How Baby

Look. Cheesy? Maybe? But I’d rather hear this coming from a fellow mom instead of yet another damn Dove commercial exhorting me to ‘love my curves’ when the problem isn’t how much I have succeeded or failed in embodying kindness or whatever – it’s in the system that tells me my body is a feral thing to be brought under control in the first place.

A cat doesn’t consider its body a separate thing from its self. Genji has the accumulated good sense of a bag of doorknobs, but he doesn’t worry that his tummy swings or he’s got one leg too short. He’s just a cat. He does cat things. Perfect.

I’m sick of being stuck in the middle of this discourse about ‘getting my body back’ and ‘loving my body’ and ‘dressing for my new body’ and feeling guilty that I can’t simultaneously change my body AND love my body AND give a crap about how it looks.

My body isn’t some beast my ‘real’ self has been trapped inside. It is myself. My body is the culmination of millennia of evolution, designed for exactly the thing I asked it to do, and I do not need to love it or find it beautiful in order to recognize and honour that.

(Is it broken in, just, so many other ways? Yes. For sure. Still choked dairy and I aren’t on speaking terms, and honestly: I could do without the hemorrhoids. But that’s besides the point.)

We’ve warped the idea of beauty, making it an ever-moving goalpost. Why must I be beautiful? Why must I find myself beautiful in order to love myself? Isn’t it enough, actually, to inhabit this body in the way it came to be, naturally?

Isn’t that perfection, to see the function of my life reflected in my form? Isn’t that peace?