By Kathy Korman Frey

Women and girls: For the Fourth of July, the Hot Mommas Project would like to give you a well-deserved present.  Are you ready? It’s going to change your life. Here it is.

On the Fourth of July, you will wake up, and…

YOU CANNOT CRITICIZE YOURSELF 

Wow. Is this a novel concept or what?

I mentioned women not criticizing themselves for a day during a Success in the City CEO Chick Chat.  People started looking around like, “Hey, now THAT’s an idea!”

You self-flagellators out there – you know who you are. You folks who love to pick your face in zoom-in lighted mirrors and work on every little flaw. You may start twitching during this exercise. But, you must stay strong.

Important reasons await as to why you must practice this skill…even just for one day:

#1 We’re dying off. Not like dinosaurs or in Al Gore’s PowerPoint presentation, but in a much sneakier way: STRESS! Women used to live longer due to estrogen (approximately 10 years longer). This is being counter-balanced as the number of dual incomes and crackberries and Masters Degrees (we get the most) and PhDs (we get the most of these too) increases. Why pile on self-criticism too? It’s really stupid when you think about it.

#2 We’re messing up our daughters.  A post by Erin Margolin  (inspired by Lisa Bloom’s Huff Post article) really got me thinking about young girls and body image. Back in the day when I was an English major at the University of Virginia I took several gender and literature courses. Here are the Cliff’s Notes:

Women were to be looked upon, men were to act. 

Has much changed? Think about how many liberties total strangers will take in commenting on what a woman should do when she’s pregnant or when she’s a mom.

Seriously. We all know these stories. We laugh/cringe at them. One time when I was pregnant, I was at a yogurt bar and this dude scooches over beside me:

Dude: “It’s not good for pregnant women to have sugar!”

Me: “I’m sorry…Are you talking to me?”

Dude: “Yeah. I read somewhere that it’s not good for pregnant women to have sugar.”

Me: “Well, it’s also probably not so great for women to gain a third of their body weight in nine months…but, people just seem to keep doing THAT!” [ smile]

Dude: [Silence]

For me, this was pretty entertaining. But, I stood up for the invisible woman that day. The woman who would have listened to him, and not known what to say, and gone home to cry. She would cry because she felt so bad about herself already, and here was some random commenting on – what – her? her diet? her body?

She would have felt  –  as Moon Unit Zappa so eloquently said in her epic ’80s song Valley Girl – grody.

Human Playdough…when does it start? Fetus age?

So, we can buy into this treating of ourselves as some kind of human playdough to be  fixed, altered, perfected, and nitpicked to death from the outside in…or we can practice stopping.

If you think you can stop criticizing yourself for one day, you are ready to move to the three part equation.

If you would rather die a slow death by nitpicking, now is a good time to  stop reading.

[polldaddy poll=5203604]

The Three Part Equation

Part 1: Stop That. Because I Said So.

We’ve got this covered. Stop fixing.

Part 2. Acceptance. Does Jennifer Lopez have the answers?

There was an article a few years back I’ll never forget. Someone was commenting on the size of Jennifer Lopez’s rear-end early on in her career. “I like it,” Lopez responded to the critic, ‘It gives me an edge.”

That’s STRONG.

Examples:

• Hair frizzy?  I kinda like it. It’s kinda Earth Mom. 
• Knobby knees? They’re super cute. 

Part 3. Beyond the physical.

The physical must be addressed because research shows it is the first manifestation of a girl’s self image and confidence in life. Until that changes…we must address it. Moving beyond the stop-fixing and acceptance, we’re adding non physical self-esteem building elements. You can even start with the non physical. Just know that, at some point, the physical will likely have to be addressed with a woman or girl.

Now add BEYOND the physical…as Lisa Bloom does with a super cool five year-old in this article.

Examples:

• Hair frizzy?  I kinda like it. It’s kinda Earth Mom. And p.s. it goes really well with your engineering degree.
• Knobby knees? They’re super cute. And p.s., they go really well-slash-are completely irrelevant in the shadow of your awesome sense of loyalty and genuineness.

Can we wake up tomorrow and believe this? Because, you know, it starts with us.