This is My Body
I'm eleven years old taking a bath. I'm at that strange age where I'm straddling childhood and adolescence. Still playing with Barbies secretly and alone on the weekends. Applying mascara and shaving my legs during the week. I wrap both hands around my thigh and feel disgusted when my fingers can touch. Back then being skinny was a source of pain. Bullied mercilessly by the cool girls in fifth grade, I had been given the nickname Stick and well, it stuck. My small frame and birdlike bones made me ripe for the picking among the social elite of my grade. I spent most of that year eating lunch in the library to avoid the abuse.
By eighth grade I had escaped the worst of the bullying both by transferring schools and befriending the studious Mormon girls. Still my skinny frame persisted. Boobs and a period, the ultimate symbols of womanhood, would allude me for a number of years. Someone approached me in line in the cafeteria and remarked how I looked like Kate Moss. The quintessential heroin chic icon of the 90's was not someone I hoped to emulate. I ordered a chocolate shake for lunch.
High school I spent a year at a Catholic school downtown. I was a sophomore entering a place where everyone had been friends since nursery school. Breaking into the cool crowd was impossible but I was able to gather a few drama class misfits to call my friends. I ate like I was still a child but hormones and womanhood had finally arrived and my body began to change. Silvery stretch marks etched my thighs seemingly overnight and my stomach turned smooshy. I had shed the skeletal body that had been the bane of my existence but this new frame wasn't what I wanted either. I spent too many hours staring at my body in the mirror and worrying about how I could change it.
As I was preparing to graduate high school my parents relented to my never-ending request to try modeling. Graced with height and an unhealthy obsession with all things beauty I sought out a photographer for headshots and meetings with modeling agencies. I reduced my diet to Cheerios and milk three times a day and I dipped down to 130 pounds. I met with an agent who took out a tape measure and told me the size of my hips would have to be smaller if I hoped to work. I thought, "But my bones can't get any smaller."
In my mid twenties I was living in LA, working in beauty and taking prescription diet pills daily. Legalized meth, these little blue flecked pills allowed me to power through my day, food nothing more than an afterthought. I loved the ambivalence the pills gave me towards food. And in turn I lost weight. A lot of weight. People told me I looked beautiful. Men chased me. My good friend, Anna, said she was worried about me. I laughed her off.
But I still didn't love my body.
I continued taking those pills for longer than I'm willing to admit. They sped up my metabolism and allowed me to stay thin without any real effort. But over time they lost their efficacy and when I finally stopped taking them my body gained the weight it had always been running from. I got pregnant a short time later.
Whether you have body image issues or not, pregnancy will certainly rock your view of yourself. Before your eyes you will transform and your body will become not so much a thing to desire but a vessel to grow a human in. Eating became truly joyful and without restriction. I stopped weighing myself when I exceeded the number of recommended pounds to gain for a healthy pregnancy. I'm sure it landed somewhere around fifty. My height helped distribute that weight gain and I felt mostly unbothered with my body during pregnancy.
A week or so after giving birth I stood sideways staring in the mirror at the bulge protruding from my waist where my baby was just encased. What had been a beautiful pregnant body just weeks before was now a lumpy, frumpy shell of my former self. I didn't know if I would ever love my body. I was taking long walks in my hilly neighborhood within weeks of my cesarean in spite of my doctor's guidance. I needed to start feeling like my old self. A self that I admitted I hadn't appreciated when I could have, should have.
I toyed with the idea of taking the pills again. But the rapid heartbeat that accompanied them scared me. I wanted to live a long time, now more than ever. I was someone's mom. A girl mom at that and I understood for the first time the weight that would carry. My feelings towards my body would need to change or be hidden. I needed to protect my daughter from developing the kind of body disdain I had long had.
I breast fed. I quit carbs and wine. I intermittently fasted. I ate protein, so much protein. I weight trained, I spun, I yoga-ed and pilated. I got stronger. My lungs didn't burn when I broke a sweat. My body changed, not a lot but a little bit. But I felt better; maybe the best I had ever felt about my body. I thanked it for waking up, being able to walk and lift and live. It didn't look pre-baby. But it was strong and most days that was enough.
I was looking back at old photos preparing to write this. At every phase, when I thought I was not enough and wanted something more... well I was perfect. Why did my eyes see something that was not there? Why did my mind trick me into thinking that I needed to look different than I was? And why at forty one years old do I still struggle with this? The media fed me a steady diet of toxic messages about what is beautiful from childhood through adulthood. The industry I worked in reinforced that if you are beautiful on the outside, you are good on the inside. And I grew up believing that my greatest value in this world comes from how I look.
Last summer I spent nine days rafting down the Grand Canyon. There were no mirrors, no makeup, no social media, no cell phones. I spent much of the trip terrified the roaring rapids would take my life. My appearance was the last thing on my mind. We ate what we were served which included meals with a number of foods I would otherwise consider off limits. I wore tank tops that exposed my stomach, a part of my body I had long hidden since Sloan was born. A roll peeked out of the top of my shorts as I ate tacos with the rest of our group at dinner. I wore a sarong as a headwrap to happy hour each night. They called me Rhoda. I felt beautiful. I felt free. My stepdaughter cried as we drove away from the river and the freedom it had given us. I spent the journey home scrolling Instagram.
I wish I could say I am healed. It is ongoing. Some days I feel like a river goddess. Some days I feel like a lazy lump of bones and rolls. Aging makes you face that you are more than a face. But it is not easy.
I am encouraged that the younger folks seem more comfortable in their skin than perhaps I have ever been. I saw a girl today, probably in her twenties, wearing a jumper. Her butt was barely covered and her thighs were dimpled with cellulite. She was laughing. She didn't look like she gave those divets on her thighs a second thought. But who knows.
This is my body.
They say if you look a a picture that is ten years old, you will wish you could be there again, and you know that back then you beat yourself up for looking that way. It’s sad really. What is in us that keeps us from being satisfied?
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