Breastfeed in public while preserving your modesty

For those of you who know me know that I have a daughter, Arianne, who will be eighteen on Valentine's Day. You also know she is eerily like me. She looks like me, thinks like me, has many of the same desires and hopes as I do, and has many motives similar to me. We feel alike, we think alike, we talk alike. When I asked a friend once if Arianne was like me, she eloquently stated, "down to the walk". (I also walk a little funny... so that was frightening!)

Arianne is a mirror for me. Many families have a child very much like one of the parents. Inevitably, they don't get along! The same is true for Arianne and myself. We both love that we're so much alike. I look like her; she like me. I have a very youthful appearance, so oftentimes people see pictures of her as a teenager and think it's a recent photo of me! Very cool.

But when it comes to what takes place inside, we are always battling. It's not a bad thing... but we serve as the true mirrors to one another. When you go to a circus and stand before different mirrors, sometimes you laugh, sometimes you cry. We see ourselves, not as others see us, but often how we really are... or how we fear we are. When I stand in front of the short, fat, warped mirror, I think, "Wow, that's what I really look like", in real life and I am not happy about it! When I stand in front of the tall, skinny one, I just look silly to me. I don't see myself as tall and skinny and the image looking back at me is completely foreign and humorous. But the image in the short, fat mirror is a manifestation of my imagination of what I look like.

Does Arianne show me the things I dislike about myself? Can she probe into my thoughts and come up with true insights I fight to hide? I say, yes, and I believe I do that to her as well. The problem is, because we know these things so well and see them in the other person, we have an uncanny ability to hit each other in those places where we are most ashamed, most hurt, and where it can cause the most damage.

She and I had a fight yesterday. I said things to her that were true, or at least to her. They hurt her to the core because I caused her the shame she feared. I hate that I did that. But no worries; she knows me just as well. She interprets my behaviour to match what she would be thinking and feeling if she were behaving that way. It is a destructive way to have a relationship.

Neither one of us were true mirrors to each other, though. We only mirrored the darkness in each other... those fears, insecurities, self conscious places in our private lives that we don't want those we love to see or point out. How do we, me and her, move on from there? Obviously such "mirroring" is not good or productive.

My goal is to "mirror" our potential to one another. I wish we could say, "I know this about you because I struggle with the same thing" and strive to make those things better. I share this because it is a private battle... taking place within the home, the sanctuary of the family, and can act as a cancer in that home. I know many of you struggle with the same thing. Perhaps this blog can help us realize why we say such awful things to those we love the most and learn how we can turn that around to minimize those situations and become more enjoyable people, to look at in the real mirror and in the mirror on our children.

Phoebe