Confidence in Bloom

She’d been playing down the street all day as she had every day in this strange, new world of in-between. But today it seemed as if something was wrong...a few storm clouds gathering below the surface of her emotions on this sunny, summer afternoon.

We spoke for a few minutes and she started to leave the room. “Wait, Honey,” I said. She stopped and turned around. “Are you ok?” I asked. “You don’t seem like yourself.”

“I’m just really tired and hungry,” she said, and I could tell she was on the verge of tears. “All I’ve eaten all day is an apple and a string cheese.”

“Why?” I asked. “Why didn’t you come home for lunch?”

Then the dam broke. Silent tears started streaming down her face.

“I just want to be skinny,” she said. “Everybody likes the skinny, pretty girls and I’m just not.”

In that moment I thought my heart would break.

My beautiful, sensitive, smart, strong, NORMAL-SIZED little girl. The one who loves to play waitress and fix fun foods for her cousins and brothers. The one who saved her money for weeks to buy presents for kids in the cancer ward of the hospital. The one who stole her daddy’s and my heart the moment she was born. That little girl who got in the car after preschool one day and said she thought all the kids were inside crying because she left. The one who came home from Kindergarten and said “I’m going to tell Michael he’s going to marry me and he is going to FAINT!!”

What happened to that confident, happy little girl? Who did this to her? Who stole that confidence? Who blinded her to the beauty that she possessed both in body AND soul? And WHY could I feel a familiar stab of pain with every word she’d just spoken? Oh yes. It was very familiar. It was entirely too familiar. And it cut me to the core. Did I do this to her?? Had my feelings of lack and unworthiness somehow been passed on to her? Was I responsible for the boogie man in the closet of my little girl’s fragile confidence?

How many times had I thought the same thoughts, not even knowing that JUST THE THOUGHT excluded me from the very feelings I wanted to feel. Valued. Accepted. Loved. Admired. Included. Did I live that out in such a way that my beliefs had become hers??
You see, it wasn’t a lack of beauty that kept my little girl from experiencing these things. It wasn’t because she wasn’t skinny enough. It wasn’t because she wasn’t likable.

It was because she had believed a lie.  

I know you’ve felt it. Not skinny enough, not pretty enough, not tall enough, not small enough, not wealthy enough, not smart enough, not successful enough, not light enough, not dark enough...
It could go on for eternity. It HAS gone on for eternity so far. What a crappy lie to believe.
NOT ENOUGH... it steals the joy, doesn’t it?

So I had a decision to make that day. 

Both for my sake and for the sake of my little girl. This was not about size and beauty. This was about something deeper. This was about worthiness. It was about love. It was about confidence and character, mindset and responsibility. And it was about TRUTH.

We worked through some of those painful beliefs that day. And we’ve sometimes had to work on them again. And we’ve even had to work on some other painful things that have come up. But we recognized the lie for what it was.

And out of this pain was born this program...