loving your body

Thankful Thursdays Guest Post: I’m Thankful for My Body

You guys. This post. I just can’t even. When Karissa first sent it to me I immediately responded with this mondo email chronicling my own constant battles with my body, my weight, and my eating. For me, they all started at summer camp the year I was ten when I was playing soccer and a boy behind me said to his friend, “Hey look! That girl’s butt jiggles when she runs.” I don’t think there’s been a day of my life since then that I haven’t been self-conscious about my body. So many of us have those stories. So many of us need this post. There are so many things I admire about Karissa as a writer and as a woman, and her ability and willingness to tell these truths here today is one of them. Soak this in, friends, and then be sure to head over and subscribe to her blog. She’s doing some great and beautiful work there that you won’t want to miss.

I’m Thankful for My Body

You might think this is an inappropriate thing to be thankful for. But as a woman, I believe I’ve been taught to despise my body. The magazines at the grocery checkout teach me I need to diet, the photos of movie stars teach me I need to be a smaller size, and even my coworkers’ chatter in the teacher’s lounge teaches me I need to exercise more. We live in a world where only certain body types are praised, and mine is not one of them.

My husband and I were talking before bed the other night. “It makes me unhappy when I tell you you’re beautiful and you don’t believe it,” he told me. I tried to hold them back, but the tears came anyway.

Seventh grade: I have been living in Bangkok for a year and am applying to a new school. When I arrive at the uniform store, a Thai woman takes her yellow measuring tape and winds it around my hips. “So fat!” she exclaims. It doesn’t matter that as an American I am simply taller and bigger than most Thais (even the men). Her words scar. My body disappoints.

High school senior trip: My friend Denny and I stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the hotel room mirror in our bathing suits. We compare our bodies, inspecting the curves of our hips, turning sideways to see how far our stomachs stick out. “Who’s bigger?” I ask. “I think we’re the same,” she says. She’s Bulgarian; I’m American. We are the biggest girls in our grade.

My wedding day, 15 years ago: 128 pounds. Skinny arms that boast a bit of a farmer’s tan. I never considered trying to fix that. Hair: short, streaked with highlights, impossible curls. Size 8. I wear a fitted, straight wedding dress with a mandarin collar. The pearl-covered dress fits beautifully over my hips.

Today: I step on the scale before getting into the shower. 156.5. At the doctor’s office a couple of weeks ago, his scale said 158. “Losing ten pounds might help your heartburn issues,” he told me. I sigh and turn the water on. After showering and drying off, I inspect myself in the mirror.

Stretch lines stripe my hips. They look pink head-on, but silver if I turn sideways. Mom arms that jiggle. A waistline that pushes out of last year’s size 10 capris. Thighs riddled with cellulite. Size 12. Surely I won’t edge to 14.

Face: Round. Full cheeks, a double chin when I look down. Crows feet around my eyes when I smile, permanent shadows beneath my eyes, oily skin, makeup that rubs off by noon.

The problem is that I like food, and I don’t like to exercise much. If I stick to diets, I lose weight. But I have a hard time following through. One week I get up early every morning and lift weights. The next week I drink wine and eat Oreos every night.

When attempts to lose weight don’t work, I try to make my body seem more acceptable. I feel the need to apologize for how large my body has become, the need to soften the blow of thirty pounds gained. I get tattoos and dye my hair and layer on make-up. I research body types and try to dress for my shape: belts, flared skirts, empire waist dresses, fitted jackets.

Underneath it all, this one truth haunts me: I won’t be happy until I accept my body. My attempt to make my body more presentable to others is really just a way to combat my disappointment with myself.

So here I am, declaring it: I am thankful for my body.

My body is a gift, a vessel that brought two babies into the world and carried three into the afterlife. It is a source of pleasure, of help, of kindness, of love. My body is a gift, even to me, the gift of being present in the world in a physical way.

My son gave me this little questionnaire for Mothers Day:

Karissa Thankful Thursdays

“My mother looks prettiest when she is here.” Not when she’s got make-up on, not when she’s wearing a dress or after she’s lost ten pounds. When she’s here. My presence is beauty.

