Face to face with the reality...

From the moment I was a little girl, I've had an unhealthy mental image of what the ideal woman should look like.

Of course, I didn't realize it was an unhealthy image until I got older, but when I was 6, 7, 8 years old, few women in the world to me, were prettier than the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

Are you cringing yet? The 29-year old me is. But the little girl I used to be just saw pretty faces, big smiles and shimmery outfits. Who wouldn't be fascinated?

I first encountered the Dolphins cheerleaders because of my mom. Prior to opening her own business, she worked in sales in a male-dominated industry. This meant part of her job often involved entertaining clients. She took her female clients to spas to discuss business. Her male clients often got tickets to Miami Dolphins games. Her company used to set up quite the pre-game tailgate and since she was a single mom hard-pressed to find a sitter, I'd get to go down to the Orange Bowl with her and her coworkers to help.

It was hard work, but when you're 7 and your parents are in the middle of a divorce, a Sunday afternoon at the Orange Bowl with all that yummy food and a football to toss around was bliss. And inevitably, someone would always prefer to stay at the tailgate party, giving my mom and I their tickets and into the game we'd go. (No wonder I fell in love with football...)

To make their tailgate even better, the company would often pay the Dolphins to have the cheerleaders make appearances at the tailgate parties. So hours before the game kicked off, those women would show up with their shimmery pom-pons and their shiny white boots. In my mind, they were glamorous. Even as a kid, I knew there was something about them...after all, why would all the cute sons of my mom's clients rush off from playing football with me to pose for pictures with those glamazons?

Is it any wonder that when I was young, if you asked me what I wanted to be my answer was "cheerleader"?

But as I got older, I realized there was more to aspire to than being a professional pretty dancer. Soon the answer to the "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question went from "cheerleader" to "pediatrician." (My mother, understably, was relieved.)

I started getting good grades in school and got a little bit heavier. Inevitably, I was one of the outsiders looking in...the cheerleaders at my school were thin and pretty and popular. And some of them weren't all that nice. But I still wanted to be like them--be liked by them, so for two years, I was on the squad.

Eventually I gave up cheerleading, telling myself I wanted "more" than to just be on the sidelines. In reality, the cheerleaders intimidated me the older we got. I ran from my pompons and embraced my bat and ball. I was a softball player now. But the cheerleaders have always been those girls I've looked up to and thought had the 'perfect' lives. Like the head cheerleader who dated the quarterback of the football team (who I was secretly in love with). Or (again), the Miami Dolphins cheerleaders who could make a crowd of 70,000 (mostly) men go crazy with one toss of their head and one shake of their hips.

The older I got, the more critical my view of cheerleaders became. I viewed them as nothing but eye candy (especially the ones that did nothing but dance...I know quite a few cheerleaders do more than that and train and perform like athletes...I'm not talking about them). My bitterness only grew when while we were dating, Mr. CCC got a job with the Dolphins' marketing department.

Part of that job? Accompany the Dolphin cheerleaders to appearances throughout South Florida. While the cheerleaders would lure the fans (err, men!) in, Mr. CCC would try to sell them season tickets. I hated that he was around those cheerleaders in their skimpy outfits for hours at a time...it pulled at every self-esteem issue I had and I worried that one day, Mr. CCC would come home and tell me he was running off with one of them. And why wouldn't he want to? They were tall. Thin. Beautiful. Voluptuous.

I was not.

Yesterday in my Pilates class, I came face to face with my childhood goal/adult nemesis. There was a new student in class and as the rest of the chubsters and I sweat and groaned through the new moves our instructor demanded, the newbie flew through the routine with the kind of grace and precision you just don't see from newcomers to Pilates. She barely broke a sweat.

Our instructor must have noticed the fact so many people turned to look because she pointed out for the rest of us not to worry--that the new student was a dancer and had been training professionally for years. As I was leaving the studio, I overheard the chatter...the newbie was a Miami Dolphins cheerleader.

I glanced over and wasn't surprised--perfect body, perfect hair, perfect smile. For a moment, all I could think was, "Damn...I can work as hard as I just worked and I can cut back to eating absolutely nothing and I will never, in my wildest dreams, look like that." And part of me internally rolled my eyes---if she was so advanced and so flexible, why the heck was she strutting her stuff in a beginner class? I go to Pilates to escape my body issues. Not run into them head on.

It was rather depressing and took me right back into junior high mode--where the cheerleaders were the ones with the perfect lives and I was alone. But as I recounted the story, to a (very wise) friend, she told me I had to STOP thinking like that...and how we women are so hard on ourselves and overly critical of everything regarding our bodies. She had a point. For the first time since taking Pilates, I left the studio feeling down about myself...not proud of what I had just accomplished. And that bothered me.

That's my cross to bear, my issue to work through. I shouldn't be placing value on the person I am by the way I look. I shouldn't see a beautiful woman and roll my eyes, telling myself internally that she's automatically a bitch or that she's bound to be mean. I shouldn't look at a woman with a perfect figure and rationalize she has a perfect life. Because I don't know her. For all I know, she's lost her job, her husband, a child and is burning with pain inside.

For all the times we preach to our children and our friends about how looks don't matter, how often do we really believe that ourselves? I know I have issues. And I also know I need to find a way to stop that negative thinking.

Instead, I can (and should) look at that Dolphins Cheerleader and think, "Wow...I bet she has to work really hard to look that good." Because I'm sure she does. She's probably passed up cookies and cake her entire life. Or she spends six hours a day exercising. Is that something to be envious of? I don't think so. Would I want to skip some of the fabulous meals I've had in my life to be that thin? I don't know that I would. Am I willing to spend hours upon hours cooped up in a gym, instead of enjoying time with my family and friends? Nah.

But more power to those that do...that have to for their jobs. There's nothing to envy there...you have to just admire their self-control and their willpower. (Unless of course, you discover her dinners consist entirely of chocolate, wine and cheese and her exercise is limited to walking outside to get the mail. If that's the case, then yeah, I'm gonna be really, really jealous!)