To the women before me

Thank you
for clearing the branches off the trail,
for wiping down the table before I sat down to eat,
for flushing the floater down the toilet even though it wasn’t yours,
for speaking up when something wasn’t right,
for thinking of others without sacrificing any part of yourself,
for showing them all that you could do so that the same would be expected of me.

Screw you
for playing into stereotypes because then they were projected onto me,
for acting less intelligent than you are,
for just going along with things,
for settling,
for always buying what they are selling,
for making thinness your greatest achievement.

For the women after me

I remember the first time I heard her say she hates her body. It was in a dream. She said she hated her webbed feet. Even though she doesn’t have webbed feed, I woke up with a feeling of dread because of the inevitability of my six-year old niece one day coming to disdain a part or parts or the entirety of her body and then carrying that disdain around for the rest of her life. Can it be prevented? Currently, she spends hours looking in the mirror, loves her naked body, and flashes and shakes her little butt because doing so makes her happy. How can we prolong this celebration? We (you, me, my sisters and mother) must be models of self-love. We must celebrate ourselves every day and feel nothing but gratitude for our functioning, funny-looking, abundant, flat, hairy, smelly, beautiful bodies.

What does it take

A beautiful woman’s body is attacked by breast cancer. She and the doctors get the cancer out of her body and she regains her strength. I tell her she looks great, and she says she feels great. But then she says she needs to lose ten more pounds. I want to shake her: But you are alive! Is it not enough that after attack and then radiation your body is now dancing to the music and laying in the grass? If surviving cancer is not enough to quiet the incessant voice in a woman’s head that tells her that there is too much of her, is there any hope for me to quiet the voice in my head?