The ashes were still falling gently from my forehead when my daughter picked me up from the neighborhood church. My kids are no longer practicing Catholics, but the daughter whom I was visiting knew that Ash Wednesday was important to me. She had dropped me off at the nearest Catholic church, and when I got in the car after Mass my 19-month-old granddaughter inspected my face calmly, finding the smudged black cross momentarily interesting.
Later my daughter, remembering the Lenten drill, asked me what I was giving up this year. I made my little speech about Lent being more than giving something up and that instead, I was planning to say a daily rosary and donate more to charity.
She shook her head. “I think you should give up saying bad things about yourself,” she said.
This only stunned me a little because we’d had previous conversations, mother-to-mother, about how a mother’s words about herself form the way their daughters think and talk about themselves. Specifically, she had focused on how I have always been a harsh judge of my own appearance, how that had affected her self-image and self-esteem while growing up, and how she was being so careful not to repeat this projection onto her daughter. I recalled the many times I had said thoughtless things like, “I look so fat in this dress” or “My skin is so blotchy/wrinkled/saggy” (depending on the day). When my daughter let me know how my words had impacted her, I regretted every time I said something negative about my appearance, not realizing the harm I was imprinting on my perfectly made young darlings.
My daughter was adamant that neither she nor I should inflict our negative body images on her young daughter. Now she was issuing a challenge.
“All right,” I said. “I’m giving up saying negative things about myself and my body for Lent.”
The next day, I left my daughter’s house to travel to the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, a yearly ritual for me, where I met my younger sister for a weekend together. When I told her about my daughter’s Lenten challenge, she said, “Oh, I’m in.” She is the mother of teenage sons but wondered how her frequent self-criticism affected their self-images.
Meeting a mutual friend later for a glass of wine, I told her about our Lenten endeavor. Our friend, a wonderful, holy, accomplished woman who is her own worst critic, joined the challenge. “But let’s add one thing,” she said. “Every day, we have to look in the mirror and say something positive to ourselves.”
So that has been our Lenten challenge for the past five weeks. Thank God it’s almost Easter.
Just kidding. The Lenten road has been rocky but lined with flowers. The morning after committing to our new practice, my sister shared that when surveying herself in a pair of pants she automatically said, “Oh, look at my big butt.” Then she corrected herself and said, “I mean, look at my beautiful butt.” And it changed her day.
Instead of returning any compliment with a self-deprecating statement, a habit I internalized as a young girl, I challenged myself to respond positively. Why has it always been so difficult for me just to say thank you for a compliment? It’s because I was taught that only snooty women think highly of themselves and that too much self-esteem is some sort of character defect. Better to put yourself down than to be seen as stuck-up. Better humility than conceit. I’d thought of my adult self as formed by the feminism of the 1970s, but vestiges of 1950s good-Catholic-girl behavior often surfaced and they manifested in the way I talked about myself.
The three of us Lenten warriors confessed that we’d all looked at photos of ourselves as younger women and been floored by how beautiful we were, cognizant that at the time of each photo, we thought we were fat. We were not. We’d spent our lives wanting to be thinner, tanner, more athletic, more graceful, more stylish, more other, than we perceived ourselves to be and calling out our flaws and imperfections. We were belatedly realizing that talking trash about God’s perfect creations is not healthy, not helpful, not kind, not right.
On the first morning of the L.A. Congress, the gathering prayer featured a hymn by Sarah Hart. “You are beautifully, fearfully, wonderfully made,” we participants sang together, but I had to stop singing because I was crying at the unbearable sweetness and pertinence of the lyrics. (And here—ahem!—I refrain from commenting on my singing ability.) We are loved, goes the song. We have a purpose. We bring God joy. I suddenly felt cocooned in God’s love, embraced by this fitting message for our Lenten endeavor.
Back home and biting my tongue about myself—in a good way—for several weeks, I checked in on my Lenten companions via text. It seemed we were struggling to form this new habit of not denigrating ourselves, not to mention the positive affirmation exercise in the mirror. “I’m failing miserably,” my friend said. “I can’t believe the number of times I put myself down in a day. Every day I begin again.”
One day at a time, my lovelies.
My sister said, “I was out today and saw what I call a ‘golden woman’ in her skinny yoga pants and flowing hair and flawless skin and I wondered what it would be like to be her.” My sister was running an errand in her well-worn cleaning-day clothes. “I looked pretty frightening in comparison,” she said.
“I didn’t realize how much I compare myself to other women. I’m never good enough,” said my friend.
“I’m a comparison junkie,” said my sister.
Same here. But a month or so into our practice, I could see that our perceptions were shifting.
“It’s interesting to me how much we as women are taught and trained to care so much about what we look like,” my sister noted. These weeks have made me ponder how to shift from comparing ourselves to other fabulous-looking women, and instead into giving thanks for, say, the ability to walk. What if we took a break from comparison and focused on gratitude for all we take for granted? What a gift from God to walk! What abundant blessings we regularly discount!
As Lent nears its end, we three have navigated some changes. Our perspective has certainly been inspected and renewed. We’re also realizing how tiring it is to dwell in negativity, to project negativity, to drown others in our pools of negativity.
“Try this experiment today,” my beautiful sister prompts us. “Hold your head up and say to yourself, ‘I am so beautiful.’ I thought I was having a bad hair day, but not anymore! I am so beautiful and so is my hair. So is yours. Try it with me. It’s actually fun.”
“I’m so glad you shared your daughter’s suggestion for Lent,” my beautiful friend says. “Profoundly powerful! I’m glad to be ‘cleaning’ like this for Lent.” Then she adds, grounding us, “I for sure couldn’t do it without Jesus’ gentle care.”
I, too, am grateful, both to God for this impactful embrace and to my daughter for illuminating this Lenten path. I have just turned 67 and am so grateful for my years. I’m healthy and so grateful for my health. I’m wrinkly and so grateful for these lines of wisdom. I’m beautiful in my skin and so grateful for that evolving awareness. With God’s grace, we three Lenten warriors will carry forward this newfound sense that we are beloved—no matter what—in our postures and our hearts. We are blessed. We are radiant. We are enough. Now, it is time to get on with the work God has for us.
And as Easter dawns, I offer my long-overdue apology to my darling children, who are “beautifully, fearfully, wonderfully made,” who are the very embodiment of God’s love. I’m sorry. May my love outlast my mistakes. May you know in your hearts and in your bones that you too are exactly, marvelously enough.
