“Can you see if you have this book?” a patron asked me one night last week.

Obviously I get asked that question often, but this interaction is lingering in my memory.

“Sure,” I said. “What are you looking for?”

She asked for the sequel to Rachel Hollis’s self-help book.

As I looked up the title and put her on the hold list (16 other people were waiting to read it that night), I listened to her gush about how Girl, Wash Your Face had changed her life, and how excited she was to put what she’d learned into action, and how certain she was that the sequel would be even more helpful.

And then she asked me the question I was hoping she wouldn’t. “Have you read it? Didn’t you just love it?”

I told her I had read some of it, but didn’t finish it, and tried to leave it at that, but she insisted. “You’ve got to check it out again!” she said. “It will change your life. I can’t believe everyone’s not reading it!”

She left the reference desk feeling happy, even if she did have to wait, partly because I'm a professional librarian. I knew that telling a Rachel-Hollis fangirl how I really feel about those books would’ve been a disaster. Pointing out the flaws in the book to her would've only annoyed her, because if she can't see them herself then it's just my opinion.

To be fair, I only read the first chapter of the first book. I didn’t continue for two reasons: 1. The writing tone. I couldn’t spend hours and hours with that chirpy, upbeat, faux-hood writing style. 2. The message itself. I went to a couple of Amway meetings in my 20s. That was enough. The focus on getting and spending—the expensive bags, the second house in Hawaii, the trendy shoes—is not how I choose to focus my efforts in my life. Her message is that the lies we tell ourselves hold us back, which is true, but I think “having expensive possessions brings happiness” is also a lie. I realized with that first chapter that I have no interest in getting coached by a person whose basic values are vastly different from mine, who earned her expensive purses through party planning, who actively self identifies as a “lifestyle influencer.”

But I didn’t share any of that with the library patron that night, not because I don’t feel passionately about it, but because I have come to understand that not many people are able to read critically. (I also understand that for many readers, this isn’t the point of reading.)

By “critically” I don’t mean “in a way that expresses disproval.” I mean the second definition, “analysis of the merits and faults of a work of art, literature, movie, or music.”

Merits and faults.

One of the reasons I love reading, and continue to read, is critical thinking. It is one of the things I loved about teaching: having a group of people to interact with in a discussion about a book, an essay, a poem. I like reading for story, of course, and to get to know characters and to enter a setting. But I also like thinking about (and writing about and, if we’re ever at a meal together, talking about) what the story means, how the characters make mistakes, the way the book influences and changes me. Not in a get-more-expensive-purses kind of way, but in a understand-something-difficult-about-the-world kind of way.

In essence, that is why I can’t bring myself to read books like Rachel Hollis’s: because they are obliviously lacking critical viewpoints. They are unable to allow for differences in life experiences, desires, and opportunities. They assume that everyone wants a Hollywood kind of life.

But Hollis’s books aren’t even the reason I sat down to write this today. They are just an example of why critical thinking is important to me.

Because I feel like it is time to bring some of those critical thinking skills to my own life, not just to the books I read.

As I wrote in my last post, I am trying to experience this autumn season with intent. I want to feel things and to experience them, rather than only looking as if through a window. “Looking as if through a window”: this is how I feel I have been living my life for many years. It has to do with the choices I’ve made, the people in my life and their choices, the ways I have chosen to wall myself off. It is about how I feel like I always have to acknowledge: yes I know I am different from you. It comes from seeing my differences and feeling ashamed of them, wondering why I don’t fit in, instead of being able to be who I am.

I want to be who I am.

The God’s honest truth is that I haven’t been really, honestly happy in…I’m not sure how long. I love my people but I keep bumping up against the reality that my life doesn’t feel like the life I need. And when I write something like that, I am flooded with doubt. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don’t want to be selfish. I love my children and I wouldn’t trade them for anything. I love my husband. But there are flaws here. And I am realizing: life is short. Life is so, so short. I’m nearing fifty and I still haven’t done many of the things I intended on doing.

And of course I can just continue here. I can keep on with my average life. I can do it until I die.

But deep down, I want change. I am craving change. I am wanting to be more than the quiet, stunted person I’ve made myself into, the one pretending. It isn’t only about church anymore. It is about everything. Maybe it is because I am at the end of my years of mothering. I still get to have an influence on Kaleb for a few more years, and I am learning how (thank goodness) being a mother doesn’t ever, in a sense, really end. But the hardest years of daily care are past, and now, for the first time since I was 23, I can ask myself: what do I want?

What shape do I want the rest of my life to take?

I can’t find the answer in a self-help book. I can’t even find the answer in the fiction and poetry I love.

I can only find the answer by myself, and that is both liberating and terrifying. I know what I want, but I don’t know how to get it within the current shape of my life. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I don't want to burn it all down. But I am also starting to realize that I can matter, too. Is that selfish?

Here I am: a frumpy woman with stiff knees, nearing 50. What have I done with my life? What will I do with the life I have left? I suppose everyone faces and answers that question every day of their lives. I have answered it so far in part by doing what other people told me I should do. Which is like reading a book and loving it only because the story was good, rather than for the wrestle with new thoughts it caused. And I’ve been doing that for too long.

It is time to wrestle.

I have spent all morning today thinking about my body. How it has changed over time and how I feel about it.

Here’s a photo of me from five years ago, at a 5k race I ran in that was a library fundraiser. (You were supposed to dress up as your favorite literary character; as I am easily annoyed by anything extra while I’m running, I kept my costume extremely simple. I’m Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, right? Two braids, blue dress, sparkly red shoes.) Not necessarily my favorite literary character, but those are hard to represent in costume anyway.)

Kendell and I were looking at this picture last night and I started thinking about all of the ways my body has changed in the five years since it was taken.

My perimenopausal body has finally decided to grow some boobs. Seriously, I’ve been waiting for this to happen since I was 13 or so. Unfortunately the message got muddled and the boobs are in the wrong place. SIDE boobs? That’s not really what I meant, body.

My belly is so much softer and rounder now.

My back looks like I used to weigh about 100 pounds more, and I lost the weight, and now the skin won’t smooth back. Except that didn’t happen. If it had, I would understand what was happening back there on my back (like I understand why my belly will never be flat). If I understood the source of my back fat and wobbly skin, I might feel a little less bugged by it.

The skin around my knees is saggy and wrinkled.

My batwings—and my maternal line has never been known for having resilient triceps skin—are a million times flappier.

I have side chunkies and a muffin top.

