Some days I know the truth, and some days it gets buried so far beneath those old lies I can hardly remember its echo.
This morning I woke up feeling out of sorts. Not unexpected, since there is a baby who had trouble sleeping. Since there was a brain that just wouldn’t turn off. Since there is work that has, lately, followed me right into sleep.
But this was something different. Something deeper.
This was me. This was my body. This was lie, a pair of them, rising up from the graveyard, where I thought I’d buried them long, long ago.
You see, I wrote an article about a woman’s body after pregnancy that got a whole lot of attention, and here came all those haters, hating. Their voices stirred those ghosts from their graves. While I was sleeping, the corpses came walking, and when I looked in the mirror this morning, they opened their mouths to speak.
Six weeks you’ve had, they said. Six weeks you’ve had to lose that belly. AND IT IS STILL HERE.
And then they smiled with their rotten teeth and told me the worst part of it all: Unbeautiful. This is unbeautiful. You are unbeautiful.
I could not argue. Not right now. Not today. Because today, this moment, their words feel true.
///
The first time I heard their voices, I was too young to know them for what they were. I listened to commercials and all those teen magazines and the Hollywood ideal of thin and pretty, and I stopped eating lunch when I was twelve. I stopped eating breakfast when I was a freshman in high school. I stopped eating the last meal of the day my first day of college, because, for the first time in my life, there was no one to monitor what I ate or didn’t eat.
I thought I could get away with it and that I would finally reach my target weight, which was bony and completely and utterly fatless. But I had a roommate who cared. She noticed my rapidly dropping weight and dragged me to dinner at a dining hall every chance she got. So it wasn’t long before I started purging those suppers.
I would walk with her to the dining hall and eat whatever I wanted, and then, when she was preoccupied with our friends across the hall, I would slip off to the bathroom and do what needed to be done. When she noticed, I made my excuses. Something I ate made me sick. Stress. A virus, maybe. She didn’t buy it, so the next stop was laxatives, because that was easier to hide. It was my course load, the pressure to make good grades, the stressful news job that kept me in the bathroom all the time. Laxatives got me through the rest of that semester.
Bulimia never really had my heart, though. I much preferred anorexia. So as soon as I moved off campus, I returned to the familiar hunger pains. I kept cans of green beans in the pantry, and the days I felt especially hungry, I’d allow myself one can a day. My roommates were too busy to notice.
Then I met my husband, and there came a night when he left a note on my computer at the newspaper office.
Skinny does not equal beautiful, it said. And for some reason, I almost believed him.
I looked at that note every time I sat down in my office chair and every time I got up to leave. It rescued me before my heart could stop from the sickness, but there are other ways to die than the physical ones, and I was already well on my way, gripped by the compulsive claws of anorexia.
///
Today is a reckoning day, six weeks postpartum, a day when I will visit my doctor again and stand on that scale. A scale that will tell me how much I have left to lose. A scale that will tell me, just a little bit, who I am now.
I hate that this is so. All this time I’ve stayed away from the scale, because I said it didn’t matter, and I meant it this time. I really did. This son is my last baby, and I just wanted to enjoy him without worrying about what I look like. And that’s exactly what I did. Until now.
I dressed for the morning. Those after-pregnancy transition jeans fit. A transition shirt hid the pooch. I got my hopes up, I guess.
And then I walk in the doctor’s office and I step on the scale and I see how much weight is left, and I crumble. I thought it would be different, not as quite much, not quite as ugly. Those voices start their howling.
Guess you should have tried harder, they say.
Guess you should have exercised more, they say.
Guess you should have worried about it a little more, instead of indulging in your son, they say.
I try to swallow the disappointment, and then the nurse takes me to a room with a mirror, and I have to look at my body before I wrap a flimsy sheet of paper around it, and I can’t help it. I turn away, because I don’t want to look. I know what’s there. Sagging skin that may or may not shrink back this time, because this is the sixth time. Lines that mark my midsection and a belly button that’s hardly even a belly button anymore it’s been stretched and pulled and rearranged so often.
Those voices grab all of it and fling it right back in my face. Right back in my heart.
This is what unbeautiful feels like.
///
Just after the first was born, I did not know how a woman’s body worked. So when he slid out and my belly turned to mush, I cried. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I wasn’t supposed to look like this.
Our first day home from the hospital, when my body had only spent thirty-six hours recovering from a thirteen-hour labor, I went for a walk, because exercise has always been my crutch. Three weeks after he was born, I was out running, with a uterus that hadn’t even fully shrunk and hips that were only just sliding back into place and joints that couldn’t really take the jarring pressure of five miles. I didn’t care. I pushed it anyway.
When I injured myself, because my body wasn’t ready for what I was demanding of it, I quit eating. I pretended I wasn’t hungry. I let my husband consume those meals people so kindly dropped by.
And then one day he shook me by the shoulders. You have to eat, he said. This isn’t the way to do it.
I knew he was right. But it was so hard. So hard. Because every time I looked in the mirror, what I saw was unbeautiful.
Anorexia makes it hard to see anything else.
///
So this is what unbeautiful feels like.
It feels sad and sharp and hard and achy and impossible and shocking. Most of all it is shocking.
We can go whole years knowing and believing and living the truth, and then one thing, one tiny little thing, can raise the dead and make them walk again. It happens for many reasons, this feeling unbeautiful. It happens because someone drops an insensitive comment about our bodies that hits us right where it hurts. It happens because we live in a society that tells us skinny equals beautiful and don’t you dare argue. It happens because we look in the mirror and the body looking back is not the one we think we need or want.
Unbeautiful, the kind that makes us starve or cut and bleed or stick a finger down our throat—it is a sickness. An addiction. A compulsion. There is no real cure, at least not one that will last forever. There is only one day at a time.
Every day we are offered the choice to look in the mirror and shake our fists at those living-again lies and say: No. I don’t believe you. This body is not unbeautiful. It is strong. It is amazing. It is the loveliest beautiful there ever, ever was. Because this is the truth.
Or we can believe the lies. Believing the lies locks us into our harmful patterns of skip the food, binge and purge, count calories to the utmost accuracy.
I want to embrace the truth.
So after my doctor finishes her examination and releases me and walks from the room, I return to the mirror, and I dress again and then snap a picture, because I want to remember. I want to remember the day I looked at my body and finally, finally, finally said out loud, if only to myself, what was true: This body. I am so very proud of what it has done. It has housed and carried and nourished six boys and a girl we will meet in glory. So what if there is still an after-belly six weeks later? THIS BODY HAS DONE SOMETHING AMAZING AND BEAUTIFUL. It needs to revel in that. So I will let it take its time.
And I mean it.
Those corpses, the anorexia and bulimia that have breathed down my neck all morning, start crawling back to their graves, because you know what? They know, too.
This is what beautiful feels like.
This is an excerpt from We Count it All Joy, a book of essays. For more of Rachel’s writings, visit her Reader Library page, where you can get a couple of books for free.
(Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash)
