The Stuff My Mother Didn't Say

I inherited a few things from my mother. Her sweet tooth. Her love of baking. Her good skin. Her very thick, abundant black hair. When I was seventeen I grew it out to a long, curly mane that almost touched my waist. She would run her fingers through it and lament — oh, I had this hair once. Then I got pregnant with you, and you took it from me.

The other thing I inherited from my mother was her insecurity.

The older I got, the more I realised that my mother's relationship with her own body had shaped my relationship with mine. Not through anything she said directly — she was careful about that — but through the thousand small things she didn't say. The way she pulled her jumper down over her hips. The way she ducked out of photographs. The way she talked about clothes she couldn't wear anymore, and other women's figures, and her own, always in the past tense.

What women think and feel about their own bodies starts when they are very small. According to Dr Leslie Sim, clinical director of the Mayo Clinic's eating disorders program, a mother's body image is one of the strongest predictors of her daughter's. Not what she says. How she behaves.

What Mother's Day really is

We've landed, as a culture, on a fairly narrow idea of Mother's Day — the breakfast in bed, the bunch of tulips, the card the kids made at school. All lovely. All a bit beside the point.

What Mother's Day is really about, when you strip back the Hallmark of it, is the women who taught us how to be in the world. The mothers. The not-quite-mothers. The aunties who stepped in. The grandmothers whose kitchens we grew up in. The stepmothers, the foster mothers, the friends' mothers who kept an eye on us when ours couldn't. The women we never thanked properly.

And — this is the part we don't say often enough — the women who tried to be mothers and couldn't. Mother's Day isn't easy for everyone. For some of our customers, it's the hardest Sunday of the year.

The things she didn't say

My mother never said the thing I needed to hear, which was that her body was beautiful, and mine was, and both were allowed to exist without apology. She didn't say it because she didn't believe it about herself. You can't hand down what you don't have.

When I started fitting women in bras for a living — women of every size and shape and age and life stage — I learned what my mother never had the chance to. That almost every woman is walking around thinking something is wrong with her body, and almost always, there isn't. She's just wearing the wrong size bra, or she's comparing herself to a woman thirty years younger, or she's still holding onto something someone said when she was eight.

A proper fit won't fix everything. But the number of women who have left our stores standing straighter, because something that was hurting them has stopped hurting, has taught me that the small stuff matters. Being seen by someone who knows what they're doing and won't make you feel bad about your body — that matters.