What would you have liked your mum to teach you when you where young?

10 comments

1. How to plait my hair. She’s not around any more but I have a vivid memory of this which makes me smile. And also how to tie my shoelaces!

2. I kind of wish she’d encouraged more female friendships and helped me recognize shitty male behavior earlier. I think she did try to warn me, but it was often in ways I couldn’t understand? She put up with a lot of bullshit from my father and his family which, although I understand the reasons why, I wish she’d put her foot down more. I actively try to model boundary setting for my students and my own daughter, so she must have done something right.

3. How to ask for help. She grew up in a very “fend for yourself” household and her parents gettting sick didn’t help change that mindset.

4. How to regulate my emotions.

5. That being a skinny child doesn’t mean you automatically will be skinny adult. I was a beautiful child and when I became a teenager i was eating a lot because I thought I can’t gain weight. She didn’t warned me and I suffered from dysmorphia because i changed so much. Thanks god, today i’m fit again and eating healthy, but the teenage years was suck.

6. Literally anything about puberty. She was way too conservative and couldn’t bring herself to teach me about how my body was about to change, how to deal with periods, etc. This was the time before the internet so I couldn’t look it up and basically had to go by what friends told me and figure out the rest for myself.

7. That I was loved.

8. How deceitful the world is. How much people lie.

   I never experienced lying or manipulation by my parents, so I was totally unprepared when I moved out.

9. How to sew/crochet

10. That being curvy is okay and not everyone has to starve themselves to be skinny like her.