I was at the pool yesterday and overheard a grandmother telling her granddaughter that the latter’s waistline “made her sick”. Meaning of course, that she was jealous of the 10 year old’s textbook perfect figure.
I get that the grandmother intended the comment as a complement of sorts to the girl – a self-deprecating assessment that’s intended to come across light-hearted and make the other person feel good about themselves. Funny thing is though that the girl probably wasn’t even thinking about how she looked until the grandmother mentioned it. She was just having fun in the pool.
I heard it a lot growing up: women in particular would tell young girls that they were jealous of their youth, vitality, figure, wrinkle-free skin etc that the older women no longer possessed.
Unfortunately what this kind of comment does over time is to give the impression that we should judge our bodies by how they look, rather than by what they can do. And my goodness, if we judged our bodies by what they can do, we’d have a very different attitude.
Maybe your body gets up every single day and fights chronic illness for you.
Maybe your body can kneel and bend over a patch of soil to pull weeds and prepare for new growth.
Maybe your body can hike mountains, swim marathons, climb trees.
Maybe your body has borne, birthed and breastfed multiple children.
Maybe your body has battled and won against a cancer diagnosis. Or maybe it’s still battling that for you.
Maybe your body gets you through night shifts, long hot days and short cold ones.
Maybe your body can bend over a sewing machine or a stove and create goodness for the people around you.
Maybe your body can create art, build things, make other’s lives easier…
Instead of telling the younger generation that our 30, 40, 50 year old body isn’t as subjectively perfect as theirs and thereby draw their attention to how they look, maybe we could congratulate them on their strong swimming or their excellent bombing. Maybe instead of sitting on the sideline, self-conscious about putting on a swimsuit, we could show them that our own body can still swim. Maybe we shouldn’t let the next generation know that their body might be something they can expect to be ashamed of one day.
Maybe we should flip the narrative in our own minds.
Instead of thinking about the fact that our uterus takes up a bit more visible space after a few babies, maybe we could remember that we are here, we have bodies that fight for us every day, and children who love us for who we are and what we do, rather than how we look.
