Loving the skin I’m in

Although I feel like I don’t have any massive hang-ups about my body, I generally like the way I look, I was reading this Guardian article yesterday, “Uncomfortable in our skin” and realised that while I certainly don’t hate how I look or feel about myself, I really identified with much of what Eva Wiseman was saying. Importantly, its more complicated than just how we look, its how we feel about the way we look. The statistics are uncomfortable reading, as Wiseman writes:

“Body image is a subjective experience of appearance. It’s an accumulation of a lifetime’s associations, neuroses and desires, projected on to our upper arms, our thighs. At five, children begin to understand other people’s judgement of them. At seven they’re beginning to show body dissatisfaction. As adults 90% of British women feel body-image anxiety. And it doesn’t wane – many women in their 80s are still anxious about the way their bodies look which, Professor Rumsey explains, can even affect their treatment in hospital, when their health choices are influenced by aesthetics. Many young women say they are too self-aware to exercise; many say they drink to feel comfortable with the way they look; 50% of girls smoke to suppress their appetite – is it too strong to suggest that these things, these anxieties, are slowly killing them?”

That is pretty terrifying, and it starts so young and does not stop! Wiseman argues that there are multiple reasons for us hating our bodies: the media that constantly streams images of mostly perfect women into our homes through multiple devices, our culture which has put thin and sexy at the top of the list of things that we need to feel/ have/ strive for to be valuable or valued, and advertisers who want us to spend our money on things that will make them rich. Its in their best interests to make sure that we always feel like we need to do more, buy more, change more about ourselves before we are OK.

I have had an interesting relationship with food and weight from childhood. I hate the mother-blaming culture that there is in much of Western society, particularly now that I am a mother, but it is fair to say that it was definitely more my mum than my dad who affected my feelings on food etc. My mom often went to the gym at the crack of dawn 2 to 3 times a week, even though she frequently said that she did not really enjoy it. She was always the one who was watching what she ate: hardly eating anything herself some days, but piling the food up on all our plates!  She was very concerned about her weight and she herself had a complicated relationship with food, not helped by being chubby as a child and teenager and being teased about this. I think that now, my mum is more concerned about how healthy her diet is as opposed to being worried only about exercising, being slim, and not eating too much. Of course there are many more factors at work than our immediate family – but some members of my wider family were also pretty rude to me about my weight, infamously my grandfather once greeting me with “Hello, you’re looking… fat” on a visit back home after being away for some years.

I wasn’t a chubby kid or anything, I was ‘normal’, and through my teens and twenties I was mostly ‘normal’ also, hovering in the 10/12/14 range. When I got married I was the lightest that I have been as an adult and it also co-incided with me starting a ‘proper’ job and buying grown-up clothes. However lovely married life, and 2 children has meant that I cannot wear clothes from my just-married era without them causing some quite serious discomfort to both me and those in my immediate vicinity. Wiseman in her article questions why we should expect our bodies to return to their pre-baby state, highlighting research being carried out by Susie Orbach (famously of ‘Fat is a Feminist Issue‘) on the issue of feelings and thoughts on body image being passed from mother to daughter. Additionally, as a woman, I wonder whether we should expect that we will feel the same about our bodies after having children. I really don’t think the ‘Get back into your pre-baby clothes in 6 weeks’ narrative is very helpful, particularly seeing as though the majority of women who seem to manage this are the celebrities (with personal trainers etc etc) that magazines are interviewing. I think that we are doing a dis-service to new mothers who have more important things to think about and deal with than whether they can fit back into their skinny jeans for their 6 week post-natal check-up.

Personally, I feel very different about my body since having my children, but although my body has been changed so much by pregnancy, labour and breastfeeding, I am now totally in awe of my body, and women’s bodies in general. Our bodies form, carry, and nurture babies from tiny zygote to full-term baby. We give birth, which is a flipping massive accomplishment, to these babies that we have been one person with, then with our amazing breasts and magical milk, we can feed, comfort, and soothe our young ones. Before I had babies, my breasts were for making my tops look nice, but on becoming a mother, I found out that I could keep another person alive with milk from my breasts! My children depending on me, my body, my nurturing of them. I have never been more impressed with what my body can do as I am now.

So why should I be made to feel like I have to get back to some ideal of femininity? How is motherhood and my body not accepted as feminine, sexy, attractive? Why should I force myself to do things that I don’t enjoy so that I will lose weight faster and win people’s approval? The article made me realise two things: firstly, how I feel about my body and how I treat my body will be observed by my children, and more importantly, my daughter. She will notice how and what I eat, how I keep myself healthy, how I exercise (or not) and how I diet (or not). And secondly, I have realised how much I want people to say how good I look (sub-text “since you’ve lost weight”). Why do I care? Why should I compare my body to someone else’s? There will always be people thinner and fatter than me, but of course we don’t ever compare ourselves favourably. When we compare ourselves we always come off worse. And I’m just going to not do it anymore. (Well, try to at least!)

Now, this is not to say that I’m just going to not give a shit. I care about how I look, and I want to look attractive, I am just rejecting the narrow definition of what ‘attractive’ is. I am also going to care more about what foods I eat, whether they are healthy decisions and whether I am eating for the right reasons or not. Exercise is important but I will try to find something that I enjoy instead of dragging myself down to the gym because ‘I should’. (I think that we need a lot less ‘I should…’ statements around in general, but that is a topic for another day!) But if I want to have a piece of cake, I will; if I want to have a glass of wine, I will. I will continue to celebrate and marvel at the body that God has given me, and to look after it as I would like my children to look after theirs.