It wasn't until I was 13 years old that I learned I was fat. That was the year I moved to the United States and began to have a difficult time finding clothes that fit appropriately. I never really thought about that change until much later when I would look back on childhood photos and was surprised by how well my clothes fit, and how well-dressed I mostly was. As someone who is very fashionably challenged, I was surprised that at some point in time, I knew how to dress well...and I seemed to have lost the skill once I had many clothing options. When did I lose that skill?
I began to explore that phenomena and quickly came to an odd realization. In the U.S. I clearly always had more clothing options that I ever did in Venezuela. Ready-made clothes in the U.S. were affordable so everyone could buy them. That was the key, in Venezuela, ready-made clothes were very expensive, so not too many people purchased them. In fact, I don't remember my mom buying anything ready-made for me or herself other than school uniforms.
Most of my clothes were made by either a seamstress or my mom, so if the clothes didn't fit or if I didn't look good in clothes, it was never my body's fault, there was nothing wrong with my body, it just meant my mom or the seamstress measured inaccurately...an easy fix. So this mother's day, I am really grateful to my mom for having given me the freedom in my younger years to not think of my body as being flawed. That thinking process gave me the ability to counteract some of the negativity about my body when I moved here, and liberated me to worry about other more pressing things, like whether I should be a cosmonaut or an astronaut?
Happy Mother's Day all!
I began to explore that phenomena and quickly came to an odd realization. In the U.S. I clearly always had more clothing options that I ever did in Venezuela. Ready-made clothes in the U.S. were affordable so everyone could buy them. That was the key, in Venezuela, ready-made clothes were very expensive, so not too many people purchased them. In fact, I don't remember my mom buying anything ready-made for me or herself other than school uniforms.
Most of my clothes were made by either a seamstress or my mom, so if the clothes didn't fit or if I didn't look good in clothes, it was never my body's fault, there was nothing wrong with my body, it just meant my mom or the seamstress measured inaccurately...an easy fix. So this mother's day, I am really grateful to my mom for having given me the freedom in my younger years to not think of my body as being flawed. That thinking process gave me the ability to counteract some of the negativity about my body when I moved here, and liberated me to worry about other more pressing things, like whether I should be a cosmonaut or an astronaut?
Happy Mother's Day all!
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