There’s a memory of my maternal grandmother that I think about every once in the while seemingly out of the blue. She is sitting in the bay window, in the kitchen of my childhood home, looking down at her hands while I sit next to her. I think we had been talking about the turquoise ring that she was wearing that was my favorite and that would one day become my ring. I can’t remember what prompted her but she told me that she never had enough confidence when she was younger. She was trying to tell me that she didn’t want me to feel that way. I asked her why she didn’t have enough confidence and I don’t think she really had the answer, she just said that she didn’t.
I’m not sure my kid brain knew what to think about that but it made a big enough impression that I still remember it today as a 40-year-old woman.
Now looking back on that memory, I can understand that women in my family have a history of low self-esteem. It’s generational and has been handed down from one to the next. My grandmother, her daughter (my mother) and me all struggled with self-confidence. When my daughter was born, I quietly whispered to myself that I would do everything that I could to end this generational pattern.
The other day, standing on the kitchen chair in our home, my little girl reached over and hugged me around the neck as I sat in the chair next to her. When she let go, she looked at me and said, “I’m smart.” I stopped for a minute. It was one of those moments when you see your parenting actually reflected directly in your child’s words.
Whenever I hug my daughter, I have this urge to tell her just how cute and sweet she is. She is after all, a ball of nearly-3-year-old cuteness with her little red glasses and long brown hair. Her mix of dinosaur rain boots and tutus is almost too cute to take. But I have consciously made an effort to change my words. Instead of cute and sweet, I tell her that she’s strong and smart and sometimes cute and sweet slip out but even so, I always add strong and smart back in there. When she hugged me and said “I’m smart,” it was like a little reassurance that she was internalizing what I have been saying to her. It was like we had taken one small step toward protecting her self-confidence.
I’m not totally naïve.
There’s a long road ahead of us. My baby girl isn’t even 3 years old yet. We are far from the pre-teens and mean girls in school. Societal influences will come in every form from princess stories to advertising, diet culture, social media and so on. I’m going to mess up. I’m sure I’ve already messed up. I’m human and even though I have good intentions, my example will be far from perfect. But I’m putting in the effort and for now, I’ll hang on to that little win in the kitchen and keep planting little seeds as she gets older. And maybe, just maybe, one day my daughter will have a very different kind of conversation with her granddaughter.
