We know that quite a few of you naturalistas are also mommies, so in the coming weeks we will be sharing content from Mater Mea and our sister site, Baby and Blog.
From Baby and Blog:
She Get It From Her Mama: How Low Self Esteem Can Be Passed Down from Mother to Daughter
Now, I don’t know about you, but my mom has always been thinner than I was and when I was in high school she was definitely thinner, and I thought, cuter. And she would always complain about how fat she was getting, or what boobs she wasn’t getting, or how unattractive she was. This made me supremely uncomfortable. I mean, what are you supposed to do when the girl skinnier than you can’t stop telling you how fat she is. “Okay, kid,” I remember saying. “If you’re getting chubby, that makes me a whale.” She was quick to reassure me that my appearance was just fine. I was curvier, so, of course I should be heavier. Still, no matter how much she told me she thought I was cute, I couldn’t help but worry that maybe I was too heavy.
Of course, now, 15 years older and nearly 80lbs heavier, I look back on old pictures of myself – all 5’ 7”, 120lbs – I think “WHAT WAS WRONG WITH ME?!” Partially, I wonder that because of the outfits I was wearing back in 1999 (that the kids are beginning to wear again, what?!). But mainly, I wonder that because I’m trying to determine how to keep my daughter from falling victim to a vicious case of “I wish I looked likes”.
I once heard, and I’m kicking myself because I don’t remember where now, that when little girls look to their mothers they see a perfect person – perfect face, perfect smile, perfect body – and, a perfect reflection of themselves. And when Mother begins to criticize herself – her weight, her teeth, her hips – it does just as much damage as if Mother had criticized the looks of the little girl herself. I mean, if I get my face, my smile, my eyes from you and you don’t think you look good, then obviously that must mean…
What?!
No.
Yes? Yes. It’s a good old fashioned case of modeled behaviors.
Read the rest on Baby and Blog here.
From Mater Mea:
At Home with Sarah, Izabella, and Micaela
After two big moves — one from Brooklyn, New York back to her native Minneapolis, Minnesota, and then from one house to another — musician Sarah White’s home life seems to finally be settling down… Her work life, though, is another story.
“Every day is really different,” White says of her three-fold hustle (she’s a singer, DJ, and a freelance photographer). “Some days I don’t work at all, and other days I work multiple jobs. It’s a really crazy schedule. You just kind of [have to] flow with it.”
It’s this adaptable nature that brought White, 32, and her family, partner Rico Mendez and their daughters Izabella Simone (8) and Micaela Sol (2), back to Minneapolis in the summer of 2012, after five years of living and making music in New York.
But White hasn’t always been so flexible, she says now. “I’m the type of person where I like to have things planned out [and] know what’s going on,” White confides. “And I’ve had to just not be that type of person over the past nine years.”
How has your faith affected the way you think about being a mother?
I wouldn’t be able to make it as mother without God in many forms. Especially with the birth of both of them — especially Mica, because it was my first homebirth — I had to have so much faith. We just had to believe in something bigger than me to just bless it and [to] not have so much fear. Fear is something that blocks us from stuff we want to do: It blocks us from who we want to be, it blocks us from love. The only thing that I’ve found that helps us to fight fear is God in some form.
I was raised in a Christian home, where if you had a high fever, you prayed. If there’s a tornado, you prayed. Everything was about praying and believing, and God will protect us — that’s something that I definitely practice every day.
I want [my kids] to feel like there’s something bigger than me that they can trust and rely on, because I’m certainly not the most reliable person — I’m human. I try to have them know that there’s something else out there.
There was a time when I was so frustrated I couldn’t get any music done. I was upstairs crying and being a baby about my own life, and Iza comes [in] with this message, literally a message from God. I don’t even have words to describe the message that she sent to me literally out of nowhere. I realized they already know so much about this universe; I can teach [them] all that I can, but I learn more from them than I can even teach them about spirituality.
Read Sarah’s full story on mater mea.
