A piece of my mind on breaking generational curses
The term “almond mom” got popular across social media platforms after some concerning videos about how Yolanda Hadid treated her daughters went viral. In one of them, an excerpt from The Real Housewives, the former model expresses her reservations regarding Gigi joining her school’s volleyball team. She says something in the lines of her daughter’s body becoming too muscular, that women who played were “big and bulky”.
In another video, shot on Gigi’s birthday, Yolanda cuts a normal cake piece into multiple tiny ones, eats a little bit, gives the other bite to Gigi, and says “I can’t believe we just did that” as if it were a crime or an absolute mistake. In another clip from the reality show that resurfaced, Gigi calls her mother and says, “I’m not feeling good. I had, like, half an almond”, to which she responds, “Have a couple of almonds and chew them really well”. That was when the archetype “almond mom” was born.
Since then, thousands of girls have identified with the struggles of growing up with that kind of mother in the house. The hashtag ‘almond mom’ was used 20k times on TikTok videos.
But the million-dollar question is: how do we avoid becoming them?
Having grown up online, with unlimited internet access, little to no adult supervision, joining Tumblr at a young age and being a heavy social media user since, it’s safe to say that I didn’t always have the healthiest relationship with my body. Therefore, passing my self-love problem along to my children has always been a concern of mine.
That being said, I’m not even close to becoming a mother. I’m 21 years old and have never held hands romantically. However, while I was trying to fix my self-image issues, thinking about the daughters that are possibly inside me as we speak, somehow helped. I wondered out loud, “If I had a baby, carried her for nine months, held her little newborn body in my arms and nurtured her, would I be okay with her criticizing her body like I am mine right now, for simply existing?”
The answer was, of course, no. I would be horrified if my child said out loud the things I’ve been telling myself every time I looked in the mirror or wore a bikini since I was twelve and discovered the Tumblr term ‘thinspo’ and thigh gaps. Hopefully, if you’re a woman reading this, you’re aware that you were born with all your egg cells that are produced by your ovaries during fetal development. Therefore, all your future children live inside your body your whole life. How could I mistreat and hate my body so much if my future child is there? They’re inside me. We’re the same. I carry them everywhere I go.
Thinking this way changed not only my perspective on my body, but also on life in general. Coming back to the question, you avoid becoming an almond mom by fixing your own relationship with your body and food before having kids, if possible. If you stop thinking about food as an enemy you will not pass that along to your children. Of course, that takes some work. Women are conditioned by today’s society to hate themselves because it’s what makes businesses money.
If you want to get deeper into the connection between beauty standards and neoliberalism, I recommend Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. The author has some pretty controversial opinions on other subjects that I feel the need to state I do not agree with; however, this one book was very clarifying (at least when I read it at 15 years old).
To avoid becoming an almond mom, you need to deconstruct all you’ve been taught and heard your whole life. Food is fuel, food is comfort, food is socialization. You do not have to be small in order to be beautiful. You’re allowed to exist in all different shapes and sizes. You can eat whenever you’re hungry. You don’t need to skip dinner because you had dessert after lunch. You are not being “bad” because you ate sugar. I hope that we Gen Z girls and future moms, aunts, or even those who do not want kids themselves but will hold the ‘mom’s cool friend’ title, break the cycle.
Do not talk badly about your body in front of children. Don’t say you need makeup to leave the house or that you look gross in a dress because of your tummy. And, especially, don’t talk about their body. I have some very specific memories of stuff my mom told me. For instance, there’s a picture of me I hate, in the pool with a friend. I wasn’t older than eight, and you can see I’m trying to suck in my belly. Keep in mind, I was a pretty skinny kid, just had a normal child’s belly. I was sucking in because my mother told me to when she picked up the camera. And till this day, I remember her saying my friend was skinnier and didn’t need to do it. I think I’ve never stopped sucking in each time I saw a camera after that.
Years later, same old stuff: I was twelve and took a picture with a bunch of friends. It was summer, we were all in little jean shorts and crop tops after having a water fight with balloons. I showed her the picture, and she said something about how the girl next to me had skinny, pretty thighs. Again, keep in mind that I was not overweight at all. After that, I think there wasn’t a day in my life that I didn’t think I needed to be smaller. My weight gain during puberty and growing out of a child’s body into a woman’s was my personal hell.
I saw this specific picture recently and, with newfound clarity, laughed about how ridiculous the difference between my legs and the girl’s next to me was. Laughed about how tragic it was that such a trivial thing made me so insecure and haunted me for so many years.
I don’t blame my mother at all. I concluded a long time ago, observing the things my grandparents say about other people’s bodies, that she had it so much worse than I did growing up. She just repeated some of the stuff she had heard her whole life without thinking better of it. She had no idea those comments would follow me everywhere I went.
Anyways, children hear everything, and they won’t forget something you said just because they were little. Let it end with us.