Observe: Arms that wrap around my children every morning. Round, full lips that give goodbye kisses. Hands that brush out long tangles in hair and wrap bandaids around toes. Feet that carry me with confidence into my workplace, where my face smiles at coworkers. Legs that take me up hiking paths and around playground walking tracks. Lungs that take in oxygen, skin that renews itself constantly, ears that notice the sounds of a world discovered.

I am learning to be thankful for my own skin: even its round softness, even its scars, even its imperfections. I am learning to be thankful for this gift that my husband calls beautiful, and to actually believe that myself.

Karissa

About the Author: Karissa Knox Sorrell is a mother, ESL educator, and writer from Nashville, Tennessee. Read more of her writing at her blog or follow her on Twitter @KKSorrell.

If you’re enjoying this series, be sure to go back and check out other guest posts I’ve shared so far in the Thankful Thursdays series, here, here, and here!

PS- Sorry about the placement of these ads. Haven’t figured out how to move them yet!

True Confessions: I Have Cellulite and It’s Not From Having Babies

Yesterday I found some new stretch marks -thin white lines running parallel to each other like the rungs of a ladder climbing up my outer thigh. My heart sank and my shoulders sagged involuntarily under the weight of yet another imperfection.

I’ve seen a lot of articles and videos lately about women embracing their post-baby bodies. About society learning to respect the body of a woman who has stretched herself around another human life. Who has willingly allowed her own body to be “wrecked” for the sake of another person. These articles and videos urge us to see their sagging breasts and wrinkled bellies as beautiful symbols of strength and sacrifice. I applaud that. It’s beyond time that society honored women, especially mothers, for who they are and what they do instead of making any kind of statements about how their bodies should look.

But every time I read one of these articles or watch one of these videos, I experience an underlying sense of guilt and shame. What about those of us who haven’t birthed children and still have hopelessly flawed bodies? What about those of us who can’t look at our veiny legs and count these as something we have embraced in order to create new life? It’s embarrassing to admit this, but I have often dreamed about the day when I can embrace my mess of a body as “post-baby.” People understand that. Other mothers, particularly, have great compassion for that. I have great respect for that.

But what about the 26-year-old woman who has never had a child, who is healthy and active, but whose knees are still dimpled with cellulite? The angry purple lines that criss-cross my inner thighs don’t mark my body’s anguished and miraculous journey to produce a new life. The cellulite that ripples my skin from my hips to my knees is not from the strain of carrying another human’s body inside of mine. These are the marks of an adolescent girl whose body stretched into a woman’s before she was ready for it.

Here is a short list off the top of my head of things I am ashamed of about my body and that I actively try to correct where possible:

  • Stretch marks
  • Unfeminine body hair Thick, dark, impossible-to-get-rid-of hair.
  • Razor burn from removal of unfeminine body hair
  • Bushy eyebrows
  • Uneven skin tone/acne
  • Flat chest – but not flat enough to just be super thin and shapeless like the Korean girls, just flat enough to make me pear-shaped.
  • Possible improper ratio of breast to areola to nipple (I just found out that that’s a thing recently, so naturally now I’m worried about it.)
  • Cellulite
  • Hair that is simultaneously dry and greasy
  • Belly down – (what I call that very light layer of hair over my belly that makes it look pudgy even when you can clearly see the outline of my abs)
  • Saddle-bags
  • Chunky calves that make it impossible to buy boots
  • Short, stubby fingers with short stubby nails
  • That one weird mole on my back

After reading that list you probably think I am obsessed with my body image and spend way too much time thinking about this. Maybe that’s true, but I really don’t think I spend any more time thinking about this than the average woman does. In fact, these are all the flaws I noticed this morning during my 12-minute shower.

As a society, we are starting to speak out against “body-shaming” mothers and against the promotion of unrealistic and hyper-sexualized expectations for women’s bodies. We, as a culture, still have a long way to go, but we are making some noise. And this is a good thing.

On Saturday I ran six miles on my solid, muscular legs, and on Sunday my thick calves and cellulite-y thighs carried me to the top of a mountain. I didn’t feel particularly proud of either of those things, but when I saw those silvery lines stretching up the side of my thigh yesterday I felt defeated and ashamed. So today I am wondering, is there grace for me too? Is there a way to love my flaws when I can’t explain them away with the sacrificial love of a mother? Can I still be beautiful and strong and proud if I didn’t earn these imperfections in a noble way? Can I let you see my scars and not feel ashamed?