The dress was white with blue flowers. It was a simple long shift dress in standard late nineties fashion, with a slight cling and wide tank top like straps. When I tried it on and looked in the mirror of the dressing room, I cried. My stomach was rounded instead of flat and I crumpled under waves of self-loathing. In reality, my stomach then followed the normal rounding of a cisgender female body, but by this point in my middle school years, I had fully internalized two truths: thin is best and I was not thin.
Is there anyone who identified female in the United States in the 90’s that didn’t entertain these kinds of thoughts even briefly? Somehow, I don’t think too many of us escaped the general cultural attitudes of body shape and size unscathed.
On top of that, there was a Mormon flavor found in the hyper modest attitudes of the 90’s and early aughts, when our shorts were knee length, our shoulders covered, and our midriffs unmentionable.
I was (and am) a short person with stocky, compact legs and I couldn’t help but despair at my utter inability to be tall and willowy. There was no way those knee length shorts and full coverage and not-too-tight shirts could actually be flattering on my body. It was nearly impossible not to compare my dowdy but obediently modest clothing options to the tall, tan, stick-thin Mormon beauties whose waists were so narrow and legs so lengthy those long shorts ended up a few inches above the knee. (If that description fits you, I know you were also locked up in your own personal mind traps and may not have had the perfect lives I imagined you living at the time. Solidarity sisters). In all those comparisons between what I felt I lacked and others had, I internalized another truth: A female body should be both modest and conventionally attractive and I, in looking modest but not achieving attractiveness, must accept my wallflower fate.
Now in my late thirties, I’ve been untangling my own sense of wellbeing in the body that I have – a fat, short, stocky body whose breasts might be called pendulous and whose belly is, in my daughter’s loving and endearing term “wriggly.” My legs require wide-calf boot sizes, and my upper arms can easily resemble bat wings (is that Halloween costume inspiration?). These words are no longer words I loathe or fear. I won’t compare this body anymore. This body has carried me through three decades and toward a fourth. It has weathered pregnancy, birth, post-partum depression, my workaholic era, overwhelming stress and anxiety, a faith transition, trauma, and anything else I’ve thrown at it.
These are my truths: My body is a survivor worthy of respect. My body is good because every day it does the best it can to do what I need it to do. My body is desirable when I feel desirable.
These truths I’ve embraced in my journey of healing my relationship to my body led to an experience in Relief Society one week when the discussion focused on the natural man. A list was made explaining ways our natural man pulls us away from God. Many comments made references to our bodies. I felt compelled to raise my hand and ask that we add self-love of our bodies to the list. I said that, as women, our bodies are often objectified and vilified (though definitely not that eloquently – this sounds better in my head after the fact). I talked about how I wanted to love my whole self, even all my weaknesses and that maybe, just maybe, my “natural man” isn’t something to hate or fear or destroy. I’d rather learn from and accept my weaknesses and, for the good of my mental and emotional health, I need to love myself rather than fear that there are elements of myself that are inherently evil. I might as well have electrocuted the room because it seemed like they collectively jumped, and several other voices urgently worked to counter what I had said. Gently, I tried to defuse the panic, but I’m not sure I was successful. Self-love was not added to the list. After the meeting, some younger women came over to appreciate my words. Something about what I said hit a nerve with some of the older women in the room while ringing true to some of the younger women in the room.
Weaving through these three memories, it seems significant to me that my journey to find healing in the way I think of my body and my self has been concurrent with a journey of deconstruction and reconstruction in my faith practices. It might be a chicken and egg situation, but I don’t think it’s by chance that both have become nuanced. The truths I integrate into my life now are rooted in mercy and joy. The truths I have left behind were rooted in fear and shame. Both worldviews have much to do with how I engage with and have engaged with my church while inhabiting a cisgender female body.
I still have plenty more untangling to do to understand my body issues and my relationship to my body as it was shaped by my experience in the church, but I’m happy with the truths I’ve found for myself at for the moment. They are good to me.
8 Responses
Thank you so much for writing this. I didn’t grow up in the Church but still found it so relatable. And I’m sorry that your Relief Society wasn’t open-minded enough to embrace self-love (!!), but I’m glad you were there to voice that for others.
I’m glad you could relate. It’s difficult to untangle what’s coming from popular culture and Mormon culture, but also vital to recognize that these harmful messages were really coming at our young selves from all directions.
Beautifully written. Thank you for this.
Thank you!
My favorite sentence in this: “My body is good because every day it does the best it can to do what I need it to do.” I need to give my aging, less-coordinated body some appreciation! Thanks!
So relatable! And same about the wide calf boots.
The problem is that our theology needs a “divine”, “abstract”, “greater-than-us”, type of Father-God contrasted against our “mundane”, “mortal”, “imperfect”, “present” humanity/”natural man” (as God’s children).
A choice to deal with this tension is to change how we see/describe “God”. That is claiming authority from leaders to redefine divinity and authority (which the leaders do not like).
Another choice to deal with this tension is how to change how we see/describe “ourselves” and our experience/”ways of sinning”. That is claiming authority from leaders to redefine terms. This action also returns moral authority/decision-making back to ourselves – away from leaders (which they do not like).
A COMPLICATION:
That “Father-God” mentality gets challenged we think of a “divine helpmeet” – Heavenly Mother. She also needs to be “divine”, and “present” (to fulfill Her Divine Mothering – because an abstract Mother is not “Nurturing” by definition)”. For anyone (divine or not) to be “present”, it means in a sense “immersed in the current experience” – which is by definition, not abstract.
Since we cannot talk about Heavenly Mother in a present tense, we correlate any “experience/sensation” with morality (aka “the natural man”) – which means that Heavenly Mother and Their children lose again…
My body is good Yes, yes, yes!! Our bodies are good. I would have very much appreciated to hear what you said about loving our bodies because I too have had to disentangle the body shame I was taught at church and learn to love my body. Also, I have come to the opinion that the natural man stuff isn’t about the body; it’s about how humans can easily become corrupted by power, create divisions, and sort each other into categories.