Imperfectly, wonderfully visible

This post should dovetail fairly nicely with my last post in which I talk about the fact that we need to quit using the word fat as an insult. Today, I am posting pictures. I am not posting just any pictures. These are pictures of my abs. In some they are covered, and in others they aren’t. They were all taken today, and will be posted for comparison purposes. I have not edited any of them. You’ll even get to see a doorknob because I am such a rocking photographer.

Why am I posting pictures of my midsection? Well, it is far from perfect by current standards. As a matter of fact, I could model for before pictures in a Photoshop class or in a plastic surgeon’s notebook. I am going to lay bare a few facts and feelings before I get to the pictures. I am at a healthy weight and body fat percentage. I workout very regularly, and before anyone thinks they have any useful tips, I don’t need them. I lift and I do cardio. I enjoy both. I have had three children who were all born via c-section. I did not put on more weight than my OB recommended during my pregnancies, but because I am short, the babies had nowhere to go but out while I was growing them, and because of genetics, amongst other things, my skin chose not to bounce back once it was stretched to capacity three times in the space of four-and-a-half years. After the birth of my first child, the weight peeled off and I looked pretty good. I was the poster girl for breastfeeding for weight loss. After number two, most, but not all, of it came off, and after number three, I had the dickens of a time getting the last ten off, plus the five to ten I hadn’t dropped between numbers two and three. I sat there on the high side of a healthy weight, nudging over into overweight, unhappy with myself for about a year-and-a-half. Then, my youngest weaned, and my body was truly my own for the first time in nearly seven years! Between pregnancy and breastfeeding, someone else had always needed something from my body. I could really take it back, so I set to work.

Now, I would love to say that my motivation was purely my health. Heart disease runs rampant in my family, and it likes to take us young. I have Lupus, which, while it is in remission, is going to prefer a healthier, fitter body to stay that way, and I have three young children for whom I am responsible, but I really did it at least as much for the fact that I wasn’t going to buy the next size up in pants, and I wanted all the baby weight gone by my 35^th birthday, which was in November of 2012. I wanted to not feel invisible, so I set about doing something for myself so that I would want to be visible. I joined My Fitness Pal, set up a good routine for myself at the Y, and then I stuck to it. I am now within a few pounds of what I weighed in high school, and I met my original goal before my birthday. I am currently working on maintaining.

All that said, what I have discovered along the way is that I was constantly finding new things about myself to dislike. I would have surges of confidence, and then I would back off of them. My current bugaboo has been my abs. I would look at myself critically, and think, “Gross!” I would joke about them with others, but I really, really hated them. My doctor had already told me that I don’t really have anything left to lose. It’s loose skin from the way my body reacted to pregnancy, and can only be repaired via surgery. I hate being cut open, so I likely won’t get plastic surgery, thus I will always have wrinkled, scarred, puckered abs. Then, just yesterday after reading (and pinning) this quotation, “I am obsessed with becoming a woman comfortable in her own skin,” I realized that I was never, ever going to be comfortable with myself if I felt my own body was gross. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I have survived an illness that nearly killed me. I have borne three children. I have chosen to be healthy by building muscle and losing fat, and even when I least liked it, my body was NEVER gross. It has done everything I needed it to do, albeit with an occasional assist from the medical community. I want everyone to hear that, go look in the mirror, and understand the same is true for you. You are NOT gross, awful, horrible, or anything else you can think to say about yourself. Your body is wonderful. It isn’t perfect. No one’s body is perfect, and the “perfection” that is currently sold to us via photoshopped spreads of celebrities in magazines and models in ads, is a particular vision of beauty that no one can attain. For goodness’ sake, they even photoshop out the natural wrinkles and puckers that occur when you bend. They remove muscle definition from women with muscular arms, and they remove visible ribs from very thin models. I will one day do a whole blog about PS, and how some of the “little” stuff is the most insidious. Standards of beauty change, but the beauty that is you with whatever you hone in on when you are being critical of yourself, is amazing, and we need to see more real beauty. I want to be very clear that I am not body shaming those we hold up as beautiful or saying that they aren’t lovely to behold. They are. We just need more than that paradigm. We need to see that there is more than just different versions of flawless to be had. There is the deeply, gorgeously flawed. We are all imperfect, inside and out. If you look at yourself, and think “Gross!” as I have been, you are rejecting part of what is wonderfully human about yourself. Embrace the imperfect. It is that which ultimately makes you unique, interesting, and fully human. With all that in mind, here are photos of some of my imperfections. It's real. It's me, and I'm not ashamed of it anymore.    

