I Learned It From Watching You

"I can't believe it-every time I look at you, you look more like your mother," my aunt said to me a few weeks ago.
I said thanks, whatever, and tried to fight against the shameful blush that takes over every time this happens. My knee-jerk reaction, every time someone tells me I look like my mother, is still to say, "No, I don't," like they have just made a mistake.
It still feels like it can't be true. Everyone, or maybe just me, has one picture of their mother where she just looks so beautiful, you cannot even fathom how you came out of this person, how you were made out of the same materials they were made from. It's like a biological experiment gone wrong-a sow's ear that was made from a silk purse. It wasn't until very recently, when I started to really see the resemblance, not just in the shape of my eyes and my cheekbones but in the shape of my body, which is the same as the shape she hated so much and fought against, that I realized what this negativity actually puts out into the world. All I am doing by hating this body I have been given is feeding into the self-hatred she carried on her back like a thousand extra pounds until she died, and I learned it from watching her.
It is hard to undo the years of learned self-loathing that I learned from my mother, because it did not come just from her. I used to have friends who encouraged my bad behavior, who congratulated me for weight loss that was usually brought on by just being too fucking sad to eat. My family, to a degree, has encouraged my past self-abuse, by only remarking on my weight when I was that sick. When I gained it back because I was happy, they were not so thrilled. In my family, skinny equals pretty, so I've only been pretty on and off to them, and only when I've been sad. This negative thinking is starting to go away, little by little, just by surrounding myself with the right people, but it's a very slow process. Now I have better friends. No one is trying to feed me diet pills or telling me it was better when I was "bulimic-looking".
This tendency I have always had, to hate everything about me that is like my mother-the shape of my face, my curves that will never flatten out, needs to end with me. All I am doing by hating the very things that made my mother beautiful is proving her assertions right. I don't want to prove her right. I also don't want to have a daughter someday who learns to hate herself from me. It's going to be hard because it is so much easier to be self-deprecating. It's funnier and people like hearing it more. No one likes someone who is too pleased with their own self. Still, this is a pattern that I am tired of carrying on. I am trying, every day, to not look at my body only in terms of what is wrong with it, with the relief map of areas that need to be changed or altered or made different. It's so much harder than it needs to be.
Trying to see myself differently has changed the way I feel about my ex, and how he dealt with my body. I have made a lot of accusations about my ex in terms of how he wanted me to change, but to be fair, how could I expect him to love the way I looked if I couldn't even like it? He couldn't, and I can't expect anyone else to. My father told me, years after my mother was gone, how he tried to give her what he thought she needed by telling her how beautiful she was, and how frustrating that was because she would counter-point with something she hated about herself too often. You could throw compliments at this woman all day and nothing would stick. I remember looking at her yearbook photos when I was little, telling her she was the prettiest girl on the homecoming court, and she replied, "I only got nominated because I was popular, not because I was pretty. I was never pretty."
I think back to when, exactly, my ex stopped telling me I was anything other than flawed, and it must have been when he figured out that there was no point. I pushed back against anything nice the same way my mother did, and he just got exhausted. So, I'm giving up on it. I'm giving up because I'm tired of this. I can't carry my mother's self-hatred anymore. Of all the ways that I see that I do resemble her, this is the one that has to change, and I am the only one who can change it.