AND I have crepe-y skin on the fold of my arm at my shoulder.

My face has more wrinkles.

My eye asymmetry is far worse.

My grey has gotten greyer and more pervasive.

Do I wish I had the body back of my 42-year-old self? Sort of. Well, yes, of course. If wishing actually worked then I would wish for the body I had before I started having babies. But wishing doesn’t work. Sometimes it feels like nothing works, because I exercise and I eat as healthily as I can but the weight is still creeping on.

But this post really isn’t meant to be a listing of all of the ways I perceive my body is faulty.

Instead, it is about the ways that bodies change over time and how to accept those changes.

Yes: in the eyes of the world, my body is less attractive than it was five years ago. It is FAR less attractive than it was 25 years ago.

But the eyes of the world (which is sometimes much, much smaller than it seems) (which means that by “the world” I mean the critical voices that influence my thinking about myself, and the actual words they have said—“heavy,” “chubby,” “soft,” “old”—and how those words grow more cruel as I replay them) are always going to be critical.

My body is not perfect. Right now, I feel betrayed by my body in many ways.

But it is the same thing I say to people—to women—who refuse to be in photos because they’re “too” something (too fat, too grey, too wrinkled): it is only going to get worse.

The Amy in that photo 5 years ago had the same critical voices as the Amy in this photo:

Actually, 42-year-old Amy had more critical thoughts about herself, because I was still equating “runner” to “fast runner” then. Not only was I too chubby, too soft, too flat-chested, I was also (in my mind) too slow.

It is always only ever going to get worse.

In five more years, when I am in my early fifties, what will I think when I look back on that photo of me today? (What I thought of it when I saw it: my calves look enormous, I should’ve sucked in my stomach more, my body proportions are all wrong, my nasolabial folds are getting worse, that dress is so unflattering, I have man shoulders, there's that embarrassing forehead...) What will I wish I had back?

And not just my body, but my life.

Because how much has changed since that photo of me as Dorothy? I went through some big traumas with my husband’s health issues, my mom died, I had some pretty severe depression, my relationship with my religion changed utterly, I had to come to peace with how things really ARE vs how I hoped they would be in almost every aspect of my life.

As I looked at that Dorothy photo last night, as I thought all morning about my “conversation” with Kendell about it—he is far more blunt than I am and maybe I am too sensitive, I don’t know—as I thought about what was fueling this swirl of despair, anger, body shame, and frustration, this is where I arrived:

I want to be seen not for my body but for who I am.

I want the people in my life to love me whether or not I am “heavy.”

I want to be more than the sum of my not-quite-good-enough body parts.

But I can’t force anyone to feel that way about me. I can’t make our society see my middle-aged body as anything else but pathetic. I can’t control any of that.

All I get to control is me—and clearly, right now I am learning that that doesn’t include controlling my body.

Maybe what my body wants me to learn is something different. Not how to run longer, stronger, faster. Not the newest body sculpting techniques. Not even how to deal with my joint issues.

Maybe my body wants me to learn how to see myself not for my body but for who I am, to love myself no matter my weight or side-boob measurements, to stop the arithmetic of shame, disgust, and self-doubt.

And if I am honest, I will say: I don’t know how to do that. I want others to give that grace to me, but I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I grew up in a house with a mother who was very concerned with bodies and thinness. I participated in a sport that was all about being small enough (gymnastics). I married a perfectionist with his own body issues. Those aren’t excuses but just the facts, the things that have influenced my thinking about my body.

I am 47 years old and I have thought about my body in negative ways for as long as I can remember.  Maybe body shame is as much a part of my identity as loving books and thin hair and my talent of standing on my toe knuckles is.

Maybe.

But maybe that is the yellow brick road I need to follow. Maybe that is the journey I need to take, a path that will help me finally figure out how to put down all the weight I am carrying. Not the twenty extra pounds, but the shame over the extra pounds.

I don’t know how to do this. But—and maybe this is a cliché, maybe this is banal and obvious and silly, but so be it—at least knowing where to start: at least that. Maybe knowing that I have to start with me. Maybe that is enough to be the first step.

If you know me, you know this: I’m pretty passionate about exercise clothes. That might seem like a weird thing to feel passionate about, but I have a firm belief that comfortable AND functional exercise clothing keeps people exercising. (Cute is also important.) Exercise clothes designed specifically for women are important in the exercise community because really: we aren’t men. Our bodies are different, our curves, our shapes, or musculature, even our height.

And, yes: our weight.

Well-designed exercise clothes don’t chafe. They don’t ride up between your legs. They felt well over breasts and hips; they support and breathe and wick. They flatter a moving body, no matter if that body is running or hiking or biking or swimming or doing yoga or lifting weights. They keep you moving, and if that is weird or silly, if it makes your eyes roll, then you’ve likely never had to work out in clothes that weren’t well designed.

There’s been a little bit of an uproar in the exercise-clothing world this week: Nike had the audacity not only to make plus-size exercise clothes, but put them on a plus-size mannequin. And a writer for The Telegraph definitely did not like it. She saw it as yet another way the clothing industry lies to people in order to sell things. The “fat acceptance movement,” she thinks, is not helpful to women because it gives them freedom to accept who they are right now, instead of working hard to become some better (read: thinner) version of themselves.

I’m not really sure how she fails to see the irony of her argument. She’s say two opposing things: marketing ploys that try to trick you into believing you have to be super-skinny to be attractive are wrong because the ballerina body is unhealthy, but this marketing ploy—the one that says “if you’re overweight, you still get to have comfortable and functional exercise clothing”—is wrong because fat people can’t be attractive.

Which is it?

She ends her article by asking “where is the body shape between the tiny and the immense, which is where true health lives? Where is the ordinary, medium, contented woman?”

As that is where I think I am—a medium-sized woman, neither small nor large—I’d like to let her know.

I’m here, working out. Moving my body in my favorite ways. I’m doing it in clothing that I love. That fits! That has pockets! That is cute and makes me happy and makes me feel pretty. Some of it is ruffly. Some of it is so perfectly compressive I only want to take it off because I sweat so much in it.  Some of it is pink, some is purple, some is even black.

I wear a size medium, usually. And I can’t be the only one because it’s remarkably easy to find exercise clothes in my size.

I want everyone to have the same thing, even women who are bigger than me. Clothes that fit them well and help them get out and move. It shouldn’t even have to be newsworthy, that an exercise-clothing company makes exercise clothes for large women

Because guess what helps people get healthier?

Exercise.

