Everything about this day is bright and beautiful. You bought your son a giant float shaped like a wedge of watermelon and a water gun; he’s been chasing after you through the water. You’re in my sights, Mom, he says. You play catch in the grass, tossing the tennis ball back and forth, admiring the way his body has suddenly stretched up, how he laughs when he misses a catch, and he misses often, and you can feel that your own body is built to move and leap and dive and swim.
You swim out to your daughter where she is floating, basking in the sun, daydreaming about drawing, about art school, about the life that she wants. You swirl her through the water on the float, falling in love with her teenage body, which is solid and soft and vulnerable and strong, taking delirious pleasure in how she is entirely happy, most of the time, inside herself. You think of that other photo, Exhibit A, and how happy you are that she hasn’t mirrored you and that you are so different from each other in so many glorious ways. She leans over, splashes water at you, and says, This is heaven. But stop staring at me. It’s weird.
Now, when you hug your daughter and your son, they hold onto you, sink against your softer, fuller body, returning home to you. Even at eleven and fourteen, their hugs last and last and last. You remember holding their tiny, naked, warm bodies against yours seconds after they were born, umbilical cords still attached, your hearts beating in momentary syncopation: Your body was their home and their bodies became theirs inside yours.
You look at Exhibit B on your phone and consider asking your son to retake the photo. That old ruminating self-critique creeps in. You look so big, it says. You take up too much space, it says. You’ve lost discipline and control.
You look at Exhibit A and see how truly unwell you were then, how you almost disappeared for good, how less of you meant less joy, less gusto. Yes, gusto. Your new boyfriend used this word to describe what he loves about you. You were trying to tell him about your body in Exhibit A, a body he has never known, not like that anyway. I was more than thirty pounds less, you said. But I was in misery and a miserable mother and wife and friend.
I can’t imagine that, he said. You eat with gusto! Healthy food, junk food—you don’t have all these rules. And you know what I think about your body….
Which is what you think about your body these days, too: your body is here for lovecreating and lovemaking, and you swallow this one luscious life that’s been returned to you, swallowing its pain and beauty, rolling them on your tongue, savoring the bright and the sharp, the dark and soft, the more and the more. That is the life that you wanted and now the life that is yours.
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This article originally appeared at The Huffington Post.
