When I was 11, my mother, literally pinned me down on her bed, tweezers in hand, and declared, “Enough is enough with those eyebrows!” She proceeded to pluck the left one down to a shadow of its former self, and with each hair pull I writhed and shouted. By the time she was done with the first one, I managed to escape her stealth-like grip and run for eyebrow cover. She never did get to the second one.
I’m sure she was right (aren’t mothers always?!). I’m sure my eyebrows were bushy and uneven; they probably crept into the middle bordering on unibrow status. Grooming them probably would have made me prettier. But what I needed to hear at the raw, prebuscent age of 11 was, “You are perfect just the way you are! Your eyebrows give you character!” I needed to have value placed on the good things I did like returning a found wallet to the police, volunteering to help my teacher after class, taking impeccable care of my four cats, not my “flaws.”
I don’t blame her. Really, I don’t. My mother is a wonderful woman, but she herself was tortured by her mother (her thighs the focal point) and I’m guessing Grandma was berated by her mother. But here’s the thing: we become what we hear enough of. If you hear over and over again, “you’re not good enough,” you begin to believe that very thing, that you’re “not good enough.” The ramifications can be devastating, running the spectrum of low self-esteem and leading to disorders of the heart, mind and body.
Marie Osmond once said, “We marry at the level of our self-esteem.” She was undeniably right; we date there too. Many of my clients come to me in self-esteem shambles. Their backstories range from abusive fathers to neglectful mothers. All of them convinced they aren’t worthy of the healthy love that I know, they were born to have. They may not say it, but their choices certainly show it. It is my job to reprogram their attitudes so that healthy behaviors can follow… so that healthy relationships can blossom that are in support of their newfound self-esteem.
A girl’s self-esteem lies at the core of who she becomes as a woman. She relies on the key players in her life (and nowadays that includes media and celebrity) to bolster that esteem. She relies on their encouraging words, hugs, and hi-5s to make her feel important. For every blow to her self-esteem – every negative experience – she needs five, that’s right, FIVE, positive experiences to counteract it and bring her self-esteem back into balance.
I now have a nearly 11 year-old daughter and I see firsthand the seeds of low self-esteem being planted. Mean girls and the idealism of celebrity can make her feel inadequate. But I will never. I will hug her through her awkward teen years and I will cheerlead her as she continues to develop into the self-loving woman she is destined to be. I will become a broken record of praise, even when the eye-rolls start rolling in. It is my wish that you do the same for your own daughters, your neighbor’s daughters, your friend’s daughters, the stranger at the local market’s daughter. Together, we can create a new breed of self-loving woman, which in turn will create a new generation of healthy relationships, minus the torture to get there.
As for me, to this day, during our annual visit, my mother inspects my eyebrows. She no longer comments, but I can see her eyeing, judging silently at their signature crookedness, likely born out of the day I only let her butcher the one. Only now, I don’t run in shame and fear, now, I strut with my imperfectly perfect eyebrows held high and a wide smile just below, proud of the woman I’ve become.