And if we are really concerned about the health of larger women, as this woman’s article seems to suggest, guess what? We should encourage them to exercise. And if they are exercising, they are going to need exercise clothes.

One of my favorite things about running races is that I get to see athletes of all shapes and sizes. Yes, there are some of those tiny, muscled runners. There are a lot of them, in fact. But there are medium-sized women like me. And there are larger women too. And all of them—even, I’d imagine, the elite runners who regularly win races—all of them have something about their bodies that they feel self-conscious about.

One of my running friends has one of those tiny, elegant, muscled bodies. She has a thigh gap and a strong back and willowy arms, and she is fast. And people criticize her for being too skinny.

Another running friend wears a size 16 but she runs five or six marathons every year. And people criticize her for her weight.

I’m that medium-sized runner. Probably on the bigger size of medium these days, but still, yeah: medium. Medium-fast, middle-of-the-pack runner. And people criticize me, too. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been outside running and someone driving past me has shouted something like “keep on running, chunky!” or “hey there, fat ass!”

(And that’s not even mentioning the language I use inside my own head, the way I have to fight to see something other than my chide sunkies (my nickname for my out-of-control-these-days side boobs), my batwing arms, my chubby belly, my thighs that haven’t gapped since I was eleven or twelve. I have to fight not to let those words overwhelm me and to keep reminding myself that what matters is to just keep moving and to draw strength from all of the ways I have already moved.)

I think it’s a rare woman who doesn’t have body issues.

So that woman writer (and I’m not linking or sharing her name, because if you want to read it you can google it), with her critical voice and her surety that no one of that size could run anywhere, that the answer to obesity is to “just stop eating sugar”—that woman is not solving any problems. She is creating more shame. And that is the opposite of what is needed by anyone with a body.

Especially women with bodies.

The point of the fat acceptance movement isn’t to encourage unhealthy weights. It is to help clear away the element of shame that is so wrapped up in weight.

We all feel that shame. (I am 100% certain that clearly, the writer herself feels shame, because otherwise, why bother? Why knock down instead of encouraging overweight women, unless the presence of an overweight woman in her exercise space is threatening to her in some way?)

We are all trying to overcome the shame and to embrace what is positive.

Exercise is positive.

Moving your body is positive.

Wearing something you love while you move your body is positive.

Whatever encourages healthier actions is positive.

Mother's day has always been difficult for me, because it asks us to overlook damage. To see our mothers & ourselves as mothers in a glowing, beautiful light. This year, many friends have said "this will be a hard Mother's Day for you, because it's your first without your mom." I love my friends for seeing and knowing this, and for being supportive. But if I am honest (but not raw, because raw is unbearable right now), this year is only hard in different ways. Mother's Day is about celebrating perfect mothers, and I didn't have a perfect mother. I was not a perfect mother. I wanted to be—I thought I would never damage my children, but despite my best intentions, I did. I know that my mom also had the best of intentions, and I don't really know that perfection is what motherhood asks of us anyway, despite this Hallmark holiday. But that is my truth: my mom couldn't always give me what I needed, I didn't give her what she needed, and it goes the other way, forward, into my children's generation. Logically I know that no one's mother is perfect & no one is a perfect mom. But it seems that other women are able to just see the good parts, the perfect parts, if only on this one day, and I can't. It's my fatal flaw: over thinking, over feeling. I know only this: we cannot bring perfection to motherhood. We can only bring ourselves. And while I didn't bring perfection, in the end all I can hope for, on this day and all the days of mothering, is grace & forgiveness.

This is what I wrote on my Instagram yesterday (I’m @amylsorensen there if you want to follow me). I received a whole bunch of comments about my post, and it also elicited a discussion with Kendell (who doesn’t really understand my use of social media) that devolved into tears as I thought about the ways I have hurt my children and the mistakes I have made.

I think I went into this Mother’s Day—the first one without a mother—thinking it wouldn’t be a big deal because I’ve always struggled with Mother’s Day anyway. That is part of why I wrote what I did, because I was trying to coax myself off the edge, to get myself to believe that it wasn’t a big deal and it wouldn’t hurt more than any other ones. But as I curled into a crumpled, weepy mess on my bed, I had to let myself admit that yes: this one was harder.

I want to set something straight, based on one of the comments on my post: I don’t think I failed as a mother. I think that failure would look like something different; failure would be giving up, would be not continuing to help them in whatever ways I can, would be not admiring or loving them. And that is not what I meant. I love them—so much. I could add one million “so”s to that sentence and it still wouldn’t say how much I love them. I am proud of them and the people they are becoming. I think they are amazing, each and every one of them, in their unique ways. They are all strong and have each overcome obstacles; they are each continuing to push forward and find their way. They make me laugh; I love talking to them, hearing their opinions and ideas.

I love them and it is because I love them that my disappointment in my mistakes hurts so much. But I didn’t fail as a mom. I just wasn’t as good of a mom as I wanted to be.

Motherhood, though, is tied tight between generations; it’s not only that I am a mom, but that I was a daughter. My mom’s influence on how I mothered my children is immense, which means each generation influences all the ones that come after, often in ways we can’t even see. Maybe the mistakes my mom’s mom made influenced mine, I mean. So the painful parts of my relationship with my mom seep into my relationship with my kids. The most painful part of yesterday was seeing other adult daughters with their mothers, saying kind things about them. Celebrating their relationship.

I was able to do this when my mom was still here, however imperfectly, because she was still here. I still thought there would be a way to fix, to repair, to move forward in an easier way. And now she is gone, that hope is also gone.

I loved my mom. She was an amazing woman who could do any craft she set her mind to. She was a sewer in every sense of the word; she made clothes and quilts and stuffed fabric rabbits. One season she sewed all of my gymnastics teammates’ sweats. She made excellent meals and I doubt she ever once served a dinner that didn’t include vegetables. She was a protofeminist who taught me many things about resisting the ways society tries to limit women. She sacrificed for me so I could be as involved with gymnastics as I was growing up. She took care of several of my friends in high school. She took me to the library and bought me books for Christmas and books from the book fair; she left me alone to sit on the back patio, reading away entire afternoons. She was beautiful and always dressed well. She was determined not to let expectations or her body’s limitations stop her—I will always remember her at 68, walking uphill in the desert outside of Cabo San Lucas with me, Haley, and Jake, from one zipline to the next, and the astounded look on the faces of the men helping us attach to the lines. Is this old woman really going to ride? their faces said, and she didn’t even answer their unspoken questions, just went.

I loved her.

