Baring All For Our Children

Please visit Alicia Kamm's new website, Born Ready Baby. She interviewed me for a piece, Mom Bares All: Now & Then.

Baring all, stripping down, seems like such an important task for women today. Especially as mothers. I want my daughter to not enter the world without knowledge or to be stunned when she loses her innocence.

It's a wobbly line I walk as I figure out how and when to talk to my daughter about my past. But I know it's so important to be honest and to present her with a good role model.

Celebrity Baby Scoop reports on actress Melissa McCarthy about how she deals with talking to her own young daughters about her issues in Melissa McCarthy: I Don’t Want To Pass On Negative Body Image To Daughters.

Mom-of-two Melissa McCarthy opens up about her weight in the latest issue of Good Housekeeping. ”Sometimes I wish I were just magically a size six and I never had to give [my weight] a single thought,” the Bridesmaids star admits. 

“But I am weirdly healthy, so I don’t beat myself up about it – it wouldn’t help, and I don’t want to pass that on to my girls,” she adds.

As moms we are so hyper-vigilant about not passing on our issues to our daughters, which I think is good.

If we're aware enough to understand what will probably affect our children, hopefully we're conscious enough to also be working on our issues for ourselves, too.

Are there any issues or bad habits that you worry about passing on to your children?

Proud to Be Wearing Clean Underwear

When it comes to positive body image advice, it sometimes seems like there's nothing new under the sun to add.

While that may be true, you never know when someone will spark a new can-do attitude in someone who's never come across that idea before. Or sometimes, just the way someone else presents a time-tested tip can be just what you need to hear.

Here's a  list of helpful hints from Yahoo Shine: 15 Ways to Get a Killer Body Image.

I like number 1:

1. Before you leave your apartment in the morning, take a moment to strike a ridiculous (-ly attractive) pose in the mirror. It's silly, but it's good to take a moment and remember how hot you are when you're just out of the shower and freshly primped for the day. 

Except I don't know if I always feel that attractive in the morning. Especially not when I'm just throwing on clothes to get out of the house on time with three kids.

And today I have a cold, feel depressed and achy. Let's see if I can somehow make myself feel beautiful even when I feel like crap and my primping consisted of putting on clean underpants and brushing my teeth.

What can we learn from the above photo of me as compared to the model in the pretty blue sweater at the start of this blog?

Well, first of all, I really need to wipe off the kids' fingerprint smudges from my bedroom mirror. And secondly, I may not look so "hot" in this photo. But seeing as I managed to clothe myself, deliver my kids to school, and come home to a heated house, I guess I'm feeling pretty good about myself today.

Sometimes body image takes a backseat to being proud of ourselves for just getting up and out there even when we're not feeling so "hot."