A Familiar Path

Here’s a question I’ve been asking myself and a few other people lately if they can answer, “When was my body perfect?”

Think about it for a minute. Is it a number, an age? Maybe a feeling on a particular day? Can you identify a time when you loved the way you looked?

I thought about this because it had to have happened to me some time in the span of 43 years and various weights, but I can’t remember it. I never remember thinking, here, if I can stay right here at this weight, at this strength, this is when I love my body.

Was it in the time that I was 18 hoovering at 98 pounds? That was the summer I graduated and took a senior trip to the beach. I spent as much time as possible in an over sized t-shirt to cover my embarrassingly thin figure. I was ashamed that my body was smaller than everyone else.

Maybe in my twenties hoovering around 100 pounds. I tried out a bikini for the first time and felt like my belly was too obvious and my breasts too small.

Or in my thirties, after birthing two children and going from 100 pounds to 130 and back down again to the same weight but distinct body changes. When I all but gave up shorts because of the mysterious spider veins that appeared on my upper right thigh.

Perhaps now, at 43, after having seen 140 pounds, my body stretched and used to its maximum capacity, able to walk, run and bike at 125 pounds. I feel strong and happy but I still tend to hide my upper legs. My soft flabby middle, evidence of four babies, shames me.

So, I wonder, at what time did I consider myself perfect? At what time did I not want to improve this, or reduce that? Perfection had to be lurking in there somewhere? How did I miss it?

I’ve gone from wanting to hide a too thin body, to hiding parts that I’m ashamed of.

I see a problem and it’s not our bodies. It’s our minds.

Have you ever heard yourself trying to tell young girls, your children, teenage girls that they should love themselves just as God created them? Do you tell them their body is a temple? That God made them in his image? Do you tell them this in an attempt to keep them from things like anorexia, self-hate, low self-esteem? Do you really mean what you say?

If we really mean it, how can they even hear us over what we are saying to ourselves? I need liposuction. I need to lose ten more pounds. I can’t believe I ate all that! I’m so lazy. I need a face lift, breast implants, tummy tuck…

Do you look at a picture of yourself, criticize it and then expect your daughter who sees herself in you to love what she sees in the mirror?

How can we begin to change our minds, and if we don’t, how is there hope for our daughters?