I Love a Deep Forest Green

I picked this dress out from Lindy Bob because I just love a deep forest green and it compliments my skin and hair color so well.

This darling 50’s style swing dress, has those oh so perfect retro strap/sleeves and neckline that scream pinup. Paired with a petticoat and its a lovely little number to wear and feel voluminous in the layers of chiffon froth. I wore my collective headband to go with it because I felt like I wanted to be a woodland fairy queen today.

I remember wanting to be a fairy queen as a little girl as that concept was and still is so marketed to little girls. Fairies are pretty, so are fairy princesses, so are princesses, why not be all of them at the same time and have wispy dresses and wands and crowns and jeweled accessories and jewels on the dresses. I remember wanting all of these things because the way beauty and girlhood was marketed to girls had these elements in it and so if I had these things then I was pretty too and I could be accepted and people would love me because I had these things. I also need to be skinny and have all of these things going on, then a boy will like me.

Well, I have been fat and been skinny and had jeweled clothing (bedazzler anyone?) and wispy dresses and now I have a whole bunch of different kinds of flower crowns but do people love me because of that? Probably not.

I think that I write these pieces and put them out there because they are mine and this is the first space I have ever had for my own writing. Do people actually read it, I have no fucking idea.

Part of what I am trying to address with this is body image and all of the weird things I absorbed over the years that I thought could make someone beautiful. So much of it was so wrong. I have spent years starving and depriving myself of food or conversely. over eating compulsively, exercising compulsively, working my body to the bone to be pretty enough.

I still don’t feel pretty enough but I am realizing that that has less to do with the amount of bejeweled fairy dresses I have and more to do with the way I have been treated by the men in my life and my family. I could never meet the standard. And now I am at a point where I am just like, fuck the standard. I ate a chocolate bar last night for the first time in months! It was mediocre and not very invigorating but it was something to do.

As women we have this ingrained rule that if we indulge, we are bad.  Whether it be in food, alcohol or drugs, if you do to much or consume too much, clearly you are a master-fuck up. It is also about 100 percent worse than when a man does it. Because we are always supposed to try and stay beautiful for them, be thin and pretty because those are the hallmarks in our culture when it comes to a woman’s value. Not her degrees or her job or the phenomenal job she did balancing work and kids and a relationship; somehow what she looks like has to come first.

And even knowing all of this, I still every day, wake up ridiculously early to work out before the kids get up so that I will have time. I wear hats, sun block and use parasols religiously because heaven forbid my skin show any sign of aging and, I have managed to find the most constricting undergarments possible to try and draw attention away from the unsightly paunch belly I have after having two c-sections and feel shame and discomfort every time I look at myself naked in the mirror.

But whatever. Today I am a fucking fairy princess and I don’t care what anybody else thinks of me.