I've been told my whole life how much I favor my mom. I'm her mirror. Which is ironic because the relationship my mother has with mirrors is a relationship she passed on to her mirror-image daughter unknowingly.

I was shopping with my mom recently and she said something about losing 5 pounds. Don't you notice?, she asked earnestly -- rightfully wanting her hard work eating right and exercising to be acknowledged.

I don't see you enough to notice 5 pounds, I replied nonchalantly, barely looking up from the clearance rack I was deep-diving into.

That means you should notice even more... She looked discouraged. 

This conversation mimics a hundred (maybe even a thousand) conversations I've had with my mom in my 28 years of life. Conversations about weight, about body image, about a negative view of her outer self that no one else sees but her. Conversations I imagine she had with her mother and that Nana had with Grandmother, and that a million mothers have had for ions before. Conversations that, until recently, I didn't realize had impacted me so heavily.

What we were really having was a conversation about the person only we see in the mirror.

We both love shopping. It's our love language. I remember watching her sift through clothes on the rack. I remember tagging along into the dressing room when she'd tried on clothes. I remember her hyper-focusing on fitting into a certain size and being frustrated when that size didn't fit perfectly -- as if fitting into a size 6 gave a person some sort of intrinsic value. I remember overhearing the conversations she'd have with her reflection and rhetorical questions she'd ask me (and later Paige, too): 

This makes my thighs look big...

Does this make me look fat?...

I hate how this looks on me...

She was always her biggest critic, but I was her biggest fan.

I wish she knew then that all I ever saw watching her try on clothes was the prettiest mom in the world. 

I wish she knew then that all her little girl wanted to grow up to be was staring her right in the face from the mirror. 

I wish she could have seen herself in the mirror the way I saw her. It probably would have changed a lot for both of us.

By the time I hit puberty the conversations I'd heard my mom have with her reflection had seeped their way into my own head. I'd sift through the racks to find whatever I knew was trendy. I'd hyper-focus on fitting into a certain size. I'd go to try on clothes in the overly-perfumed Abercrombie dressing room (with perfectly tanned, perfectly tall, perfectly blonde, sepia-toned models on the doors) and think to myself: 

This makes my thighs look big... 

This makes me look fat...

I hate how this looks on me...

After despising how critical my mother was to her own reflection, why couldn't I switch the tape off in my head? 

Side note: I don't think it helped that in the early 2000s the bodies I was seeing on female celebrities were those of Paris Hilton, Tara Reid, and Britney Spears -- all with rail-thin frames capable of wearing the lowest rise jean, the shortest cropped vests, and the pointiest toed shoes; all of which don't favor a 5'2" curvy frame with big boobs.

As a favorite podcaster of mine (Kate Kennedy from Be There In Five) recently said: In the early 2000s, we weren't really tailoring the clothes to our bodies, we tried to tailor our bodies to the clothes. 

I don't think this is just the case for the 2000s. For decades, the female psyche has been shaped by fashion trends and icons set those trends, with very little acknowledgement that all shapes and sizes don't necessarily fit the same mold. 

My mom (and millions of women like her -- women like me) spent the majority of our lives thinking our bodies are the problem instead of thinking the culture is the problem. 

These conversations with myself continued into high school, college, and even young adulthood. Conversations we all have with the person we see in the mirror. I couldn't turn them off. 

I still struggle to turn them off, but luckily we've reached what I think is a turning point in our view of women's bodies. I'm not sure if it's the social media age, the rise of more plus-sized models, or the shift from celebrities in magazines giving fashion advice to girl-next-door social media influencers doing so, but something has started shifting in the last few years. 

One of those aforementioned social media influencers I admire is Anna Grace Newell. She's my age and lives in Nashville. She's blonde, bubbly, and a little eccentric -- but her confidence in what makes her unique is how I think has gained her quite a following. She said something recently on her Instagram story I found to be so simple but so profound. When asked how she was so confident, she said: I stopped focusing on everything I didn't like and starting telling myself everything I did like about myself. Every day I tell myself something I love about me.

This got me thinking: 

• When did the person I see in the mirror stop being "myself"? 
• If I'm my mother's mirror and I think she's beautiful, why can't I see her in my reflection and tell myself I'm beautiful? 
• Why do I spend so much time picking apart every imperfect thing I see until those imperfections are ALL I see? 
• How has that morphed the person in the mirror to someone that 10-year-old me wouldn't even recognize? 
• What do I want my daughter sitting in the dressing room to hear me say about myself? 
• How do I want her to talk to herself when she looks in the mirror? 
• How would I see myself if I wasn't trained to hate my reflection?