Impact of Childhood Experiences on Your Body Image

I'll be brave and post. It may sound trivial but growing up - especially in Hawaii it was a big deal. I don't tan - I am very fair and freckle. I had a lot of great "local" friends. (Meaning Hawaiian, Japanese, Fillipino etc) that it didn't matter to them. There was of course the relentless bullies - "Ho bra, look how white that one stay! Only sore my eyes! (Sorry - the slang comes back now & then)
Older men (say when I was 8) would always say "oh honey - the men are just gonna love those freckles when you are older." I hated hearing that. I never referred to them as "angel kisses" like adults tried to tell me they were.
What made it worse, when I was around 13 - I had a friend say "I'm so glad you don't tan. You would be so pretty if you had a tan." What the hell was that? Did I make her look better if I was uglier?
I was 20 or so- a friend made a comment " I don't know what it is - you just look healthier". Took me a while to figure out - I had tanning lotion on & it somehow really changed my look. So, then I felt, "do I look unhealthy normally?
It was equally annying when men would bring me their daughters with freckles and say "tell her how much the men love your freckles." I felt bad for the child - knowing she was living through what I did but - ITS TRUE!!
It was a self image thing - no one else cared as much as I did.
Looking back at my pictures when I was in my 20's - I felt like the woman from Titanic - "wasn't I a dish!"

So there - thats my body image story. Happy ending? (I still use tanning lotion on my legs to avoid glare when I wear shorts )

*sigh* Love my father dearly, but he was always saying things like, "Your butt is as wide as two axe handles and a plug of chew" and "Quit leaning on your mother, you great cow!" (when I was giving my mom a hug -- I was a bit of a clingy teenager). This was my mid to late teen age years, when I was in actually pretty good shape (120 lbs at 5'6"), but I thought I was ha-HUGE.

Concurrently, my next older sister (I'm youngest of five) would try to "help" me dress, do my make up and hair, etc., by saying things like, "I'm not letting you out of the house looking like that." She was, let's just say, a lot more concerned with social things and appearances than I (a proto-nerd-chick) ever was.

Twenty-some years later, we get along great. And it's taken me about this long to scrape up usable levels of self-esteem...