Here you can see all the wrinkles and my c-section flap

This one gives a better view of the stretch marks and what I refer to as my second bellybutton  on top of the original

Front view in a flattering dress

Side view in the same dress

Bare side view- you can see a mosquito bite and  a kidney biopsy scar

The "F" word. . . No, not that one; the one that really hurts people

Can we stop using the word “fat” and its many synonyms as insults, please? Seriously, it is a description of one’s weight, not one’s character. For one thing, it is often applied inaccurately. A few weeks ago, a blogger for a newspaper wrote a column in which she referred to a cheerleader as fat. The internet exploded, the post was removed, etc, and it wasn’t even factual. The woman in question, while not ridiculously thin, actually did not appear to be overweight. It was an insult, and, while the internet exploded over the incident, it seems that it didn’t bother too many people that fat was used as an insult, rather, the debate was over whether the woman was indeed heavy or not. She isn’t, or at least didn’t seem to be in the pictures I saw. She wasn’t ridiculously airbrushed, so her skin moved, folded, etc. appropriately, but we don’t even realize that most supermodels have those folds anymore b/c we never see them due to the insidious airbrushing that is everywhere, and thus unrealistic expectations for the human body are set, and now a cheerleader for the opposing team is “fat” b/c she has skin and muscle, and yes, body fat, but everyone has a certain percentage of body fat. It is necessary for our survival as a species. Some of us have more than others, but we all have it.

What harm is there in calling someone who is not overweight fat? S/he isn’t really, and it’s apparent whether one is carrying around an extra pound or five, right? Well, there’s plenty of harm in it. First of all, young people read that drivel, then they read the comments. Anyone with eyes and a realistic expectation of the human body notes that she isn’t heavy. Others feel that the original blogger may not have been so off-base. Person A, struggling with her own body image, thinks, “I look just like her. I am fat.” Person B, also struggling, wonders “If she’s fat, what am I?”  People become defensive and speak offensively.

We have equated fat with being ugly, of low character, lazy, etc. and absolutely none of that is true. We, as a society, seem to place so much value on being thin, that we have made fat the ultimate insult, and we continue to use it indiscriminately. We have absolutely lost perspective on what a healthy body, male or female, can look like, and that there is a wide range of healthy and beautiful. We ask people to reach for the unattainable, and when they cannot reach it, we knock them down if we don’t like them.  In the process, we offer no alternative. People give up on being healthy b/c they do not feel ideal. Others hide in the shadows b/c they feel the crushing judgment of being overweight. Fat is not a character flaw. Mean-spiritedness is.

Some people are indeed fat, others are extremely skinny, and many are somewhere in between. We try to address it superficially. Dove’s “real beauty” campaign, an occasional acknowledgement by a major retailer that it’s okay to have a model who isn’t a size 2 or less come out of the back pages of the catalog, but until we decide that it’s not an insult to be called fat, we won’t make any progress. Fat is simply the state of having a higher body fat percentage than is deemed normal or healthy for your age and sex. That’s it. For many, there may be long-term health issues if the body fat percentage is not reduced, but we make it extremely difficult to have honest conversations about losing some excess body fat when merely having it around is enough to make a person a source of derision. There are many wonderful, physically beautiful, and yes, even fit, overweight people. There are many awful, less-than-attractive, and unhealthy people whose weight falls within the normal range.

I know that one reason fat is an insult is because people view being overweight as something you could control, if you really wanted to do so. To some extent, this statement is true. Putting unusual medical issues aside, most of us have some control over our weight, but it isn’t as easy as simply, “putting down the fork and moving more.” We first have to develop a healthy relationship with our bodies and our food. We have to find the time between all of our obligations to move more. We have to learn how to move in ways that won’t injure our bodies. We almost always need the support of people around us. We need to understand that health is important and looking like a movie star is not only not important, but often not possible. We need to stop judging people who are overweight as being anything other than who they are. By the way, oftentimes the worst offenders are people who have lost a lot of weight, much like former smokers are often the most obnoxious non-smokers. It becomes so easy to fall back on, “If I can do it, anyone can. If you feel bad about yourself, just do what I did!” First of all, every situation is unique. Secondly, why would you want to diminish your own accomplishment? It’s hard to lose body fat, and while our society loves a good weight-loss story, we don’t really like the often long process it takes to get there in a way that is healthy and sustainable.

