I’ve been writing Ramshackle Glam for nearly ten whole years – which means that there’s a lot of good stuff hanging out in my archives. So each Friday, we’ll be doing a little throwback to one of my personal favorites. This week, I got sick – like, really sick, with a kidney infection (treat those UTIs, kids) that left me more or less unable to get out of my bed for a couple of days. And whenever I get shut down by some physical malady or another – something that thankfully doesn’t happen too often – I start thinking about how I treat my body. Which, if we’re being honest, isn’t especially well. And never has been.
I wouldn’t say that my relationship with my body has, historically, been an especially positive one. Not because I don’t “like” it, in the “do you like what you see when you look in the mirror?” sense (I do, more so on some days than on others, but generally I do), but rather because it’s always been a bit of a danger zone.
In my twenties I starved my body. I let it be used by others in ways that now make me feel like screaming. I analyzed every pore and follicle and strip of skin looking for things to fix, ways to make myself better. If I could just get skinny enough, pretty enough, perfect enough, maybe all the things in my life that felt wholly beyond my control would just…fall into place. (Such a simple solution to life’s woes! Obsess over your body, and all the rest will work itself out!)
I think it’s safe to say that my body was something that I thought about a whole lot. It was consuming. And exhausting.
How I feel about my body is so different now that it’s almost comical. Of course I still care about what I look like, but the degree to which I do has been winnowed down to “Will I scare the other parents at drop-off?” and whether my jeans fit; there is no longer space in my brain for something like a calorie count (nor room in my day for a trip to a Power Yoga class, even though I have to admit that would be lovely, minus the sweating and pain).
I wish I could say that having been entrusted with two little lives made me start treating my body like a temple, being careful and precious with my magical, life-creating force, et cetera et cetera, but nope: With little breaks for declarations of how FROM THIS DAY FORTH I am going to take vitamins/eat my vegetables/go running every day/chill out on the caffeine/whatever (I excel at doing all of these things for up to four days in a row, and would like a medal each time, please), I’m careless about my health to the point where I have to fudge the truth at checkups if I don’t want my doctor to lecture me (“You don’t exercise…ever?).
I walk into steppy stools and bicycles and sharp greenery on the regular, and my legs now have permanent lumps up and down the shins (that is, of course, in addition to the scrapes and wounds that are in various stages of healing). My eyes have bags; my stomach skin continues to be loose and wrinkly since my ectopic pregnancy stretched it out and my flesh apparently no longer springs back into shape like a little elastic band like it did during my first two pregnancies (aging, ugh). I have gross feet and gross fingernails, and my chest is starting to wrinkle up in the middle like a grandma’s…and I mean, I wish all these things weren’t true, of course, but do I care enough to obsess over them? To put them in the category of Important Things That Must Be Dealt With?
Nope.
I’ve got other stuff to obsess over. Like interest rates and school deadlines and car registrations and did I pay the insurance yet and termites and the earthquake kits that the school requires for each kid and that I still haven’t ordered.
So I suppose that’s the first thing becoming a parent taught me about my body: That self-care is good, paying attention to your body is good, and even changing it can sometimes be good, if those changes come from a positive, healthy place…but allowing your body to become a point of preoccupation that makes you feel bad? That’s just a waste of time, energy, and precious, precious sleep.
Here are a few more things I’ve learned about my body over the past handful of years.
