat, feminism, and eating disorder related things like my Actively Arielle: A Voice with a Commitment. It seemed the easiest thing for me. I still associate my ED blog with personal stories, but they relate to EDs, body image, etc. And again, you can do whatever you want, of course, so there really are no rules about what you write and what you don't write. But having 2 separate blogs has been very good for me.
Arielle :)
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