Alright you scrapping female lobsters, lets have a chat.
Remember when I posted about wanting to be a Male Lobster? If not, read that post here.
Short version:
Male Lobsters help each other out of a boiling pot of water if the lid is off.
Female Lobsters see one of the other lobsters climbing out of the pot they pull her back in with the rest of them.
So if you cook male lobsters you have to have the lid on, for female lobsters, you don’t.
So what does that have to do with this post and all the scrappers out there?
I’ll tell you.
Recently I have seen two different posts by fellow lady bloggers both involving self image and self esteem. One of these bloggers was talking about how after having multiples she had a very hard time with self image and that other females weren’t helpful because they just brought her down instead of teaching her that it’s OK to be curvy, you are still beautiful. I read this post by her and she had said that she recently learned to embrace the curves and that she was beautiful. I loved reading that. Then I got down to the comments.
Holy Canole friends.
Ladies – our gender sucks in the harshest of ways. Instead of telling her how amazing it was that she is learning to love herself…there were all kinds of brutal comments that she shouldn’t embrace being curvy because she was unhealthy, and that if she needed people to tell her that she was beautiful she had self esteem problems. And honestly, she ended up leaving the blog world because of the harshness.
Does this break your heart like it does mine?
What on earth is the point of pushing each other down?
The other post I read gave me a little more hope for our gender and that we aren’t always brutal and harsh. It was about how a blog friend of mine is having body issues and loving herself after having two boys and that she was taking photos of herself her husband and that she deleted about 98% of them because she didn’t feel sexy like she did before having babies. When I commented on the post there was only positive comments, telling her how she was beautiful was and that there was no doubt that her husband felt the same way because he loves her.
Finally! some encouragement, some ladies telling another female to love herself.
It had me thinking about it though…the difference in the posts was this: the first one was saying that she was learning to love herself for how she was and that she’s beautiful – and she got brought down brutally telling her terrible harsh things for loving herself. The second post was about one having a hard time loving herself and she got encouragement that she needs to love herself.
So….please explain this to me friends, explain why this has to happen?
If someone doesn’t love themselves we encourage them to, but when someone does love themselves the goal is to bring them back down to the point that they don’t?
I don’t know about you but that brings the exact imagery into my mind of what the female lobsters do.
It goes past the body image issues, I have also seen way to much mama bashing online lately too.
Mamas getting angry that other mamas go above and beyond and make the “themselves” look bad. Some mamas judging other mamas about how they parent, how they do things because it’s not how “they” would.
What the hell happened to “Treat others how you want to be treated?” Isn’t that what we have be taught since children and we teach our own children? Does that just go out the window when we are adults?!
How about we embrace one another for who we are, encourage ourselves to only love ourselves not hate ourselves and realize that every mama parents different and it doesn’t mean that its right or wrong, it means that we are all different. Don’t we thrive to be different from one another? Aren’t we supposed to embrace it?
How about instead of the hate we all realize that we are all in this together, we are all swimming upstream and all struggle because friends, we are human. And if we don’t have something nice to say to someone else, keep that mouth shut.
Because friends, I don’t know about you but as a mama to a little girl all I want to teach that sweet girl of mine is that she is beautiful, and perfect exactly how she is.
Well said mama! Reading about that first story just saddens my heart. The blogging community can be so uplifting at times, I just wish there wasn’t the negative side of it too. It’s not fair, and just seems so childish. Thank you for posting this, well said!
Thank you! I love the blogging community for so many reasons, but like anything there is a downside. Sometimes though I wonder how much of it is the blogging community and how much of it are others without blogs…
Good girl. I think it’s important to be vocal about this issue. So many people advocate against child bullying, but a lot ignore advocating against ADULT bullying, especially among woman. There are so many reasons why this does take place, jealousy being a main one as well as other breakdowns in society, including godlessness. But beyond the reasons, I think you and I agree that there should be two things 1) less judgement, and 2) far more encouragement. Additionally, sometimes our “opinions” especially if unkind, should be kept silent, and our keyboards too.
This is a HUGE reason why my husband and I are starting our blog. We both live to encourage others and feel God has called us, in a way, to encourage those who we have the opportunity to speak with. I cannot wait to start and launch some articles that share positive ways to begin living a life of encouragement.
Okay, sorry, typing away again. Let it out Kristina, and keep standing up for the injured woman out there. (The second blog, I read that too. I get her totally! I hope she begins to heal from that mentality and feel completely sexy again. Her husband will love every ounce of her even more, when she loves her more, ya know!)
-S
(PS: Interesting factoid about the lobsters by the way. 😉 )
I’m looking forward to your blog!
I love your heart Shirley! I can’t wait until your blog launches! I’m so looking forward to reading it!
Let’s try this again on a better keyboard…
Amen! The way women and moms lash out at each other makes me sick. Literally nauseous. There is no reason to judge others so harshly. None of us can claim perfection as people, women, or mothers. We could go into how often the cruelty is projecting personal issues onto someone else, but at the end of the day there is no excuse for it.
Thank you so much for this post. I agree with it completely and am thrilled to see you saying what I like to think many feel. Let’s support each other, ladies! No one has the same story or set of circumstances. Isn’t that part of the beauty? What makes us wonderful the same AND different? Like Shirley said, it is just as much bullying when we are adults as it is when we are children. I, for one, hope to lead by example and teach my children how to support and love one another instead of ripping each other apart. The golden rule doesn’t stop applying when we become grownups.
I fail at typing today. *wonderfully the same* in that last paragraph.
I totally agree, it makes me so incredibly sad. It makes me nauseous, anxious, etc. all of the above. I don’t understand why so many have to be that way, but at the same time I’m going to guess it goes back to insecurities and sadness in their own heart that they try to project on others. Sad.
It makes me sad that anyone would even think that it’s okay to say something that awful to someone. It seems that there is such a big push to be the visual ideal of healthy. However, how you look on the outside is not necessarily an indication of how healthy you actually are. There is such a thing as skinny fat. It’s a real thing. But just as important is being mentally healthy. And loving yourself is the first part of that. Mental health and stress are just as bad for your body as physical health. And mental health and stress are medically linked to diminishing physical health. For someone to bring anyone else down who is learning to love themselves is just sad and unhealthy.
I completely agree. There is so much to being healthy and society today focuses on the wrong things so often. So, so sad. 🙁