How, I ask, are we to fix any of these problems if we use the word fat as an insult? If we hurl it indiscriminately with no intent other than to inflict pain, we will only continue to make things worse. It hurts the person you are trying to insult, it hurts people who aren’t overweight, but have no idea what, other than very thin, constitutes beautiful, and it hurts people who happen to carry around a little extra body fat because you can think of nothing worse to say than that someone may resemble them.

That being said, if I hear another, “Real women have curves,” schpiel, I might just projectile vomit. Body shaming is body shaming. If you don’t like it when someone does it to you, don’t do it to someone else. Trust me when I say there are plenty of very thin women who would  love some curves, and “Eat a cheeseburger!” doesn’t do any more for them than, “Put down the cheeseburger!” does for heavier gals. Real women have vaginas. The relative sizes of their breasts, bottoms, stomachs, etc. do not make them any more or less a real woman than someone w/ very different proportions. 

While I would prefer that we not hurl insults at each other, if you do feel the need to insult someone, next time try being accurate and focusing on what, exactly, the person is doing wrong. “Ugh, that dancer was so out-of-step; watching the routine made me uncomfortable. How did s/he get that job?” “That politician is proving that s/he lied on the campaign trail. S/he has a serious lack of integrity. Remember s/he promised ceiling fans for all Americans and now s/he is introducing a bill trying to make ceiling fans illegal! I guess that’s what happens when you take money from the Trading Spaces lobby.” If you really just have to call someone a name, which I really do not encourage, look to Shakespeare for your insults. There are some pretty good ones in his works. There’s also just the good, old-fashioned “Jerk!” It is simple and lets one know that you do not approve of his or her actions. Calling someone fat as an insult makes no more sense than pejoratively referring to someone as a brunette. “Her hair is just so dark. Gross.”  See, it doesn’t make sense, does it?

*Disclaimer: I use the words fat, overweight, heavy, high body fat percentage and a few others interchangeably here. I do realize that someone can be overweight by one measure (BMI, for instance) and healthy by another (body fat percentage). As I use the words here, please assume that they all refer to the issue of possessing an excess amount of body fat.

You Can Save A Life

My oldest son is turning seven in a few hours. He almost didn’t make it to seven hours, let alone seven years. He needed assistance breathing when he was born, but, just as importantly, he needed a blood transfusion. He was so severely anemic that had he remained in utero and/or not received a blood transfusion, he would have died. My son is alive because a stranger went to a blood drive or walked into a donation center and donated a little bit of blood and a little bit of time. They were likely thanked by the volunteers and staff. The person who has allowed my son to become the compassionate, brilliant, funny little person he is probably had a cookie and some juice and went about their day. I don’t know if this person gave any real thought to the fact that what they just did could actually be the difference between life and death for someone, the difference between joy and sorrow for a family.

You see, my big boy’s blood type is compatible with mine, but not my husband’s. I am not allowed to donate blood for many reasons, and having just had a c-section, would not have been allowed to give blood to my son, and my husband could not. The kindness of that stranger saved our family in a situation where we were helpless.

I have always been a huge advocate of donating blood. I am not allowed to donate due to my medical history, although I have volunteered at blood drives, and I try to make it as easy as possible for those who can donate to do so. My son’s life is not the only life for which I am personally grateful to blood donors, though. Not two years before my baby needed blood, one of my sisters-in-law was also saved by a transfusion. It is her history, and I shall not divulge too much of it, but I will say two of the people who I love most in the world were saved by people who took the time and ignored any fear of needles they might have and gave blood. It is so simple, but so few do it. The supply of blood is frequently running short. If you can donate, please go out and give. It is simple. It doesn’t take long, and while you may never meet the people you help, you are giving an absolutely priceless gift.

To those of you who take the time, thank you. Thank you from me, from my son, from my family. Thank you for allowing all of us to get to know him; thank you for allowing his welcome to the world to be dramatic, but not a welcome and a farewell all in one day. He’s a wonderful child. He loves to help and care for others. Maybe some of his empathy came from you. Thank you for keeping my sister-in-law with us. We all need her. Thank you from all of the receivers of blood and those who love them. It is so simple, so easy, and so very important. 

And His Mama Cried

Much is being made of the Steubenville rape case, and the media’s reaction to it. I am heartened to hear how vocally disgusted most people seem to be with the rape apologists in the main stream media (and, holy lord, they are everywhere) and with all the sympathy given to the young rapists. Even the Yahoo! News comments section, where decency goes to die (it should really be their trademarked tagline), seems to be trending towards those wondering where in the world the sympathy and worry for the victim’s forever changed life is. *I am editing this to add that I have also seen plenty of victim-blaming, slut-shaming, and drunk-shaming happening, but this is not the majority of what I am seeing, and certainly none of that nonsense is on my Facebook feed or other places where I encounter people I like and respect.

