HOW DARE I

Nova, our 2 and a half year old was sitting with me at the kitchen counter when she noticed the freckles on my chest. She gently rubbed her little brown fingers over them and asked me why there was dust on my skin.

I explained to her that they were called freckles and that people with skin as light as mine sometimes got them from the sun.

I told her she was so lucky because her beautiful skin probably wouldn’t get them.

She looked at her arm, rubbed it and said: “Mine is wrong”.

My heart sank.

I took her hand in mine and told her there was nothing wrong about her...nothing.

When I asked her where she had heard that, or who had said that..she just looked at me.

It was me. It was my fault.

Not because I had ever said anything remotely like that to her.

I have always done nothing other than celebrate how beautiful Nova is, randomly I tell her I think she’s got the most beautiful brown skin I have ever ever seen, that I had dreamed about her brown eyes before we had even met.

But why would she believe me? I am a liar.

For months now I have been declaring in our home how my grey hair makes me feel older than I am. How frumpy and fat I feel. How weathered and worn and tired I feel and look. How ugly I am.

And I’ve said it in front of her, or at least within earshot of her.

How dare I? How dare I take my insecurities and shout them out over her? And how on earth did I not think it would have an impact on her?

I had basically broadcasted that everything she could see about me was wrong. Why would she not think the same?

How. Dare. I.

She’s only 2 and a half, and she may not even understand what she’s saying. But she said it, because she had heard it.

I owe her more than that. I owe her and her little sister more than my loud insecurities. I owe it to myself.

We owe it to our daughters to not only tell them they are beautiful, but to show them that they are by showing them that we think we are beautiful too.

This is not sowing the seeds of vanity. It’s sowing the seeds of self-love, acceptance and validation.

I want to find my girls staring at themselves in the mirror and seeing all they love about themselves, and being confident enough to say it.

I’m done with passing down a legacy of insecurity and dissatisfaction. It’s stops here.

May we raise a generation of girls who become women who love themselves unapologetically.

And may we be a generation of mothers, aunts, sisters who set the standard for this and model it for them.

I pray my girls will speak of their bodies, their hair, themselves with glory. That they will never diminish the beauty they carry because of the loud voices who would speak of blemishes instead of beauty when speaking of the ordinary parts of themselves.

I pray they know that when they acknowledge, with dignity, the beauty they carry, that they dignify the God whose image they are made in.