Hi, loves. 🌿

Bodies here and there and everywhere

On the weekends we’d go to Santropol, up around the mountain in Montreal, for our enormous sandwiches and milkshakes. Even then, back in high school, I felt voracious, my appetite huge, no qualms about what I ordered — always the Paspebiac, a sandwich loaded with cream cheese and tuna salad, lettuce and tomato on pillowy brown rye bread, and a milkshake to get it all down; sometimes even carrot cake to boot. My friends never ordered as much, or at least never finished it all, already aware of their figures, of wanting to be thin, for whom, I wasn’t sure — boys, probably, whom I thought about a lot but hadn’t truly touched.

For brunch we’d go to Encore, the coziest café in both the dead of winter and the heat of June. It sat on a corner in my old neighborhood, windows along two walls, but we always tucked ourselves away in the back corner. If I was lucky, I’d go with Katie, the popular girl who later unceremoniously ditched me without explanation, and ordered pancakes and latkes and so many coffees and enjoyed it all, even as I could see her nibbling away at her smaller order — I can’t remember what now, but it was meagre. Black coffee. Perhaps some eggs. I don’t remember wanting to be like her, wanting that kind of self-control. I remember unabashedly loving the food, fantasizing about it while walking over, and thinking little of the volume, of its effects on my body.

At the end of high school, five of us posed for a photo in our friend Amy’s backyard, arms around each other, buck naked, smiling defiantly at the camera. Why did we do this? Probably for the same reason teenage girls do anything — for the thrill of it, to test out how bold we could be out in the world, never thinking that someone in a lab somewhere was developing these shots, staring at our tits, our pubic hair, the curves of our budding hips. What I’m struck by is how free I felt, how confident and embodied and satiated. How I looked down the barrel of the lens with total assuredness.

I’d been so denied as a competitive gymnast — not that anyone put me on a diet. My body was pre-pubescent, all muscle and bone, but we had weekly weigh-ins and there was talk of cottage cheese and of drinking only water. We’d hide our junk food while away at competitions in Vancouver and Prince Edward Island and Toronto. I’d stuff chocolate bars into snow boots, store chips under the bunk beds, all so the coaches wouldn’t find them. The same way my daughter now hides her computer from us.

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I don’t know when the algorithm caught onto me, but lately all I’m served up is Ways To Lose Weight. How To Add 100g of Protein To Your Diet. How To Lose the Belly Fat in Your 40s! Weight Training for Menopause! Get Healthy in 5 Easy Steps.

I click and click and click. I cannot stop. I want the protein, I want the loss of belly fat, I want my jeans to fit, I want toned arms again, I want the miracle, I want speed. I want to look 32 again. (I don’t really want to feel 32 again, I was miserable.) Is there anything more boring than a woman talking about her weight? No. No, there is not.

There is a certain irony to being bombarded by all these messages at this point in my life, when I feel better in my body than I have in decades. My sciatica is no longer a daily assault (knock wood; there are always flairs), the post-baby back problems that stalked my early motherhood are gone (no more carrying anyone around), the pain of driving all over LA managed now, too, by an army of women who care for me on a weekly or monthly basis — my beloved Pilates-turned-weight-training teacher, my acupuncturist, and, amazingly, by my growing ability to say no. By naps, by walks.

It takes a village to keep me functional. And yet, here are the messages, coming for me: Don’t you want to look better, too? Don’t you? You can’t possibly feel okay with that worn old flabby body of yours? Don’t you want your old jeans to fit? You know they can. Click here.

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My dear friend, who happens to also be a wonderful nutritionist and registered dietician has a way of framing eating for your age in a way that makes sense: you wouldn’t exercise or sleep the way you did in your twenties, so why should you eat that way, too? This is helpful. It is not about getting rid of anything but about fuelling your current body. I need different things in all aspects of my life: love, friendship, exercise, rest. My mothering is demanding a part of me I didn’t know existed until my kid turned 10 and turned into a tween. Food is another shift in this whole project of growing up.

And yet, how many reels can I see pointing me to more protein? To Greek yoghurt, to turkey sticks, to overnight oats with protein powder? How many ways can I be told that if I do X, Y will result, knowing this is surely total bollox? This is diet culture turned predatory. I go onto Instagram for God knows what (increasingly I find the whole thing not only dull, one long exercise in our collective narcissism, but also upsetting, see here), and find myself convinced I must — and can! — turn 15 pounds of fat into muscle. I can look like my 30-year-old self!

This is an old story. Not mine, but an old patriarchal one. I just cannot believe I’ve fallen prey to it.

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And yet, the truth: I do want my jeans to fit. I do want to eat more protein, if it will make my jeans fit. I want to lift heavy things! I want to walk more, I want to sweat, I want to feel my thigh burns. I want I want I want. I just want all that work to show. I want the receipts. I want the transformation. I want it on the outside. I am, it turns out, not above my own vanity.

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But. What if one day I lift three pounds and the next week five? What if I can suddenly walk up and down stairs for five straight minutes without pain? What if I actually do get on my mat most days to do Pilates? Isn’t that the biggest victory of all? Isn’t that embodiment? Isn’t that success in my 40s? Isn’t that the Before and After? What if I know it?

All these things are what I so sorely missed during all the years I felt so far away from myself, living with pain that followed and limited my every step. In “Wonder Woman,” Ada Limón writes, “you always look so happy,/ said a stranger once as I shifted to my good side, grinning.” This is a line I could have written, it is a line I have lived. In fact, after a failed surgery and then a subsequent failed series of steroid injections, when I was miserable and angry and despairing and so so young and lost, my back surgeon said to me, “It’s so hard to tell how you’re really feeling because you’re always smiling!” I was trying to relieve him of something. I was trying, always trying to make things better.

What I want, when I let go of my own vanity, of the clicks and temptations and endless loop of photos showing The Transformation, is a body I can use. Here we are, again, with the poetry, but one of my favorites from Marge Piercy is “To Be of Use.” It is about work, about giving yourself over to the task, to the needs of the world, but in her telling, it is full-bodied, this work. One can feel the speaker longing for hands submerged in mud, a body in water, hands ready to pull and push and carry. I do not take this ability for granted, not for one second.

This is all I longed for during those years I felt so limited, all those years I looked happy and terribly thin and I felt so fragile: a body that could make its way through the world without constant fear and worry. When I flew alone across the continent a few months ago, I hauled my suitcase into the overhead compartment by myself. It had been decades since I’d even attempted this.

I cannot express the delight I felt at this small victory. The ability to finally carry the weight of my own life.

Sending love,

Abs xox

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✨ WRITING CLASSES I have one spot left in my Thursday evening class. Come read and write and laugh and cry with us for nine glorious weeks. This is the last Zoom class before fall. More info here!