Dear Kate,
I've always liked you.
From the moment you stepped onto Canada's turf
and laughed with your whole face and held the hearts of our people, I've liked
you.
But never more than this past week when you
emerged from the hospital with a brand-new son in your arms. You radiated love and life and I thought you'd
never looked more beautiful.
I thought nothing of your mommy-tummy because goodness, girl, you'd just had a baby
and anyone who's given birth knows that tummy doesn't disappear overnight, nor
should it.Your body's been stretched nine-months long to hold an eight-pound
highness, and it's been pushed and prodded and bruised over hours of labor and
there you stood shining in a blue dress, patting your son and cherishing
him with new-mother eyes.
And the world exploded with tweets and
posts about your postpartum body and I cried for you. I cried for our
ignorance and for the pressure you are facing. And I fear for you. The years
ahead and the toll of being in the public eye. I fear you might stop
wearing blue dresses that celebrate your womanhood. I fear you might
begin to grip your crown too tight. I fear you might become a disordered eater
as Princess Diana was, for all of the pressure of a society that condemns a new
mother for her mummy-tummy.
“The
media’s neuroticism over Kate’s post-pregnant looks is brainwashing women into
thinking that they will constantly be judged and criticized unless they meet
the new standard – unattainable perfection,” human behavior expert Patrick Wanis
PhD, told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “The obsession with the perfect female
body is spiraling out of control.”
Kate, I wrote Mom in the Mirror for you. I
wrote it for all of us mothers--Kim Kardashian included--who bear life under
the watch of an unforgiving culture.
A culture that has lost the scope and art of beauty. The curve of beauty. The
shape of beauty found in the rounded tummy, found in the soft cushion of an
arm, found in the maternal hug.We've forgotten the beauty that can be found
in a nurturing figure, in a real-life person, in the struggle and surrender of
a body to nature.
We are hard on you, Kate, because we hate ourselves. But enough. We
need to stop. Because we are hurting you and ourselves. We are hurting our
daughters and our sisters for all of our self-loathing. And perfection isn't
attainable, no matter one's size.
Kate, forget the six-page spread in UK's OK Magazine detailing
your weight-loss plan. Forget trying to get back to your
pre-pregnancy physique because you have a new body now, one that has worn and
born a child and one that will feed a child and it will never be the same, but
change is good. You have a new name now, and that name is mother, and
it has a shape all its own.
Most of us can admit to loving things about ourselves, but do we love
our selves? The parts that make us, us?
“A woman’s happiness is in throwing everything away to live for love,”
says Ai Yazawa inParadise Kiss, Volume 5. But this living for love does
not mean throwing away our dreams and desires.
No, it means fully entering oneself, while ridding of any pre-conceived
notions about beauty and value and worth. It means embracing our crooked noses,
snorting laughter, the stretch marks, saggy boobs, tea-bag eyes and warty feet.
It means accepting our humanness, but more than that. It means approaching
ourselves like author Anne Lamott does: with kindness and laughter.
“Age has given me what I was looking for my entire life,” she writes.
“It has given me me.It has provided time and experience and failures and
triumphs and time-tested friends who have helped me step into the shape that
was waiting for me. I fit into me now.”
I applaud you, dear Duchess, and I beg of you to hold your head high in
that blue dress and to eat well and to sleep long and to keep George
close because the world is envious of what you have. It wants to steal
your joy.
So stand strong. You not only model what it is to be royalty; you model
what it is to be a woman in the 21st century, and we need you to be real,
Kate. We beg you to be real. Always.
On behalf of women everywhere, your friend and sister,
Emily.
