I write a lot about thighs, about body image. I think a lot about my thighs. I blame this on the fact that the most spoken sentence out of my mother’s mouth was “do my thighs look big?” Literally, until the day she died, I heard, “I’m sorry you have my thighs” or “Gosh, C (my oldest child) is so lucky she didn’t get my thigh genes.”

My mom despised her thighs. 

My mom felt less beautiful because of her thighs, she felt less whole, she never did truly love herself. It’s heartbreaking really. 

It was always her thighs. 

In retrospect, I never noticed them.

Truthfully, I don’t even think she had big thighs ever, but of course, she’d disagree. All I noticed was her beauty. Her personality. The things I loved about it. The things I hated. But never a moment of thought about her thighs . . . or her body. Ever. 

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I look at my own thighs now and cringe. I see what’s now been corrupted in my head, but then I smile in the same breath because they really are her thighs. And I love that. 

I miss her complaining about them. I’d give anything to hear it and make her stop hating on her body just one more time. 

I am now my mother’s thighs, and I’m changing the story.

I will not let my children remember my most said sentence as a piece of hatred about my own body, and then with that, making them hate their own.

I see the things she struggled with, I feel them, I have them. I hate them because of her. But I also love them because of her. 

She was so much more than her dang thighs. 

She was not only my mother, but she was also one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen. 

But all she saw was her thighs.

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I am now her thighs. And my thighs and I are breaking the cycle. We are so much more than what our body presents us as. And honestly, I’m realizing most people don’t even see these things that we criticize about ourselves every single day.

With all that said, I just wish she would have been able to see what I see now. I just wish she could have felt as beautiful as she truly was. She was so much more than her thighs—hey, we all are.