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Most enlightened makeovers for 2009
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Let your sons and daughters walk in your shoes, and
they'll experience that they are too big and awkward.
That's part of the fun. They're not asking to be us. They
just want to step in our shoes for a while. Don't let media
and marketing change that. The same holds true for us as
men and women. We don't have to be the images we see.
Whatever your gender, most of us are born with things we love and things we'd like to change. I'm not sure how old we are when we begin to see less in ourselves that we love and more that we love to critique or change, but I can tell with my own two kids that it starts pretty young.
I am a tough critic. I'm tough on myself and I'm tough on those I love. In the past year, I've decided that I need to change because in the pursuit of happiness and self-satisfaction as it stands I've been a complete and total failure. Not because of my goals, but because of my methodology. Okay maybe because of my goals as well. Needless to say, I need a new pace. I need to stop looking through the binoculars the "regular" way. As a mother of two young children and wife to a hard-working business man, triathlete, and dad the objects in my life may appear closer than they are and I've liked to keep some distance between myself and my world. As a child, I read books and listened to the radio a lot. As a teenager, I could escape in my dancing. As an adult, I escaped in the gym. As a mother, I haven't quite figured out how to escape for longer than 5 minutes.
So, I have resolved to start looking through my binoculars the "other" way so everything seems farther than it really is. I try to scale back my expectations of myself and those closest to me. I have also realized that I have to trade in my leaps for baby steps. My resolution this year is to do more than resolve, but to practice. Practice looking at my life the "wrong" way through the binoculars and practice taking baby steps and being okay with that.
In the media, this time of year we, especially women, are bombarded with other people's ideas about what we should be changing and working on in our lives and ourselves. As I look through my binoculars the "wrong" way, in the distance I see Jezebel.com's wonderful makeover list written to parallel the New York Times' style section article about who they'd like to makeover in 2009. Instead of focusing just on style Jezibel looks at a few more dimensions.
The Jezebel list includes a great critique of Strawberry Shortcake stating, "Strawberry Shortcake's tweeny makeover was one of the most disturbing of '08. Shortcake lost the freckles and curls, aged about seven years and morphed from a chubby little girl to a lithe Lolita. Our advice: make-under. Stat."
I fear that Strawberry Shortcake's makeover reflects a lot of what has been done to our children especially our girls' image of what it is to be a girl. In this case, things definitely appear a lot closer than they are. Why are we rushing our girls? Do we encourage our boys in the same way? Perhaps in 2009 we can find a new way. Start a new trend. Let's hope we can start to see things slow down in a positive way and begin looking at life the "wrong" way through the lens of the binoculars.
Try it. Welcome to 2009 where everything is just a bit further off in the distance.
Does he understand how binoculars work (just for fun), What's hot for 2009 (ABC News), NOW's Feminist Action Agenda for 2009,
