Beautiful

So my hubby asked me last night if I ever felt beautiful. I really had to think.  Certainly not on my wedding day.  Definitely not at the senior prom.  I HATED my hair.  My mother rolled it.  It looked ok.  My dress was pretty, though, and it fit really well.  An added bonus is that I can still fit into it!  I felt beautiful at the junior prom.  The irony is that I was in a $30 dress.  I was very thin and knew it!!  I felt beautiful while wearing a light blue sequin dress with cut outs this past summer.  Yes, that night I felt great!  So few moments, though.  It got me thinking if that was just me or the legacy left by my mother who would often tell me in high school that people would make remarks about my "thunder thighs" in my cheer leading skirts.  She would do it under the premise that she was worried I would hear someone, but, of course, the only person I ever heard make that remark was her.  I wonder what she would say now if she saw me in a bikini.  My guess is that she would analyze the somewhat excessive skin around my waist and tell me that I needed a one piece.  The thing I realized last night is that when I look in the mirror, I hear her voice telling me every negative comment she could possibly come up with.  Every time.  Every now and then I will see a picture of myself and think, "God I am thin and pretty."  That is not what I see in the mirror, though.  My mind pics apart the skin around my middle or the skin hanging on my thighs.  Those are things no matter what I do, I can never get rid of.  I used to weigh over 200 pounds.  Skin does not recover from that.  Nor does it recover from 3 pregnancies, not completely anyways.  Sometimes I just want to tell that voice to shut the F up.  I feel the same way when I see my mother now.  She tells me now, of course that I am a size four to six how pretty I am.  It is too late.  Much, much too late.  There are too many years of that voice picking every thing about my appearance apart to ever recover from it so I sit here feeling inferior to every woman, feeling like my hubby will find someone else so much more attractive than I am and simply walk away, and feeling scared and tired and ugly.  I have promised myself not to do the same damage to my daughter.  I hope I will not.  I don't want her looking in the mirror at 30-something and picking apart everything about herself.  I don't want her to ever have that voice.