Pretty

I'd better fire off today's post before Happy Hour starts.

No, smarty pants, I wasn't too hungover to post today. I've just been busy and stuff. At the end of another really good book. How do I find so much time to read, you ask? Well, in general, I totally neglect my kids. Instead of making loving and rapt eye contact with them while they're nursing, I lay on my side in bed and prop the book up on the other side of their heads. Really, there's only so much loving and rapt eye contact one can make with a baby. Especially when eye contact causes the baby in question to smile and squirm and coo. Quite cute, most of the time, but not when you want her to just eat already and have done with it.

Believe me, when you're nursing half the neighborhood, it's important for them to just eat and have done with it, already.

I also neglect them at the park. I will walk around long enough to get Claire to fall asleep in the sling, and then I'll let Mary Grace run loose in the children's play area while I read, looking up often enough to ensure that she hasn't run away with the weird little sand eating boy. I also carry a book in the diaper bag, so that I can read at stop lights, at McDonald's in the play area, and at railroad crossings (generally only when trains are present).

I figure that what they're lacking in rapt maternal eye contact is being made up in the excellent literacy example I am setting for them. Or something.

Moving right along... I found an absolutely fascinating post at another blog today. Go read it (open another window for God's sake, you're MY traffic!), I'll wait.

How in the world are we supposed to raise girls who feel good about their real bodies, when truly beautiful women like Faith Hill have to be airbrushed into oblivion before they're "good enough" for a magazine cover? Honestly, as a mother of daughters, it makes me so sick.

You might have noticed from yesterday's drunken rant - um, I mean, yesterday's missive, that I'm not the thinnest reed in the oboe. In fact, I'm not even in the woodwind section. I'm more of a cello. Clearly this state doesn't bother me in the slightest, because I'm sitting here eating Brownie Explosion ice cream while writing this (happy hour has officially begun, people!). I am at peace with my body. It produced two incredible children. How can I begrudge it the ice cream it so richly deserves?? Sure, I'd like to lose a few pounds, but until someone comes out with a pill that can make you drop weight without deprivation, sweat, or anal leakage, I'm going to keep eating my ice cream.

Anyway, I am in touch with my surroundings enough to know that I am either seriously in denial, or I am extremely rare among women. Most of the "role models" (and role model makers, like Oprah, and the people who airbrush the magazines) out there seem to think that this (or this, or this, or this) is what a woman should look like.

Don't get me wrong. I love thin people. Some of my favorite people are thin. I like to keep them around because they let me finish their desserts. And if my girls grow up and they decide to be thin, I will support them. I will love them every bit as much as I would if they weren't thin. In fact, I will finish their desserts.

The thing is, I want them to aim for a healthy, attainable weight - not an unhealthy, unrealistic, airbrushed fantasy weight that is impossible for anyone to achieve with any sort of health or wellness in tact.

When I was a teenager, there were thin girls, but they were normal thin. Even the girls on Beverly Hills 90210 started off normal, for God's sake.

But if current trends continue, young girls are going to want to look more like coat hangers than like women by the time my girls are teenagers, and it scares me.

Sure, I want them to look stunning in the gowns that they wear when they accept their Nobel Prizes (becoming the first ever team of sisters to win Nobel Prizes for Physics and Peace in the same year). But I hope that they'll find a way to love themselves no matter what they look like. I hope they won't look at themselves, and wish that Photoshop worked on people's actual bodies, instead of just their photos.

On the other hand, by that time, maybe we will be able to Photoshop our bodies. In that case, I'm going to want to have plenty of body to work with. Pass the whipped cream!