   

The fact of the matter is, these young men’s lives are forever tarnished and ruined, but it is not because they received a well-deserved conviction for raping an intoxicated young woman who was slipping in and out of consciousness.  Not only did they violate her, they recorded it, photographed it, and sent it around as text messages. Some of their friends who did not participate in the actual sexual assault helped with continuing to degrade and devalue this young woman by laughing about it, recording it, and passing it along. She was not a person deserving of respect to them. She was an object to use however they pleased. All of the young men involved are guilty of that, and so help me, I wish they all had to spend a little time in juvenile detention and run around as registered sex offenders.

Yes, the two rapists will forever have to register as sex offenders. Some people seem to think that this is an injustice. I think the one year sentences are an injustice. In one year, are they going to learn to see other people as human beings worthy of kindness and gentleness, regardless of how female and/or drunk they may be? In one year, are we going to be able to undo the years of damage that a culture that cries at the INJUSTICE of their conviction for spending hours treating another human being as a prop has caused? Many people, particularly in the MSM, shake their heads and talk about what a shame it is that their lives are ruined, and that this will be with them for the rest of their days. Yet, where is the head shaking over the fact that they did it? These are not innocent youths wrongly convicted. These are boys who were taught that they were special and above the laws of the state and common human decency because they are athletically gifted. It is reported that they are good students as well. First of all, so what? Secondly, forgive me if I sound a little jaded here, but these kids had adults who were trying to cover up a GANG RAPE for them. Is it really so far-fetched that their grades could be padded? I’m sure they didn’t have to be model students to receive model student grades and perks. They may actually have been, and they may not have been, but it doesn’t change the fact that they REPEATEDLY VIOLATED A YOUNG WOMAN.

This fact is the real shame. They have ruined their own lives, and, more importantly, what they did to this girl will be with her for the rest of her life. Through no fault of her own, she was sexually assaulted, humiliated, and has to live with the fact that not only did all that happen to her, but that many people saw pictures and videos of her degradation. She will need counseling, she may very well end up with trust issues and issues around her own sexuality and sexual maturity, she is now at a much higher risk for suicide, depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, amongst other issues. Let me repeat that first part for the slow people in the audience, THROUGH NO FAULT OF HER OWN. Being drunk, being high, wearing something alluring, wearing red lipstick, walking home in the dark, going anywhere alone, hanging out with guys, etc. etc. are actually not versions of consent.

Men do not rape women for these reasons. They are the red herrings of a culture of rape apologists, and every lawyer who has ever defended a guilty rapist thanks society for creating them. Rapists may use these things as excuses, but rape is about control and seeing someone as less than you. When someone violates another human being, it is not because they were so irresistibly drawn to that person that they couldn’t help themselves, or they were confused about whether someone who had vomited all over herself and was no longer conscious wanted to have sex. No. They do it because what they want is more important than what is right. They do it because they do not see any value in that person beyond what they want from him or her (yes, men get raped, too), and this, this is where we fail every time we talk about any rape, but specifically the Steubenville case.

We do not recognize that no one who sees past his own pleasure, no one who recognizes the value and dignity of other people beyond what those people can do for them, can harm another person the way they abused that girl, and, to make it more disgusting, they did it for fun. It was just a night of partying, and they expected to get away with it. Where I cry for these boys is at a more fundamental level. I cry that they were convinced that it is true that they cannot and should not have to control themselves around others. If they want it, they should take it, especially if it involves sex. After all, who doesn’t secretly want the golden boys, and how can they be asked to control themselves in the face of drunken availability? What a load of crap to sell those boys.  They can control themselves. They can treat a drunk girl the same way that they would likely treat their drunk buddies, which is get them to a safe place, put a bucket next to the bed, and tease them the next day by eating in front of them and making really loud noises.

 I read that one of the boys’ mothers became hysterical during sentencing. I hope she was crying not because of her son’s not remotely harsh enough punishment for his brutal actions, but because at some point he failed to grasp that you don’t hurt other people. People aren’t there for you to use however you please. If someone is at a disadvantage, self-inflicted or otherwise, you take care of them. I hope she wept because her son’s life was ruined long before he raped that girl. I hope she raged because he had become a person who thought it was fun to assault another human being. I hope his mama sobbed because she is ashamed and disappointed, not because he has to face the music for forever changing the life of a young woman. Mostly, I hope she cried for that girl, and all the others like her, who are raped by young men who have not been taught the value of another person.