If you’ve followed my blog for sometime you may recount me telling the tale of Hooper slipping in a puddle of water by the pool on one of our trips out to the desert and suffering a concussion that resulted in a trip to the ER where, like most, we waited.

The hospital is not a new environment to me but actually sitting and taking in the slowness that only a wait in the ER can afford me is a new experience. I people watched, mostly; the older man with a laceration above his eye resulting from a fall, a young woman hoping to get a prescription for pain medication, and about 20 others who – like Hooper and myself – didn’t have an obvious reason for being there, waiting. And when I was over that, I glanced up at the TV. On it were informative snippets, all health related, that the average google-searcher is probably already keen to. But one, in particular, caught my eye and has stayed with since. So much so that it’s months later and this particular post has been marinating, writing itself really, in the back of my head ever since.

The snippet was on body image and how to talk to children about their bodies in such a way that fosters confidence and self-respect. The one that stuck with me most was something along the lines of “point out all that their bodies do for them”. It got me thinking. I tell my boys numerous times a day how ‘cute’ they are. And ever since letting the infomercial sink in, I start to choke on those words as they come out of my mouth. Because they’re more than cute. They’re CAPABLE.

I would rather build them up and make them feel special based on what they can do rather than on how they look. And what they can do need not be anything more than breathing because the gift of breathing, we all would agree, is pretty special in it’s own right.

I’ve had a harder time trying to transition this kind of vocabulary into words that would actually come out of my mouth because I’m certainly not willing to ditch ‘stop being so dang cute’ with ‘how amazing is the fact you breath’. But I’m on my way, because dammit, it’s important.

I grew up with the ‘skinny girl’ complex that in today’s bizarre weight obsessed society feels like an inappropriate thing to complain about. But it made me incredibly self conscious. So-much-so that I wore sweat pants to gymnastics. Mind you I trained 5 days a week for 4 hours a day, in the afternoon, in southern California. Point being, it was hot and it didn’t make sense.

The other day my mom told me Hooper’s golf coach gave him a ride in the golf cart while all the other kids walked and justified it, in front of Hooper and the other kids in the class, because Hooper was ‘too skinny’ and couldn’t afford to lose calories walking. When I heard that, I was reminded of my junior high days when all my friends and a few curious classmates pitched in on my birthday to buy me an absurd amount of balloons to see if I could actually be whisked away. I was a pretty resilient kid in the respect that it didn’t bother me much, but my sister and my mom – who were equally thin but arguably more sensitive – recall similar memories being more detrimental to their psyche.

Hooper overheard me the other day describing him as a baby being ‘skinny’ and immediately upon hearing the word ‘skinny’ turned to me and said, ‘I’m not skinny’ in-such-a-way that proved he’s only beginning to become aware of this new label and making sense of it. I can see the wheels spinning, ‘is this a good thing’, ‘is this a mean thing’, ‘do I want to be skinny’, ‘do others want to be skinny’…

I recall reading a post by my dear friend Marge Jacobsen, who herself was a victim of abuse. Her post highlighted the fact that she does not make her children hug her. Sounds fair enough but I know I for one am always trying to manipulate a hug or kiss out of my boys because, dammit, I love them. But she makes a ridiculously important point in that we ought to respect when others don’t want to touch us or show affection and not make it about hurt feelings.

Sometimes I think we’ve all gotten too damn sensitive in this age of parenting. We’re all so hyper-aware and there’s so many avenues that allow for so much judgement of one another. I mean describing Hooper as skinny is synonymous with describing his hair as blond; it’s nothing more than a characteristic trait. By the same token, one would never describe a kid as fat to his / her face because it carries a certain amount of hurt when being described in such a way.

I suppose the take home, for me, is that it is more beneficial for me to compliment my boys on things they have control over; things like chores or the way their body enables them to do things they enjoy. I won’t deny their obvious traits, I just won’t let them define who they are and I won’t file them under reasons why I love them. Because fat or thin, short or tall, black or white, hugs or no hugs, I love them all the same. Always will.