I’ve spent this entire week bopping around the house to Lizzo’s new album, Special. “Am I ready to be loved?” I sang out loud as I did the dishes.
“Am I ready to be loved?” I belted as I drove to work with the windows down.
“How am I supposed to love myself when I don’t like myself,” I cried as I crawled into bed at the end of the day.
Special has been making waves since it dropped this month, earning praise as a "radical political statement" about women’s rights at a time when bodily autonomy has been stripped away. For me, and every other mom raising young girls, it meant something equally profound. Though Lizzo has always been unabashed about body positivity and self-love in her previous albums, this hit different. Special is about learning how to love yourself — inside and out — even when it’s hard to do it.
I understand that sentiment well
Still, I have hope
Especially when I see this generation of artists like Lizzo celebrating diverse shapes and sizes, and eating more for pleasure and energy than to fit a certain size of jeans, I have hope — both for moms like me and for the kids we’re raising. I have hope that, however slow, things are changing and that we’re starting to get angry about the mold we’re supposed to fit into; that we’re starting to say, “enough is enough” when it comes to hating our bodies and questioning our value because of how we look; that we’re starting to openly celebrate amazing body-positive pioneers like Lizzo. I have hope that someday soon we will be able to say with honesty, “I like myself” when we turn in for the night.
