Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go round

I have recently been looking at photos of an Easter gathering that my mother posted on Facebook. I know. World's colliding.

There are many who cautioned me against friending my mother on Facebook. They are of the same ilk as those who cautioned me against friending my co-workers and exes. I didn't listen to them, either.

I lived for two and a half years on Gilligan's Island in a community of expats that was so close it was literally like living in a fish bowl. Through that process, I learned more about my co-workers and colleagues than most of their families know about them and that required a unique way of living and of looking at one another. See, but don't ask and don't tell, and at all times maintain the fiction of privacy. Which is to say that I know from world's colliding. I'm not scared of Facebook.

Anyway, what struck me looking at these photos is how seriously, seriously thin the women in the photos are. After four years overseas, I had honestly forgotten about the pressures of thinness that permeate everyday life for the average woman in America. It is oppressive and unyielding. And I won't say that any of the women in the photos are necessarily unhealthy or pass comment on people who are my relatives or the loved ones of my relatives. But I will say that, having lived here for awhile, the thinness was shocking.

I remember the first time I visited New Zealand being amazed at how different all of the women here are. And I don't mean different from Americans, I mean different from each other. Here, there is a real acceptance of the female form in all of the forms it comes in. Skinny women, thick women, short women, tall women, women with guts, women with small chests, women with big legs, I could go on and on. But each of them dresses pretty much however they want. There's not the same pressure, for instance, to fit into a particular mold or to dress in a way that makes you look like you fit into it or hide the ways in which you don't.

Women are just women, however they come. And I cannot tell you how refreshing and relaxing it can be to live in that world.

It's been a long road for me accepting my own body, which never came close to fitting the form Hollywood has told me I should have, and I'm not even there yet, acceptance-wise. But I sat on my couch today looking at those photos, wearing a fanciful polka dotted dress gifted to me by Aunt Pat, which will never make me look thin, but does have the benefit of accentuating some of the better features I have to offer, and I thought to myself how much better this skin feels than what I used to wear around every day in America.

What I remember from living in America is the pervasive need to fulfill a "one size fits all" mentality and the persistent feeling that I was a failure. Because the one size that fits all in America is thin. Too thin. Impossible to maintain, full-time job thin. At times I embraced it and "went to work" as it were every day to meet that goal. At other times, I rejected it wholly and entirely, wearing my excess weight like a protective barrier against Us Magazine's dictates about how I should look. But never was I satisfied, with myself or what was expected of me.

Which is not to say that I don't worry about my weight here or that I don't still wake up somedays feeling inadequate and unworthy. That is to be expected. But what I feel most days is accepted. For being a woman, however I come.

And some days, I even feel pretty. Not because I won the scale's lotto drawing that day and hit my numbers, but because I am who I am, and I look like what God wanted me to look like. And occasionally that feels ok. Hell, some days it even feels good.