Lessons I Refuse to Learn From My Mother

“Too much soda isn’t good for you!” my four-year-old son tells me, wide-eyed, as I pull another can of Coke from the fridge.

“You’re right,” I tell him, popping the tab. “Too much of anything isn’t good for you.”

In the playroom at the gym one evening, the boy-child picked up a one-pound weight and did a hundred reps, counting them out in his enthusiastic, too-loud way.

“Exercise is good for you!” he yelled when he was done. “Feel my muscle! It’s like a rock!”

These are all sentiments he’s absorbed from cartoons, which tell him to recycle, to brush his teeth, and to quit kicking the dog.

I was the sort of kid who listened to TV’s pat, well-meaning messages myself: the instructions of the very special episode of the Facts of Life, in which we learned that featuring Tootie buck-naked in a perfume ad was one step away from child pornography; that time in Family Ties when Alex Keaton’s close friend whom we’d somehow never heard of before died, and Alex stopped being an asshole for at least two episodes. We, of course, took away from this the fact that we should appreciate our pals while we’re all still here. Life is short. Eat your vegetables. Don’t get into cars with strangers who offer to take your photograph in their basement.

Of course, these TV lessons quickly became a source of humor. Life’s problems aren’t resolved in 30 minutes. That episode of Diff’rent Strokes about learning to love yourself sure was misguided, since it had Dana Plato whipping off her wig and going off on her date with her greasy botched green hair.

There’s always a lot of talk about how girls grow up surrounded by the wrong messages and are made to aspire to impossible standards. I may joke about how black-and-white television can be when it comes to subverting its own message, but when I think about how it influenced my body image versus the kind of message my own mother sent me, I am grateful for all the trite lessons I got.

At 58, my mother is still very attractive. She was a young mother, having given birth to me at 25; in grade school, on parent-teacher night or during a school fair, my classmates were always awed by how youthful and thin she was. I inevitably prided myself on having such a pretty mom.

When I was in high school, she tacked a picture from Vogue to our fridge with magnets. It was the photograph of a torso in a bikini, tanned and void of any body fat. My friends chuckled whenever they saw it, but my mom was pretty serious about using the picture as a deterrent.

“You might have a problem,” I remember telling her, remembering my lessons from TV, all those articles in teen girl magazines.

“Americans have different standards of what thin is,” she told me. “You’d better be careful.”

I was also in high school, both of us a size 0 or 2, when she caught me changing in the bathroom.

“Oh my God!” she exclaimed, squeezing at my belly, “you’re so fat!”

While I did have a tummy pooch, I knew I wasn’t fat. Even now, after having had a son, still carrying a few pounds of my baby weight, my stomach not its best after a C-section, I know I’m not fat. I’m grateful to have a boy in the sense that he won’t have to deal with this shit. There’s enough real horror in the world to contend with.

My mother continues to look me up and down whenever she sees me, trying to bite her tongue and failing. While it’s irritating to me, I feel worse for her: a perfectly beautiful woman who hates herself, because no one growing up, not even the television, told her to be happy with herself.

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