#248: Fitness

on September 28, 2017
Y’all know that I’ve got some complicated feelings about my weight. It’s gotten a lot better – mostly because I’m dressing better and feeling better about what is, rather than what I think I should be. It’s nice! But also a lot of it is coming from something I’ve been mulling over recently, which is that I’m supposed to be shaped differently now.

There’s this book series, Clan of the Cave Bear, and while I can’t say I recommend it (and I absolutely don’t, haha) something in it has always stuck out to me. The women who look like they’ve given birth are far more desirable within the clan, because they’re obviously fit to bear children. And I got to thinking, yeah, that makes a lot of sense: keeping weight on post-partum is actually a really desirable trait in humans, because we care for our young for so long. It means we can breastfeed longer, survive food scarcity, and travel long distances (as we did). Boobs that look like they’ve breastfed mean you were able to feed your children. Stretch marks mean you survived a pregnancy.

Who knows if that was actually true for the early humans, but for me, it went a long way to helping me accept my body – how it looks now is a gift of evolution, a badge of fitness, the uniform of an unbroken line of mothers that stretches back to the very first humans.

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I’m at GeekGirlCon this weekend in Seattle, at table A126! I’ve just found out I’ll have copies of Dirty Diamonds #8, as well as How Baby zines and a bunch of my other illustrations and fandom artifacts. Stop by and say hello, why don’t you?