But as I became an adult, got married, started my life, things got complicated. This was both of our faults, but I think I felt more guilt about it than she did. I married someone she didn’t get along with (partly because I married her; my husband and my mom are so much alike, and you know what happens when two fires try to interact? Someone gets burned, and it has always been me) and I worked within my marriage in different ways than she did in her marriage with my dad. I had a daughter and my mother loved her, but then I started having sons. She loved them, too, but she didn’t know how to interact with them. There was the tuna-noodle-casserole wedge. There was the fact that I didn’t feel like I could ask her to help me because I felt like I was imposing, especially with my kids. She wanted me to be one way and I wanted her to be another way and neither of us could do what the other one needed.

As time went on there were more wedges. I think my mom had unwavering faith in me that I could do anything in my life—that I was, in fact, meant to do something amazing. Isn’t that strange: her belief in my intelligence and abilities became a wedge because of the dissonance between her faith in me and the reality of my life. I was supposed to change the world but all I really did was what most everyone does, got married, had a family. I graduated from college but “only in English.”

But maybe what was most damaging to our relationship was the differences in our communication habits. My mom is the type of person who assumes that everyone wants to talk to her, to include her, to be involved with her. I’m the type of person who assumes no one wants that from me. So she needed me to be assertive when I didn’t know how, and I needed her to be inclusive in ways that were foreign to her. Neither of these traits is wrong or bad; there isn’t a moral judgement here, but just an acknowledgement.

My sister summed this up for me very neatly in the days after my mom’s funeral. “When it comes right down to it, Amy,” she said, “Mom just didn’t understand you.” The tone of voice in that kind of statement is essential, and hers was patient and loving. That sentence helped me to start letting go of my guilt, because it’s not that I am defective, but just baffling. And that is OK.

So here it is: the first Mother’s Day without my mom. And despite my bravado (which I only shared with my own psyche), it was painful. Much more painful than any other Mother’s Day. It was painful because she wasn’t here, of course. But it was painful because it was a reminder that even if she was here, it wouldn’t have been what other people seem to have. (I’m fully aware of how social media only presents us in one light, and usually it’s positive, which is another reason I wrote that post on Instagram, because I refuse to put myself in a false “Amazing Amy” light.) And since she is gone, that will never happen.

I didn’t get to have an uncomplicated, healthy relationship with my mother, and now I never will.

Which is why I wrote that last sentence of my Instagram post: forgiveness, grace. Forgiving not just my mom but myself (although I can’t imagine what either of those would look like). And letting grace work forward, so that while yes, I wasn’t a perfect mom, I was a mom who tried her best but made many mistakes—while that is true, it isn’t the only story. What I have is whatever future I have left with my smart, funny, caring, unique children and my relationship with them. And what I want to accomplish is that, when they eventually have their first Mother’s Day without their mother, they won’t have this snarl of emotions. They will know (I hope, I hope that is what I can give them) that I love them and that I am proud of them and that they didn’t disappoint me, not once, not ever.

Here I am, just past three weeks into my 100-day project of blogging every day. I’ve missed a few days, but not many. As I’ve continued to write my posts, I have begun asking myself: Why am I doing this? Not in an existential “why” sense. But, what do I hope to gain? What can I learn from this process?

One thing I wanted to do was re-establish a writing habit. In a sense I have done that, as I’ve blogged nearly every day. But it hasn’t been at the same time or with any predictability. I’ve written some of my blog posts while watching TV at night with Kendell, which really is just fulfilling my self-imposed requirement rather than dedicating myself more fully to writing. I started out doing this project with the hopes that I would find my writing personality, my writing identity, again. I’m not sure I’ve done that. I think I need to find ways to explore other topics and look at things in different lights. Not because I’m trying to capture more readers or followers, but because of that search for my writerly self.

But this post is not going to be one of those kinds of posts.

Today while I was gardening, I was listening to a podcast about scrapbooking. (The Scrap Gals podcast.) In this episode they were talking about telling our stories (as opposed to feeling like everything you make has to be about someone else, an idea I am thoroughly a fan of), and one of the ways to do that was to make a layout about who you are right now. I used to do this with some regularity, mainly about my kids but sometimes about myself. Often enough that has an abbreviation in my scrapbooking spreadsheet (YES! I do have a spreadsheet about scrapbooking; two, in fact): LRN (for Life Right Now). Sometimes I did this on my blog, sometimes in my journal, sometimes on scrapbook layouts. I really do love looking back on those past ways of being and thinking, and while yes: it isn’t really fantastic writing, I do think there is also merit in it, simply because my own story matters, too. So here it is, the long-awaited and very popular post about my life right now.

My biggest complaint about my body right is my unreliable knees. (Ten years ago, when I was in my 30s, I’m not sure I had any complaints about my body, except the usual my-boobs-are-small-my-thighs-are-big vexes.) They aren’t really painful, per se, except for occasional stabby pains and right at the start of a run or a hike. More, it’s just that they don’t work like they’re supposed to. They just don’t bend normally, and the right one (the one that suffered from a crackled femoral condyle) won’t straighten all the way. But still: I am running and hiking. I am trying to find exercises to strengthen my quads that don’t require lunges or squats (harder to find than you might imagine). And I’m just going to keep on keeping on for as long as I can.

I am pondering going back to physical therapy though. Maybe once a week e-stim and stem would be good for me.

While my identity is not only tied to my kids, no life-right-now list would be complete without them. Haley is living in Colorado with her boyfriend, Austin. She is working at a pharmacy at a hospital. She recently figured out that she applied to med schools too late last year and so will have to reapply this spring. So, one more year of working, saving money, and (I hope) resting and building up her energy for med school. Jake is living at home and sorting out his life. So much of his story right now is just that, his story, not mine to tell. But he is doing so much better than he was a year ago. I have every faith in him that he will figure it out. Nathan is at his AIT in Arizona. It is so nice to be able to communicate with him so much faster now; when he was at Basic we could only send letters. Now, in the evenings he can call or text. He is struggling with shin splints and has discovered the magical inefficiencies of military health care. Kaleb is enjoying his soccer season finally. He wasn’t thrilled when it started again, as he has a new love: basketball. He loves basketball. He even watches basketball games on TV. His track season ended yesterday with the regional meet, called Alpine Days. He got 4^th in the state on high jump, matching his PR of 5’2”.

Stuff I really like right now: half square triangles, dark chocolate toffees from Trader Joe’s, hazelnut-flavored beverages, my new big pink mug, being outside doing almost anything but especially working in my garden, the last Game of Thrones season, talking about the last Game of Thrones season with Jake.

