You Have to Say I'm Pretty, You're My Mother How to Help Your Daughter Learn to Love Her Body and Herself

Introduction This book started five years ago when my then fourteen-year-old daughter, Phoebe, was alternately throwing up in her school bathroom and starving herself at home. Somehow, at what seemed like warp speed, Phoebe went from being happy to being miserable. From not worrying about her weight to insisting on havingtwoscales in her bathroom and memorizing the calorie count of every morsel of food. From not worrying about how she looked to freezing like a deer in the headlights in front of the nearest mirror and asking, "Do I look particularly fat today?" Day after day after day.We took Phoebe to a therapist who suggested she draw pictures of rainbows. I went to a therapist who said, "She's such a beautiful girl. How can she have an eating disorder?" My husband and I talked to a psychopharmacologist who said it was probably all biochemical. "Oh, she's just having a hard time adjusting to a new town...to a new school...to adolescence...to two parents who are never home," said her school guidance counselor, hastily adding, "but two parents who love herverymuch."Phoebe went to an eating disorder clinic where they gave her a healthful diet and told her all about the food pyramid. "Complex people have complex problems," suggested her pediatrician. "Just look at all the depression that runs in our family," my sister-in-law theorized. "It's all those Sylvia Plath books and Anne Sexton poems she's wallowing in," warned her teacher. And this dubiously positive pronouncement was offered by my mother: "Well, she certainly eats a lot for a girl with anorexia."Phoebe was in crisis. I was in crisis. Our family was in crisis. And while her eating disorders slowly got better (with time, with family therapy, with counseling, with revelations), her body image issues remained. Phoebe, always precocious, might have been first on her block to obsess about her looks, but soon most of her friends had their own problems, too. And I gradually realized that most of America is caught up with body image issues. There's an absolute epidemic today of beautiful, accomplished adolescent girls who are convinced that they're fat and ugly, who believe that looks are everything and thattheirlooks don't measure up to some impossible ideal. They are matched by loving and well-meaning mothers who feel blindsided, helpless, clueless, terrified, and guilty (sometimes all at once) and who invariably have their own unresolved body image issues.Always a problem solver (instant when possible), when the problems became overwhelming, I read everything. I talked to every smart person I could find. I got conflicting opinions, outdated information, misinformation, suggestions that might have been helpful if Phoebe were ten. I read books written in some sort of academic shrink-y language I couldn't understand, breezy magazine articles that both minimized and oversimplified complex subjects, overwrought books with only worst-case scenarios. I saw TV shows on body image topics that sensationalizedeverything.I found bits and pieces of what sounded like good advice on the Internet but didn't know how reliable the sources were.Oddly enough, it was when I read Mary Pipher's brilliantly insightfulReviving Opheliathat I felt the most helpless. While this was the one book that helped me get an overview and explained the magnitude of the problem, after I finished it, I still didn't have a clue about what to do with Phoebe. How was I to respond to her saying, "Will you look at how gross my stomach is?" when her stomach was as flat as a washboard? How was I to answer "What's wrong with my knees?" when there was nothing wrong with her knees? And when no matterwhatI said, she came back with, "Well, youhaveto say that, you're my mother."Where was the book to help mothers like me who need to address body image problems, not just understand them? Where could mothers go for practical advice aCohen, Phyllis is the author of 'You Have to Say I'm Pretty, You're My Mother How to Help Your Daughter Learn to Love Her Body and Herself', published 2003 under ISBN 9780743229180 and ISBN 0743229185.