This evening as I was undressing for my shower, I took a moment to really look at myself in the mirror. I noticed for the first time that my breasts, which have gotten heavy, have begun to sag. It made me a little sad because they've always been just terrific.
Even in my fantasy that someday I'm going to eat perfectly and do enough exercise that I'm going to get back my 40 year old body, I realized that, without surgery, they're never going to be upright again. No amount of celery and spinach, no number of push-ups is going to bring them back. I found myself apologizing in my head to SH for them, because he likes them as much as I do. Maybe even more.
And I realized instantly that SH would never say something like that about himself to me, never apologize for what he looks like, never. He went bald quite young, but doesn't now and didn't them seem to have the slightest self-consciousness about it. When we were courting by phone, early on he told me that he has hair on his back, but not with embarrassment, not with shame. Just to let me know in case it mattered to me. It probably had to some woman he was with. He hardly ever looks in the mirror, which is why his clothes are often askew. He just does think about, don't care about it. That is so foreign to me.
I can remember being negatively judgmental about myself when I was a child. A child. I don't know at exactly what age that started, but once it arrived, it has never left. And the thing is, I used to be so healthy, slim, muscular, athletic, with long blonde hair. I don't know if I was so down on myself because I wanted to be an actress and felt I needed to look good on camera, or if I was just one of an infinite number of girls and women who are taught by an infinite number of teachers that we don't look like her, this model, this starlet, this gorgeous famous woman whose face has just enough of a flaw to be perfect. I knew my legs were too short, my thighs not skinny enough, I knew my chin was too soft, my belly not concave enough. I wasn't limber enough, or slinky enough, or exotic enough.
It's brutal, this beauty culture, which infects us all, male and female. We're taught the perfect prototypes for our own sex and for each other's, and we occupy and exhaust ourselves trying to fit them and trying to find them to make them our lovers, as though that is what matters.
My sister, who is working very hard to lose weight right now, really committed and strong, said that she thinks I accept and like my body, or at least am not disdainful of it. I don't know. I guess there has to be a certain amount of unselfconsciousness built in or achieved in order to be an art model. I did that for about 30 years. I guess there had to have been a moment when I decided to keep doing it after I hit menopause and my belly softened and my arms sagged and, well, you know. And in fact, I am rather proud of the fact that a teacher who taught a series of art classes on anatomy would hire me for the session on fat and age. I think I was a fairly rare commodity: an overweight woman who was still willing to undress in front of a classroom of very judgmental-but-always-respectful young people. Something built into me or achieved somehow makes it possible for me to be naked, even with this heavy, aging, imperfect body. My sister is wrong, though; I make low, heavy judgments of myself daily, perhaps hourly. But I'm awake enough to know that if I'm not going to do what it takes to look more the way I say I want to, then I need to shut up about it. Until I'm ready to do what my sister is doing and really make changes, then I should give up any, pardon but notice the pun, belly-aching about it. So I just manage to look as though I accept myself. Maybe with SH for a role model, eventually I'll learn to.
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