Things I am grappling with: My faith. (Right now I don’t have any callings and am not going to church very often. Am I happier this way? I’m not sure yet.) Whether or not we should move. (I know exactly what I want my new, imaginary house to look like. In my head it is designed to accommodate the next 25 years of my life, which I’m hoping will eventually include sons and daughters-in-law, grandchildren, family parties, as well as Kendell’s OCD issues. But…I love this house, too. I love my memories here. I love my trees and my yard and my view of Timp. But I want to live somewhere I feel like I fit in. But that’s a lot of effort and expense considering the very large possibility that maybe I don’t fit in anywhere. But that vision in my head of my beautiful new house!) How to fulfill my goals. What will happen if I really do need knee surgery. Selling my mom’s house. Coming to terms with the reality of my relationship with one of my sisters. (Despite what alcoholics and addicts think, their actions, words, and decisions don’t only influence them.) How to help my adult kids in their adult lives. Whether or not I should let Kaleb play ninth grade basketball. (He is really good at basketball but his pediatric cardiologist doesn’t want him to play and that’s all I can write about it for now because I am filling up with terror and despair.)

What I am wearing right now: (I don’t mean literally right now as I write this, but if you’re curious: a black running shirt and the long sleeve from the half marathon I ran in Brooklyn; Kendell just walked by and said “you stink!” which is true as I just finished running and haven’t showered yet.) My knees feel so much better if I wear compression. So lately I wear a loose dress (almost all of them are like this one by Karen Kane) with black running tights or capris. Do I look weird in these outfits? I don’t know. I think I’m old enough that I don’t care. I also wear my workout clothes when I work in the yard. Or do housework. Sometimes I make myself put on actual jeans or pants, but honestly I just want some compression.

The story of my shoes: I have to wear orthotics because of my bunions and capsulitis. So I’m still wearing my Dr. Martens a lot. I know, summer is coming. (I dread the coming of summer because I look so awful in shorts.) But my feet are happier in shoes with tons of support. BUT I’ve got my Chacos out of the summer-shoe storage and my feet are also happy in those. Don’t tell anyone, but because of an awesome deal at the Rack, I currently own five pair of Brooks running shoes. And, because Kendell is slightly obsessed, I have three pair of Keen hiking boots. But one has purple laces so how could I resist?

Hormone status: I’m forty-freaking-seven. I am starting to have…I don’t think they are actual hot flashes. They are hot sleeping. My circadian rhythms are a freaking Katie Perry song. Also, losing weight: that’s a myth, right? From here on out it’s just gain, gain, gain, no matter what I do???

Stuff I do: work (poetry & essay collections, book group everything, reference desk hours), laundry (it is so weird how easy it is to do laundry for just three people—Jake does his own. Sometimes the easiness gets me behind, though, because I’ve started thinking, ehhhh, there’s almost nothing in the baskets, I’ll wait until tomorrow and then I wait too long.), running, hiking, gardening (OH how I love spring gardening!), cooking (but only sometimes, see note about 3 people’s laundry; it’s the same with food and, actually, I need to be better about cooking). Every morning I drive Kaleb to school, which is kind of a pain because it means I have to haul my butt out of bed, now that he’s at a different junior high and can’t walk. But once I’m awake I actually really love it because it gives us some one-on-one time to talk or tell stories or fight over the radio station. I’ve been sewing a lot and honestly, I think it is my way of coping with my mom’s death. A little bit of scrapbooking, but not much.

One last thing: I got a new curling iron from my friends the McAlisters and it is the best thing ever. Smooth curls, not too tight or loose. Swoon!

When I was pregnant with Haley, right at the end there was a little scare where the doctor was worried that her growth had slowed down. A few stress-tests and ultrasounds later, he decided that everything was probably OK but that an induction would probably be best. (I have to add that I’m grateful I had babies when the philosophy was “let’s induce!” instead of how it is now, which is “wait until you’re 57 weeks pregnant and then we’ll think about it.” I would be pissed if I were some of my friends, who’ve had enormous, 11-pound babies. Kaleb, at almost 9, was a struggle to deliver and my body has never been the same.) When he was looking at his calendar, he said “what about Thursday, April 20^th?”

“That’s my birthday,” I said.

“Oh, that would be so cute!” the nurse said. “She’d be like a birthday gift for you! And you could share your birthdays your whole life!”

But I already had a strong sense of who that baby would be. I had a feeling that she would want to have her own birthday. So I disappointed that nurse (who really: she was beaming, she loved that idea so much) and said “No, let’s do it on the next day if you can.”

The doctor had space that day, the nurse stopped beaming, and I had my daughter the day after my birthday.

She was still a gift, though.

One of the things I have loved about seeing my kids grow into adults is witnessing them becoming people. With each of my pregnancies, I had that same strong sense of each of their personalities, and in general it has proved true. But how they use those personalities has been so amazing to watch.

That feeling I had about Haley was partly the idea that she would be independent. An adventurer. And that has been the case. She was never a clingy baby who couldn’t be away from me. She could play on her own; she was happy to be held by almost anyone (but she rejected any form of snuggling; you could hold her but she wanted to see what was going on) and she never seemed afraid of anything. When she was barely two, Kendell and I went to Hawaii for a week; she stayed with my mom and my mother-in-law and was happy and never cried about missing us.

Independent. Confident. Strong. An adventurer.

Now she is having another birthday. Now she is in her twenties and living her life fully. She thrived in college, where she worked nearly full-time and still graduated with two majors and three minors. She is a great employee, even when she had a sexist and demeaning boss. She is passionate about her causes. She is a feminist through and through. She is smart—so smart. And she loves to travel; so far in her life she’s been to Canada, Mexico several times, Florida, many of the cities on the east coast, and Europe, including a semester in Spain.

I still remember her face, though. Her face when they handed her to me, her baby face, her toddler face surrounded by her blonde curls. Her smile before her braces, her smile after. I will never not feel that same feeling I had at her birth: awe and gratitude and excitement at her existence.

I’m glad I followed my gut all those years ago, even if I disappointed the nurse. It was one of my first decisions as a mom, and while I’ve made many mistakes with other choices, that one was right. She needs her own day. I'm glad our birthdays are so close, though. I love that we can celebrate during the same weekend.

She will always be a gift in my life.

Today was my 47^th birthday. I have some thoughts on the year that just passed in my life, but today I just want to document the things I did. A few things happened today that don’t usually happen on my birthday, so I just wanted to mark it.

