hips

​Weight is a thing for me.

My isolated upbringing in a religious commune notwithstanding, American culture did a doozy on me, and by the end of my teens, my negative body image was well entrenched. It wasn’t even my body so much, it was me (already unworthy, as far as God and I were concerned) going around in a body, period. I was inherently flawed. So must my body be. 

I was a skinny teenager, but I watched my weight—if that’s what you call eating junk food and then berating myself for it. Estimating grams of fat in my head and fretting that I’d had too many. Having a pack of peanut M&Ms and balancing the anticipated pleasure of eating that delicious candy against the anticipated horror of gaining weight. 

I’m 5’10”, with a naturally slender build, but I have an anomaly: my big hips. (Sometime in my teenage years, some forgotten adult, probably a well-meaning woman who pitied me, told me that in pioneer days all the men would have wanted to marry me. Why? Because they’d see my wide hips and know they could take me off to a wilderness homestead and count on me to birth their babies without up and dying on them.) I have wide hips, wide shoulders, just a wide torso in general. This lack of adherence to the societal ideal has tortured me. 

My lovely slender build, these long arms and legs—“willowy,” I’ve often been called, and it was always my favorite adjective—and then, KLONK, these wide hips, this big bum, throwing off the balance, un-willowing me. Once in a while I would see a photo of myself taken from behind and be mortified, filled with shame and revulsion—I worked so hard to look okay by societal standards, to be as good-enough as I could be, and then I’d see those Benedict Arnold hips of mine, that big squishy butt. Don’t you guys get it? Don’t you get that I am working really hard to be skinny enough to deserve love, and you’re just squishing around like you can be as big as you want and there’ll be no price for me to pay?!

I was 25, I’d left the church and had my first boyfriend, then my second; I was enjoying male satisfaction with my physique for the first time in my life, and I had this epiphany: my ass comprises the best curves I’ve got—I may as well own it! But those Teen Vogues came back to me, the few contraband copies I’d managed to see during my sheltered teenage years; I had internalized that a societally attractive woman has big breasts, not big hips, and even in the face of my partner’s approval, I still felt like the consolation prize. Sorry for my small boobies, but I’ve got a big juicy butt, so maybe that’s better than bad? In my mind, I was the consolation prize. 

Hence the great amount of energy I expended—more with the passing years—to stay as skinny as I could. I was 31 and married when I had my first real bout of anorexia: I wonder how little food I can eat in a day and still function? I wonder how skinny I can get if I eat as little as possible for months on end? 

I got real skinny. I got divorced. I gained the weight back. I judged myself. Whether I weighed more or less, I continued to self-identify as a consolation prize. Even when people called my body gorgeous, I never looked gorgeous to myself.  

I hit my 40s, I weighed the most I ever had, I found the guy I wanted to grow old with. Then he died suddenly, and the weight fell off me—turns out the grief diet is highly effective! I lost 40 pounds and found myself, mid-forties, back in the body I’d had as a 20-year-old. (The body of my 30s was actually skinnier, but that was self-starvation skinny, and I understood the difference.) Here was a different kind of consolation prize: your heart will be shattered, but hey, you’ll be skinny again. I looked in the mirror and there she was, willowy me. Gorgeous.

But then I faced the challenge of how to stay willowy. So began a renewed obsession with my eating—is this too much? Is that? I’m hungry, but I don’t want to gain weight, so I should go without.  

Only I know myself now, and I know there’s no love in self-starving, no integrity in trying to abuse my body into looking a certain way. I’m too old for that crap. I can’t lose myself in that trance of self-loathing and control anymore. I know better. 

Two years after Phil’s death, I started a new relationship. By then I’d begun padding back out, and during the months Brian and I were together, all that weight that had fallen off me, fell right back on. It felt like my body was relaxing back into itself. I stared in the mirror like I always had, aiming a harsh, appraising eye at my belly and thighs. The bigger breasts were fine; the bigger bum I could own; the bigger stomach, though—unforgivable. 

Except that there was Brian saying, oh my god, you look so much better. BETTER? I showed him pictures of 30s me, ultra-skinny, back during the years when I felt good enough (though was unable to enjoy it because I had to calorie-restrict so obsessively from fear of becoming not good enough)—and he looked at them and said, “you look like you need a good meal.” WHAT? I was too skinny? That’s a thing? But—but—all those Teen Vogues! I thought being willowy was the only way I’d ever be loved! 

Yet Brian, the sole person who actually saw me naked, whose opinion of the flesh on my bones actually impacted me, was not saying, “should you eat that?” Instead, he’d catch me in that squinty-appraising moment before his full-length mirror and speak up at once: “I’m so glad I met you when you’d already put some weight back on, or it would have taken so much longer for you to get back to this.” The pudge, the pooch, the squish, everything bad and unlovable about my uncooperative, noncompliant, would-never-be-featured-in-Teen-Vogue body. I was desired for this. 

These Jezebel curves, my no-longer-willowy frame—all those years I tried to pretend myself away, horrified when I saw a photo that reminded me I was fooling no one but myself. Those skeletal mid-30s moments in the mirror when I nodded, “this is the body I’ve always wanted,” then peered a little closer and concluded, “well, once I’ve lost a little more off my thighs.”

Those bony thighs had no more to lose. And I have no more time to waste in the pursuit of being willowy. It’s so funny to me that I spent decades believing that men would only love me skinny, and then one guy loved me soft instead, and my body image completely shifted. Perhaps it was the intense work I did, after Phil died, to learn finally to love myself. Perhaps it’s sobriety. Perhaps I’ve reached the age where it just feels like, ahhh, screw this. 

For years, I starved myself compulsively. I would finish my carefully-portioned meal, still feeling hungry, and forbid myself to take seconds: you’ve eaten enough to stay alive; that’s enough. How will you ever get skinny if you keep on eating til you’re satisfied? 

God forbid, right? God forbid that I be satisfied. God forbid that I have, let alone be, enough.

This is my gift of love to myself, decades overdue—that I eat when I’m hungry. That I enjoy peanut M&Ms every single day. That I shop for size 12 trousers and don’t promise myself I’ll be a 6 again next year. After some months single, I’m toying with dating again, and as I do, I realize that I’ve kept the stunning knowledge of myself as desirable for my softness, not in spite of it. Still the prize, but without the consolation—suddenly, late-40s, after a lifetime of self-loathing and self-starvation, I look in the mirror at my societally unapproved curves and think, gorgeous.
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