Who Is That Woman in the Mirror?

and why are her jeans so tight?

I am 39 and a half years old. My hair, still undyed, is mostly brown, though some of the threads are more golden or transparent than they used to be. The crease between my eyebrows, well-grooved from half a lifetime of furrowing in sun, perplexity, anger, has deepened to the point of permanency. The lines at my cheeks are a foreshadowing of the jowls that are to come. My chins and neck are on their slow journey toward a union. Daily smiles for almost forty years have made my crows feet—my favorite physical part of aging—ever-present. All I have to do is think about smiling and they spread out from the corners of my eyes across my temples.

Ok, so that covered the aging process of my head. Not too bad. But what about the body down below the drippy neck? Who even IS that? What is going on there? I don’t recognize her. What the heck happened? Where did I go? How can I dress a stranger?

I have always had a touch of body dysmorphia, admittedly. Recently my husband told me, “I loved you when I married you because you’re YOU, but…” he lowered his voice to a whisper, “you were a little bit emaciated.” A guest at our wedding told a friend I looked like a concentration camp survivor. Now, I think that is a huge exaggeration, but at the same time, that point in time when I weighed 102lbs with my shoes on is the only time I remember feeling thin. I still sported my enormously wide shoulders (swimmer!) and my wide bottom, my cherry-round face, but I knew I was thin. And I could wear anything I wanted.

Even through my childbearing years I never weighed more than 110 when I wasn’t pregnant. Nowadays, pre-shower, free of any garments or accessories, the number I see blinking up at me is much higher. And when I do get dressed, the clothes I used to wear—jeans, skirts, dresses—if they haven’t already been dropped at the thrift store donation dock, they are in a bag awaiting their day. I put things on and even if they fit, they don’t fit the way they should. They don’t fit like they used to.

My husband tells me I’m beautiful and slim. He says my clothes are wonderful and I look wonderful in them. But those are opinions, and what I’m looking at, what I’m bothered by, is factual numbers: weight and waistline, pounds and inches—the numbers have increased. It’s not something that can be argued. And they keep increasing, as the roominess inside my clothes decreases. And I don’t know what to do about it.

[Mostly] it’s not about vanity, it’s about feeling like a stranger. It’s about a loss of familiarity, and a feeling of betrayal as this body that I’ve fed and walked like a beloved pet for so many years is suddenly reverting to a shape I didn’t like the last time I saw it in the mirror. My middle aged body looks like a saggier version of my adolescent body, with that nonexistent waist, big thighs, a chest that doesn’t even know what is going on. The eternal question of: is a bra really worth it? What at one point was too small to bother with has gone through it’s butterfly phase and is now drooping back toward its old “not worth it” status. As a bonus feature in this Pubescent Body Version 2.0 I have the added belly flab that hangs over a five-times-sliced cesarean scar. And my hips? What happened to them? What used to be separate and unique body parts have morphed into one big, boring torso. But it’s a torso with a bulge, beneath which used to be an organ to house growing family members but lately appears to just be a vacant, poochy reminder of the fertility I used to have.

It doesn’t really matter what the numbers are or what I look like now. It’s about the living in a different skin. The looking in a funhouse mirror every morning and wishing you could just see your old self again. I know I’m not the only one who is experiencing this metamorphosis, this unpleasant revisit to the Freshman Fifteen, except without the pizza and booze (which just seems even MORE unfair.)

I guess it’s kind of like parenthood, or loss, or anything else, really…. You know what’s coming, but you don’t KNOW. You can read and learn, and prepare, but you can’t really be PREPARED. It’s impossible. You just have to walk through it and feel it and maybe hate it for awhile, but eventually embrace it, and…. Will it ever happen? Will I learn to love it?

Here is a sudden blast of irony: as I type this in a coffee shop, on the overhead radio speakers Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know” just started playing. 2004. The year I was stepping out of my chubby, awkward teenaged body into the adult body that would carry me here to 2023.

And I guess here, in this stream of consciousness, is where I should put down my preoccupation with the numbers and the resistance to elastic, and go look in a mirror, not with resignation, but with a different perspective: I love you, crows feet, for all the smiles. I love you, cesarean scar, for all the daughters. I love you, thick thighs, for still walking me as many miles as I please on any given day. I love you, body, for growing, feeding, loving, running, dancing, being. I love you.