After a horrible night’s sleep, in which I dreamed I had an argument with Kendell and then I was so angry I just wanted to break something so I went into the kitchen and threw everything I could think of onto the floor, the walls, the counters, the cupboards, and nothing, nothing would break—after that pleasant dream, I dragged  myself out of bed and started baking. I made two cakes, a vanilla Mary Ann cake with blackberries and raspberries and blackberry whipped cream and a triple-layer lemon cake. I sipped a hot beverage and listened to music and made cake, and it was a lovely start to my birthday.

(Even if, yeah, I was sort of making my own birthday cake.)

I did cry twice, though. Once when I thought about my first birthday without my mom. The second time when I had that birthday moment, when you stop to think about how much of your life has already past, and wonder what it has all meant, and how you might’ve wasted the time you had.

Anyway.

I cleaned up the kitchen a bit, changed into my running clothes, and ran down to the soccer fields, where I caught the last half of Kaleb’s soccer game. They ended up tied, 1-1, and he was bugged about not winning but glad to not lose.

We grabbed him and his cousin Jace, who was hanging out with us today, some food from McDonald’s. We were in the truck, which is incredibly uncomfortable with four people, but since I am now officially the shortest, I still crawled in and out of the back cab (those inflexible knees make that difficult!)

Once we were home, I made the lemon cream cheese frosting for the lemon cake (I am feeling a lack of confidence in my lemon cake; I’m not sure everyone loves it like I do. It’s pretty lemony, which is what I love; it’s not too sweet, and the texture is enhanced by the lemon-curd filling), and then Kendell frosted it while I showered. I had him put it on the cake plate that my mom always used for birthday cakes and which I was bequeathed by my sisters because I do the most of the baking.

Sniff.

Kendell and I ran a few errands, and then we went to the park to meet the rest of my family for a little Easter party. That’s the thing that doesn’t usually happen on my birthday: I got to see both of my sisters, and several of my nieces and grand-nieces and nephews. Becky even brought some birthday candles, which we couldn’t light because it was too windy, but still. There was cake and singing and candles and family, and it was perfect (even if it really wasn’t a party for me).

I didn’t eat a whole bunch at the party, though, because we had plans to go to dinner. In between, I got to talk to Nathan, and Haley sent me a text. Not as good as actually getting to hug everyone, but at least we all got to talk.

A little bit later, Jake, Kendell, Kaleb and I went to dinner together. We don’t do this often enough, between Jake’s work schedule and everyone’s food particulars. So it was so nice to sit together, talk, and share a meal. (We went to Mi Ranchito, a local Mexican restaurant that has my favorite Mexican rice ever.)

Finally, to end a sweet birthday, a little bit of sewing and a little bit of relaxing, and some prep for tomorrow (it’s Easter!).

I can’t let myself hope too much—but I’d really like to think that this good birthday could be a harbinger of good things to come in my 48^th trip around the sun.

Favorite Quotes: “And yet, I will think of the future, to remind me that the present is not forever…what is the present without the future?” (Vasya)

and

“It is not for men and women to presume what the Lord wishes. That way lives evil, when men put themselves too high, saying, I know what God wants, for it is also what I want.” (Sergei)

First off: this will not be a traditional book review. Partly because it’s difficult to review the third book in a series without spoiling the previous two. To that point, The Winter of the Witch is the story of Vasya’s further adventures in medieval Russia. She interacts more with her brother Sasha in this novel, but less with her sister and niece. The way the story played out helped me to understand that the second book, The Girl in the Tower, was the story of Vasya’s adolescence, and her mistakes and faults there were the function of learning how to be in the world. In this third part, we get to see her learn from her mistakes, find her unique strengths, feel grown-up emotions in many forms. I also felt that the story struck a good balance: Vasya is not a girl in distress waiting for a man to rescue her from her trials (this makes me crazy), but she is also not impossibly bad-ass (which also makes me nuts). Instead, she does some things on her own and in other experiences, learns to use the resources she has, including other people and beings, to assist her.

I was not disappointed by the ending of this series, and am I so glad I started it despite my initial misgivings.

But what I really want to write about is how some books resonate within a life. I haven’t given her a name yet, but I have invented a Greek goddess of reading. Her role in the Pantheon is to bring to pass the matching of stories to souls. Not always, not all moments in a life and not all books. But sometimes she bequeaths the perfect book at the perfect time, and for me, The Winter of the Witch at this exact moment in my life—the winter before I turned 47, when my mom died, when I have begun to feel like I am on the other side of some intense struggles and so in a time of figuring out what I learned from them—was one of those moments of bookish auspicious grace.

This is because of the time of life I find myself in. My main topics of thought revolve around the fact that I am turning 47 next month. Somehow, 47 seems much older than 46. So much closer to 50. If I am lucky, I have two decades of life left, maybe two and a bit, and they will be full of bodily failings. My body will do whatever it does, but joints and wrinkles and failing eyesight feels out of my control. If you had asked me when I was 20 what my life would look like when I was almost 47, I would have described successes. I wanted to be a mother, and I am blessed beyond measure that I got to do so. But I also thought I would achieve other things, and honestly, I didn’t. My 20-year-old self might be disappointed by me (although I think she’d be delighted, if not a bit surprised, at how much I love running and hiking). And my relationship with my religious faith is, right now, deeply conflicted. I think it always has been, but while I was so deep in raising my family I didn’t stop to really question, to let the conflicts rise to the surface, and that itself has done damage.

In some ways I am more at peace with myself than I could’ve imagined at 20. In other ways I am anxious and troubled and saddened by the ways I failed and the mistakes I made.

Really, my midlife-crisis-style questionings have absolutely nothing to do with a young woman in a medieval Russian fairytale retelling. But there was something that happened as I read the book; a deep sense of peace and of being heard, somehow, settled over me.

It has to do with those two quotes. Vasya is right: a big part of the present is influenced by the future. I’ve always been a person who thinks about the future. Just one example, I remember telling my grandma Florence, who I loved dearly as a little girl, that I couldn’t wait to be a grandma just like her. She looked at me quizzically and said “but you’re still a little girl, you should enjoy being little.” I do try to live in the moment, but I am also prone to imagine the future. For so long, the future I looked forward to was full of things I would do or experience, but now it feels like what is left is witnessing what happens to other people.

