We Women Are So Beautiful

I would like to live in a world where we women learn to love our bodies: short, tall, fat, thin, in wheelchairs, old, gray-haired...This is our one body, our one life in which to live in it.

The first woman I met who liked her body was my daughter’s first babysitter, Mirna.  She was from Guatemala, full of joy, always laughing and eating mangos. She was the one who got my daughter started on a lifelong obsession with mangos. Mirna was working on her green card in the 90s. She left her country to escape the violence, but in Los Angeles, she was hoping to have a fun time. 

Every Friday after work, she had me drop her at a gas station. She wore tight pants, a tight top, and a lot of makeup. I waited with her while motorcycles circled. “Salvie hombres,” she said. “Mi Salvie hombres.” She wanted a Salvadoran boyfriend with a motorcycle, and pretty soon she had one, and then another and another, and then she was pregnant. 

My husband sat with her at the abortion clinic. Everyone looked at him like, you bastard. He just let it be. He let them think what they wanted to think. He was there for her. At the time, age twenty-five, I remember thinking, I would have wanted to explain. He said, “What they think is their problem.” She came home to our house and rested. After a couple of years, she found a boyfriend to move in with.

But when she worked for us, she always told me how great it was to be beautiful. She had a great smile, she was short, and she might have weighed two hundred pounds. “You wouldn’t get a date in my village,” she would say. “No one would want to date someone so skinny who no one takes care of. I look loved.”

I did a lot of thinking about that idea of looking loved. She did look loved. Her smile, her happiness, walked around with her. My anxiety hung on me like a cloud. I loved getting to know Mirna and re-thinking beauty. She walked in her own beauty.

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The Silent Generation told the Boomers they were fat, and the Boomers told the Gen X’ers they were fat. The idea was always that you can’t be fat and beautiful. You can’t be fat and attractive to anyone. And by anyone, they meant a Man.

I’m a cusp Xer, and in college, we girls sifted in and out of the clinic for weight loss disorders, anorexia, and bulimia. I took it for granted that every woman hated their body, was ashamed of something about themselves. It was a conversation starter. “I really hate my nose, hair, feet, hands, legs.” Once you know what a girl hates about herself, you know her.

This self-hate extends beyond appearance. The American dream is that you can change your financial status and your class, but that is harder than many people think. Most people who start off poor likely aren’t going to make it to Harvard and gain acceptance from the upper class. 

You can change your hair color. You can make more money. You can move across the country. You can change jobs and spouses. But you will live in your body.

I think of Christopher Hitchens, one of the great minds, eating, smoking, drinking as his body fell apart, as if his beautiful brain and his body were two separate things not attached at all. I’m killing this shell I’m inside of while thinking these great thoughts with this brain.

But how is that different than millions of women looking at ourselves and saying, “Kate, why that face? Why that stomach? Why those huge feet? Why couldn’t you be a skinny, cute, curly-haired chick that people would have said, ‘Ah, look at her, she looks like Shirley Temple’?” 

I wouldn’t mind having been cute, pretty, attractive, just once in my goddam life, but now that I’m old, I have to say, it’s nice not to have that to wish I still had good looks. I don’t have the power of beauty to miss.

My first mother-in-law was a beauty. Since she slept with her fair share of men, when she came into a room, she gave off that Erica Jong, zipless fuck vibe. But as she got older, she gave into panic, because without her zipless fuck vibe, who was she? 

In her late eighties, she had to move with her boyfriend. “If you’re going to move in, you have to stop sleeping around,” he said. She was still trying to remind herself that she had been wanted once. I’m not going to have that problem.

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Last year, at an Italian restaurant in Germany, I was with my queer daughter, Tobi. The Italians started sending over drinks to myself, the blond American, and my  “son.”  Tobi is often taken for a college boy.  (It’s the great skin.) But I was elated that my daughter could see that I hadn’t completely lost my charm.

Tobi has a friend, Chelsea, who I admire deeply. Chelsea has a huge Instagram following. In many of her photos, she is in a bikini. She’s a glorious person who is celebrating the body positivity movement. I’ve shown her account to many people, just to say, look at this person loving herself. I love Chelsea’s joyful life. I wish could have seen this earlier and known I could have allowed myself to live happily in my body at any size.

The millennials are the first generation to believe that beauty comes in all sizes and that what size a person’s body happens to be is nunya business. Work on your own body. A person’s health should be between them and their doctor.

When my daughter visited my first mother-in-law at ten, she asked for something to eat. “Why don’t you get on the scale first and see if you should be eating,” her grandmother said.

They were both about 5’6 at the time. The grandmother weighed about 108, my daughter weighed about 125. 

“What does that tell you?” her grandmother asked.

My daughter thought about it for a minute. “It tells me that a person my size could beat up a person your size.” 

When the grandmother called me later, she said, “Your daughter has no shame about not being skinny!”

Score one for me as a mama, I thought.

I raised my children to celebrate their bodies. Not passing down shame is one of my happiest parental achievements. My daughter is proud of her body. She is strong and healthy and she is going to do a great job having and raising a baby. Besides, she’s a champion Jello wrestler.

When I look at the photos of Chelsea, I know I would never have the courage to post a photo of myself in a bikini. But I love that she does, and because she does, I’ve started wearing a bikini. I said to myself, what am I waiting for?

Eating disorders are on the rise with Gen Z, and so is general anxiety about the world. Part of eating disorders is seeking control. We live with uncertainty. The Thwaites Ice Shelf is melting. The waters are rising. We cannot control climate change, the electoral college, abortion rights, or the current chaos in the Middle East, but we can take our own body in hand.

Let’s start with love. I would like to live in a world where we women learn to love our bodies: short, tall, fat, thin, in wheelchairs, old, gray-haired. We could start by telling each other how beautiful we are, because we are utterly amazing. This is our one body, our one life in which to live in it.

We don’t need to walk into beauty. We are already here.