Remember how I said in my last post that I by no means have
all the answers? True statement. I am a work in progress. A dear friend reached
out to me after reading said post. She knows a lot of my struggles surrounding
body image and shame. She has walked alongside me and has been my cheerleader
as I’ve worked through some hard stuff. She noticed something in my wording, in
the way I chose to talk about the “playing doctor” incident that occurred between
me and the neighbor girls. She was struck by the fact that I called our
behavior “wildly inappropriate” and she said that it made her heart hurt for me.
And so I owe you an editor’s note.
This word choice is evidence of my past. If you were to ask
me point blank if I actually believed it wrong for kids to practice curiosity and
explore their bodies, I would say “Absolutely not!” Yet, I still fight former ideologies and they will
at times sneak their way into my words without my awareness. Instead of
referring to our body curiosity as developmentally normal, as I now know it to
be, I wrote, without a second thought, that our behavior was “wildly inappropriate.” It is an ever-present struggle to fight
against the messaging of our youth.
Don’t mishear me. Certainly, I am not trying to say we
should be encouraging body exploration as a playdate activity. What I AM trying
to say is that body curiosity in and of itself is not wrong and bad. And we
need to be extra careful that we don’t portray it as so. Yes, we should be proactively talking to our
kids from the get-go about what is and is not appropriate behavior surrounding
their bodies and it’s interactions with others (such as only exploring their own bodies and doing so in the privacy
of their own room or the bathroom), but to shame them for being curious? This
is the practice I would like to eradicate.
Rather than referring to my first explorative childhood
experience as “wildly inappropriate” (as I did in my first published draft of my last blog post), I have since changed the wording to reflect what I actually believe: childhood body exploration is NOT wildly
inappropriate. It does, however, make many of us as the adults, “wildly
uncomfortable.” So that’s why we need to
ponder this more.
If even reading this post brings up feelings of “wild
discomfort,” it could be a sign that this is an area where work is needed. Take
it slow. Give yourself lots of grace because this is a process. But I would
encourage you to rehearse and prepare your response for that inevitable day (trust
me, it WILL come!) when your child does something that, were they a grown adult,
might be considered an “indecent exposure.” If we are to set our kids up for
loving and accepting their bodies as created by God, this is absolutely an area
we must give adequate focus.
But we need to take care of our own stuff, our own body
baggage first. If we are to raise our kids to love and appreciate and value
their bodies the way they are, we
need to first address any negative messaging and any misconceptions from our
own upbringings. And doing so will most likely not be comfortable. But I’m
learning that being uncomfortable isn’t wrong or bad. It just is. Sometimes we
need to sit in that discomfort for a while, and think and talk about hard
things. We need to process our discomfort, examine where it stems from and why
we are feeling it. I, for one, hate this process but you know what? IT’S OKAY. I’ve
learned that I can be in uncomfortable places AND still be okay. It’s not
rocket science but it takes some of us 32 to years to get there.
My hope as I raise my kids is to be calm in the
uncomfortable. I want to be open. Maybe discomfort is simply our body’s way of
alerting us of an opportunity for growth. I kind of like that, don’t you?
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posted by kelsie