small life, slow life

What could it look like to just soften?

What could it be like to not watch myself in the mirror, to not look for skin pudge-ing out over my bra, or hanging over the waistband?

How could life be without saying to myself, Well, before I had a baby, I looked like ________ / I weighed _______ ?

Or, when the former employee/fitness model posts a picture of her three week postpartum body and she has actual abs, and is lean AF, what if I thought, That’s so great for her instead of, Wow, her body looks better at three weeks postpartum than mine looks two years postpartum ?

Can I blind myself to the adjectives companies use to make me insecure? Or can I think of them differently?

What if “youthful” applied to a woman’s spirit instead of her face?

What if “firm” applied to my boundaries and not my thighs?

What if “glow” was talking about her smile instead of her skin?

What if “lose weight” applied to emotional baggage instead of pounds?

This is not a photo of my body. But wouldn’t I be brave if it was?

We’re so frightened that accepting ourselves, just as we are, means we’ve given up somehow.

“I’m not going to weigh myself everyday” = we’re going to go crazy and gain 100 pounds. How about, no, that’s not going to happen; we’re just going to take care of ourselves and not obsess about a number.

I’m already dyeing my grays, not eating any sugar to control my weight, getting up at 7:30am the one day the whole family is off together to go to a grueling workout, wearing high rise everything to flatten my belly, using Retinol at night and SPF foundation during the day to stop further wrinkles, taking the probiotic to tend to my gut flora…I mean, when the hell does it stop and when can I just start living already? 

What could it look like to just soften?

To say, This is me, these are my wrinkles from the sunny days I raised my head to the sky and all of the times I laughed at my husband’s jokes, this is the swell of my belly from when I carried my beloved child in my body, these are my stretch marks from when I used to binge on food before I learned to nourish myself, these are my gray hairs because my parents went gray early too. This is my life; my body wears my history; this is me.