I will not always be almost-47. Knowing the future is coming makes me love right now, even with its complexities, because I know everything will change, and because I also know that I cannot imagine what will happen in the future. Even while my decisions in the now shape the future. So I am deep in pondering: what, given how my current life really is, should I do with the time I have left? How can I learn, like Vasya, from the mistakes I made and then use that knowledge to shape the future in different ways?

But it’s also deeply entwined with religion. Or faith. Or belief in something other than this world. I’m feeling so prickly about old men telling me what God thinks. Especially since so often it bumps hard against what I think God thinks. Or what God wants me to do with my life. Or what I want to do with my life. There are many religious characters in The Winter of the Witch, and they respond in different ways to the turbulence of their time; the ones I respond to best are the ones who are flexible in their thinking. What is good? What is evil? What is the best way for me to act? How can I be a good person? There are plenty of old men who are willing to tell me what they think, and when I’ve followed their ideas blindly I have found myself in places I didn’t want to be. Not necessarily evil, but uncomfortable. Not the right fit for me. In fact, I feel like I have been pretending for far too long—my analogy of the bloody dress—and I just don’t want to anymore. I want to believe in a God who loves me not because I am good but because I am myself. I can’t pretend to know what God wants for anyone, even, sometimes, for myself, and I no longer want to justify anything by thinking “it’s what God wants.”  Fitting that into the structures of my life is one of my main focuses, and I will freely admit I have no idea how to do it.

Winter of the Witch didn’t really give me any answers to the questions I have. It entertained me; I loved the world building, the concept of Midnight, the interaction of ancestors’ choices with ours, Vasya’s growth, the resolution. The horses and the history mingled with fairy tale. The way the plot is led by questions. I will forever think of Ded Grib when I eat mushrooms. Most importantly, though, it felt like an answering voice, a story entirely like my own that still told me that my own questions and future are also important.

Some days, my work feels mundane. I love what I do, of course, but the negative of working somewhere you love is that the place loses some of its magic. This afternoon, for example: I spent time reordering damaged books, pulling new teen books for a YA display, and talking to patrons. Good, happy work, but what is usual. 

But some shifts feel numinous, somehow. The library can never feel for me the way it felt before I worked here (I can't smell that library scent anymore, for example), but as I come to understand the library's moods, its weather patterns and shifting people, I find a deeper, more connected sort of magic. That is how this morning felt, so here is a story told in vignettes​ that perhaps will mean something only to me...

Before the library opens, I take thirty seconds to stand at the tall windows and look at the mountains in the morning light. The air is finally starting to get a little bit clearer here, and the middle parts of the mountains are starting to turn orange in spots; this view of Cascade framed by the library windows is one of my favorites. I turn on computers and set out newspapers and wipe down keyboards. Then I clean up the blue toner powder that someone must've splattered last night onto the black-and-white printer, and then I unlock the doors.

It is a Friday morning, so my father's old friend Craig stops by. We talk about hiking, and of the peacefulness of being in mountains that no one goes to. He tells me, as he does every Friday morning, how he misses my dad and wishes they could go on a desert walk with him again. "Of course, we were always looking down at the ground, watching for flakes of arrowheads," he says, because twenty years ago you could wander the Utah desert and find arrowheads. "I know now it's illegal and wrong to take them," Craig says, "so now I leave them. But when I find one I always think your dad lead me to it." I think about the morning we buried my dad, when I didn't want him to go into the dark without anything but his clothes, so I put one of his illegally-procured arrowheads in his pocket, and how the muscle of his thigh was also a stone. For a moment it is entirely absurd that my father's friend Craig, walking carefully and slowly with his cane on his stroke-twisted legs, is here in the library talking to me about books, hiking, and arrowheads, and my dad is...where, I don't know for sure, but his body is in the ground and in his pocket there is a stone.

I help an older woman learn how to download e-books onto her iPad. At first she is unsure but as we move through the steps she starts to understand. I think about how baffling our world can be to someone raised in the 50s, when refrigerators were finally affordable enough that middle-class families could have them, washing machines were becoming popular, and the credit card was just becoming a reality (but only, of course, for men).  Our technology now is nearly ephemeral...you don't really hold​ an e-book, you never touch an e-audio book, but it still gets you to a story. I can't help wondering, every time I help someone who is initially baffled by—or actually a little bit afraid of this technology—what the world will be like in another twenty or thirty years. What else will we invent before I am dead? And will I be the brave sort, always trying new things, or the kind who is afraid?

I help another older patron who tells me that she hates fiction, especially that "wild, made-up sciencey stuff" but she wants to read something from the Great American Read list. (Which doesn't have any non-fiction.) After we talk for a little while, I get her three books in large print: Anne of Green Gables, which she'd never read but enjoyed the movies, To Kill a Mockingbird, which she'd read "years and years ago" but would really like to read again, and Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she'd never heard about but agreed sounded like something she would love. I always ask the patrons on crutches or with canes if they'd like me to get their books for them, and she says she would love that. I do this to help them, but also as a sort of good-karma thing for myself, as one day I will be an old woman but still need books, and hopefully there will be someone in the future who will help me access them if I can't get to them myself.

I check people in to use our study rooms, I help a woman figure out how to see the order of a series, I tell another woman where to find Colleen McCullough's novels, and I walk an elderly gentleman over to the biography section. I have a conversation with a man who has the same name and spelling as my husband's deceased brother; we talk for a bit about how much more difficult it is to trace back Scandinavian names as the change from -sen to -dottir and back again through the line. I confess I don't know as much as I should about my husband's line, but I can trace my McCurdy line all the way back to the Scottish MacCurdy clans. 

I read my email and get caught up on book group reservations.

A small blond girl in a pink dress, perhaps two, has wandered over the bridge to my side of the library, without her mother. I watch her for a minute to see if anyone is coming to look for her. She stands calmly by one of our sculptures, which is of a crouched man. Done in alabaster that looks like the flesh of raw muscle, this sculpture is either terrifying or fascinating to our little patrons. She just stands and looks at it, carefully touching the ear. I walk over to her and ask if she knows where her mom is. She pops her binki out of her mouth, shrugs, and says "nope. Let's go find her." She puts her binki back in her mouth and reaches up to hold my hand. Her tiny fingernails are painted turquoise. We wander over to the children's section and in a few minutes find her mom, who didn't realize her daughter Kate (she told me her name with another quick binki removal) was missing. As I walk back to my desk, I remember my own days of bringing my kids to the library. I can almost feel how it felt to have their little hands in mine, and the sound of their voices, and the deep, lovely exuberance they brought to finding books at the library. For a moment I feel like all of my life has already been lived, and that every sweet, gentle moment is behind me; I swallow that familiar lump and get on with it, as there is no crying at the reference desk. (Except I cry all the time at the reference desk. Reticently.)

