Dear Daughter,

You are at ease in your body. You mold yourself to mine in the comfort of the wrap where we both spend our days. When does the comfort end? Most women that I know struggle with their bodies, and many men do as well. Only satisfied if they manage to spend most of each day working out, plucking hairs, tanning this, concealing that, putting on another face before leaving the house in clothes that fit as long as they don’t move because they need to lose 10 pounds in order to feel good. And then life catches up with them and they’re forced to let something go.

This past weekend we went to the beach, your brothers, your daddy, your grandpa, you, and I. We passed a beach that allows people to be free of clothes and to walk nude in the sun. I had never seen that sort of beach outside of movies. People of all body types walked around, more comfortable in their skin than many are in bathing suits or even fully covered from head to toe in thick clothes.

I could see those that were truly at ease, those who were seemingly taking pleasure in showing off their bodies, and those who were meeting everyone’s eyes with a look of defiance.

Your daddy appreciated the variety of bodies as an artist, and expressed an interest in the many different shapes of the human body.

Your grandpa expressed discomfort with the idea that “unattractive” people were without clothing.

Your brothers didn’t even notice, as they were fixated on getting to the ocean.

And you just took everything in.

I have a long history of being uncomfortable in my skin. 5’11, 37 inch inseam, a size zero three months after my third child was born. My legs make up too much of my height, and my arms are unwieldy. Knobbly knees and long-fingered witches hands that match the witch’s nose that crooks slightly to my right. In truth, I spent portions of my life with the body of a supermodel, a body that I never wanted and was never comfortable with as I fought to put on those 10 or 15 pounds that everyone else talked about wanting to lose.

Motherhood helped me accept my body even as it “ravaged” it and changed the texture of my abdomen and breasts and gave me cellulite on my rear.  My body was not perfect, but it was functional. It was where you and your brothers came to exist, where you grew, and where you found your food and comfort after you were born. It also helped me to see that my body is not the shape of “me”. It changes over time from year to year and decade to decade. I cannot hold onto the skin of youth or the larger size of breasts filled with milk. I cannot stay as I was when I was 20 any more than I can stay as I was at eight or ten. And I will not be at eighty as I am now at thirty-two.

The shape of me is contained within my soul and my memories and through being your mother and the mother to your brothers I am learning that the shape of me is found in how we fit together and in what fills my life each day. It is found in how my body flexes to hold each of you when wave-battered in the ocean, how I stretch on my tip toes to cut the creepers of Wisteria as your brothers laugh and point at the ones that are impossibly high and egg me on until I jump up at them and miss.The shape of who I am is contained in my face when I smile without thought of controlling the boundaries of where my smile will stretch to.  The shape of me is contained in how my body hits the ground when I run after each of you as you learn to walk, not the way it looks to others or the way that it would look to me if I see it recorded in a video.

The shape of me is contained within how I see myself from the inside, not how I’m seen by others. The way they see me is part of the shape of them, of their views, of their lives, and the things that they accept as true and false. This allows them to judge me, to imagine who I must be, to make assumptions about my character that are either right or wrong. Sometimes the shape of them will be so injured by others that they will see me filtered through the image of someone that has hurt them somehow, or someone that they look down upon. It is what it is, but only I decide what I am, who I am, and how I will act and feel.

I do not know if I could have avoided those years where I was not able to like myself. I do not know if you will be able to avoid those years or if there is any way that I can shorten them for you. I do not know if this is a process that everyone must go through in order to understand things.

I know the things that contributed to my dislike for my body and for who I was, and I hope that I do not echo the things that I heard in my own childhood that led to my feeling this way about myself for as long as I did. I hope that you will bypass all of this and understand the shape of who you are throughout the entirety of your life.

You know who you are. You know the shape of your soul. You know the shape of your body and how it carries you through life.

You are beautiful to me, not because of the big blue eyes and curly black hair of your infancy, not because of what shape you may take as a child, a  young adult, a woman, a mother, or a grandmother if I live to see you along that far. You are beautiful to me because I love the shape of your soul and how you are growing to be exactly who you need to be.

(And because you and your brothers have freed me up to see myself for who I am, as I desire for you to see yourselves as who you are. Thank you for this.)

I love you unconditionally, and with awe.

❤ Mama