Yesterday was global Bra Squad Day, an idea from Kelly Roberts that basically means: go outside. Exercise. Just wear your bottoms and a sports bra.Celebrate your body for what it is and what it can do and how strong it is.

I thought it would be a great idea to take up this challenge because it seemed like it would push me to think about my body issues. I confess that at the beginning of my hike, I thought no…I can’t do this. Maybe I should just take a picture and then put my tank back on. But Kendell, who was hiking with me, decided to join me; I looked back and he, too, was hiking with his shirt in his hand.

Still, it probably didn’t hurt that we didn’t see one other person on our hike. (Maybe because we started hiking at 11:30 on a really hot and sunny summer day?)

As I hiked, I thought about my body and how I feel about it. I tried to think of a time when I didn’t feel a barrage of critical thoughts about it, and realized as I kept going back through time in my memory that it was a moment before I hit puberty. Twelve or thirteen, then; I was sitting outside on our patio, reading in the shade, and I got up because I wanted to do some cartwheels. (I never said I wasn’t a strange child.) As I cartwheeled around my yard, I remember thinking I love that I can do this! It’s almost like flying! I felt light as air and strong all at once, overjoyed at what my body could do.

Of course, gymnastics is hardly a sport that emphasizes positive body image. As I entered puberty I was highly conflicted: I want to stay small but I was also deeply envious of all of my friends’ boobs. I kept waiting and waiting and waiting, being hopeful…but boobs never really happened for me, at least not much, and I have always been self-conscious of that part of my body. (Except…I also am grateful that I don’t have to work too hard to find a sports bra that prevents any bouncing; I’m not sure I could do that with bigger breasts.) Even though a smaller chest meant I still had that gymnastics build.

But what I was always bothered by is my thighs. No way around it: they are not petite. They are strong, but I definitely don’t have a thigh gap. I still remember the sting when one of my gymnastics teammates asked me why I couldn’t vault and tumble like Mary Lou Retton, since my thighs were actually bigger than hers. When I look back at the photos I have of me at gymnastics meets, I don’t see a girl with extraordinarly large thighs. Just strong legs, but in my head? In my head I was castigating my thunder thighs the whole time.

Isn’t that a shame? At that time of my life, I could fly, just a little. I could jump hard enough to fight just the tiniest bit against gravity. I could do a beautiful switch leap. I could still do the splits, not only on the ground but in the air. I could do a back flip on the balance beam, and an ariel. I had enough lung capacity to tumble and to dance. Plus, I was strong. I could do thirty pull ups and fifty dips and a hundred sit ups.

But what I felt was my boobs are too small and my thighs are too big.

A thought that, I confess, has never left me.

❦ ❦ ❦

I felt OK about my body in my twenties. Maybe I was just too busy to really pay attention, but honestly. I never exercised, I drank at least 32 ounces of soda every single day, I baked all the time, and my body just stayed the same size. (Except for pregnancies, of course…but I managed to gain less than 22 pounds with each of them.)

But then, the January before I turned thirty arrived. Kendell had been laid off and we didn’t know how we’d cope, so I decided to go back to school. I had three young kids and a husband without a job. I had started running by then, but not consistently. And, BAM. In two weeks I discovered my first grey streaks in my hair and I gained ten pounds, and I haven’t been the same since.

Now, it does matter what I eat. Now, I only have soda very, very rarely (and I’m honestly just fine with that). Now, if I let a week go by without exercising, I immediately start gaining weight.

Sometimes it feels like my body betrays me, over and over. I still have disappointing breasts and large thighs. But now I also have a big lump of fat on each side of my spine that bulge over my sports bra (I call them my back boobs with as much affection as I can…but really, I hate them and I don’t even know why I have them). My belly is almost irreversibly soft, and I am starting to grow a good pair of bat wings, and I have a little roll of fat over each of my hips.

Plus the skin on my knees is starting to get wrinkly.

And sometimes I just want to shake my own body. I mean…I feel like I treat it fairly well. Sure, I eat more sugar than I should. But not even close to the amount I ate in my twenties. I exercise with far more dedication than I did in my twenties, too. But every year, a bit more weight sticks around.

❦ ❦ ❦

So taking my shirt off? Exposing all of that flesh to anyone who might wander by? Even just sports-bra’ing it with only my husband around made me terribly uncomfortable.

Except, I came around a curve and there was a breeze on that side of the mountain, and I felt a little bit cooler without an extra layer.

I realized that without a shirt I felt more present in my activity, because more of my skin was experiencing the air, the heat, the whisk of a breeze.

And that helped me think past my insecurities, past my various fat blobs.

Instead, I started thinking about what my body has done since I turned thirty and lost control. I survived teaching for two years (which seems cerebral but actually requires a bunch of physical energy as teachers never sleep). I had one more baby and nursed him for an entire year. (Those small boobs? It goes against all laws of physics, I swear, but I had tons of milk.) I learned to run for longer distances, half marathons and even one full. I took up hiking and discovered that I had a previously-unknown talent: I can hike uphill really fast for a long, long time. I kept moving even with intense back pain for five or six years and five painful ankle sprains and two enormous bunions and one toe with capsulitis and skin that blisters just from the glancing pressure of someone looking at it. I discovered that one of my greatest pleasures is moving my body through the world.

So really: why don’t I love it more? Why do I berate it, and wish it were different? Why can’t I see it, yet, as beautiful even if it doesn’t meet the world’s version of beautiful?

All of which are a lot of deep thoughts brought on by taking off my shirt in front of my husband, I suppose.

But I do feel like I gained something by participating in this exercise. It made me realize that despite thinking I am OK with my body, I’m probably mostly not, and that my habits of thinking go back for decades; they are tangled up in some pretty deep emotional issues (I mean…I haven’t even discussed the way my mom’s body issues influence mine). And that maybe the answer isn’t in going to the gym more, doing more push-ups, or eating fewer cookies. Maybe the answer is in focusing on the positives, on reminding myself that running and hiking are privileges that not every body is given, on seeing some of the “failures” as evidence of strong things I have done.

I’m not sure I will ever be able to love my body like I should, or quiet the myriad voices pointing out my flaws. But life is, even though this is a cliché, a marathon and not a sprint. I still have time. And I intend on using that time by moving, even if my flesh does jiggle.