That put-on-your-swimsuit-for-your-kids'-sake post that I wrote about has spread its influence throughout the feminine half of the blogosphere, at least the sector* populated by mothering mothers. Elizabeth Duffy, writing at Patheos, had a good post the other day:
One of the swim coaches stood on the side of the pool in a handsome black tank, and she was as plump and dimply as the rest of us, but she stood up straight, shoulders back, making bold demonstrations of each stroke for her pupils. I remember thinking that her confidence paired with an obvious tendency not to take herself too seriously was very appealing, and not just to the eyes.
She was not slouching out of sight, and it wasn’t just because she found the right suit for her body type, or because she had memories to make. She had a job to do, an important one, and she clearly found her work fulfilling enough that she could be at peace with herself and delight in her body’s ability to do its job well.
This is really the way that I prefer to think about it; indeed, though getting in the water and splashing with your kids is important, this it's the reason behind that reason. We're raising kids, and so everything we do teaches them how to be. If we want to teach them what their bodies are good for -- doing and being, as part of their human wholeness; not just appearing and seeming, and certainly not merely things to be used and abused; well, being ashamed of the appearance of our own is only going to teach the wrong lessons.
Too, being focused on the jobs you have to do and the joys you want to have is better than being hyperfocused on What People Will Think When They See Me.
More from Elizabeth:
The irony is, that when a woman of a certain body type or a certain age decides to get thin–I count myself here–you really do end up giving everything else up as your mental energy goes into counting calories, planning meals, and incorporating strategies to prevent yourself from eating. There are many hours spent in the gym, many hours spent working on self-image rather doing things of interest to yourself or of import to other people.
Not every woman who decides to get fit loses their perspective this way, but I certainly have, and I have corroborated my experiences with female friends. When I decide to be thin, I become a very boring person, a stressed out person, someone who only thinks about food and mentally scourges herself for mistakes made when eating.
You don’t usually get to have it both ways–you don’t get to be a skinny woman, and at the same time, a woman who’s happy to sit at a bar and drink pints with her husband. You don’t get to be someone who is fully invested in being thin, and at the same time finds herself interesting enough in her own right to forget occasionally her body and its tendency to grow fat when it’s having fun.
I can also corroborate this. The year that I achieved my big weight loss was a year of absolute concentration and obsession. It consumed almost all my attention. I don't regret it, and I have found the effort to be fruitful in more ways than one -- it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity. But it was so costly.
But I wasn't bored.
I wasn't bored because, to put it bluntly, I am a geek, and I can really get into that which bores other people. Whatever my project, I must love it and dig deeply into it, understand it and analyze it, take it apart and put it together in different ways. This is how I cook, how I gestate and give birth and care for babies, how I educate my kids, how I approach faith. My life is a little laboratory, and it's okay if the results are not repeatable by others because they're highly tailored to my own surroundings. The year that I lost all that damn extra weight and learned to be an athlete was the first year that my own body became the laboratory for the sake of itself.
(And I do call it "becoming an athlete" for a reason. I won't call it just "fitness," it was more than that, an identity crisis was involved. I wanted not just to appear thin, but to feel like Elizabeth's swim instructor, strong and capable.)
So I wasn't bored. And if my spouse was bored, he did a good job of hiding it. We sat at the bar and drank pints together -- only we split them, and he drank more deeply than I did, for that year.
We still share pints that way. And that's emblematic of the difference.
Some friends speculated that it was possible for me to temporarily prioritize becoming an athlete in a way that it might not have been for me today, had I put it off. I was six years younger, I had only three children. And maybe that's so.
But staying an athlete, even an amateur one only competitive against herself, is a priority -- not in competition with the priorities of raising my family and accompanying my husband, but in union with them.
I am married to a person who aspires to be always training for the next goal. His sports are downhill skiing and climbing (both rock and ice); seeing as how we live in the northern plains instead of the western mountains, he's never going to be able to find the time to do either of them frequently enough to excel at either, but he can always be training for his next trip so he can have more options and have more fun. And so he tries to get to the gym three times a week if he can. And so it's something we do together -- not so much the climbing (I have an old wrist injury) but the training. Neither of us has the time to train very well or thoroughly, but it's something we can talk about over those single shared pints.
And since he's a geek too, and also since training involves chemistry and physics that neither of us has ever mastered, we can talk about it over and over and over again. That's a lot of pints.
Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin; his siblings and their spouses have been runners, mountain-bike and road-cycling racers, equestrians, and collegiate-level wrestlers, along with the occasional dabbling in climbing and downhill skiing.) We are working to pass it on to our kids. That priority meshes with our other family and marriage priorities, so it isn't in competition with them (although it has to be balanced with them: I have to teach and feed the children, and Mark has to go to work). I think this more than anything else is why the changes I made six years ago have remained permanent. They reinforce, and are reinforced by, the other good things I have in my life and want to keep.
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*Yeah, I couldn't stop myself from googling just to double check that "sector" was the correct geometrical term with respect to a piece of a sphere, as I knew it was for a circle. Although it isn't quite as satisfying because the arcs that define the sectors of a circle, being one-dimensional, perfectly tessellate the "surface" (i.e., the circumference) of the circle -- cf. pie charts -- but the domed spherical sectors by necessity have gaps between. Unless, of course, there are an infinite number of them in just the right distribution of volumes, much as you can fill a rectangular box perfectly with an infinite assortment of differently-sized spheres.**
**Yeah, I finished writing the footnote before I went on to write the rest of this post.
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Beware. Novel length comment coming:
"it was an achievement I had never thought possible, and it opened up all sorts of possibilities for me as well as leading to a lot of reflection on my identity."
I relate to this in a small, but meaningful way. My mother is 4'11, probably 50 pounds overweight (sound familiar), and is absolutely, thoroughly, and completely convinced it is not possible for her to lose weight. I have heard my whole life that, due to her genes and height, she cannot lose weight even though she is on a continual "diet." I could go on here, but won't.
My childhood and adolescence was spent obsessing by both of us that I not be fat like my mother. The extra pounds you gain as you first begin puberty were treated as a crisis and I was put on Slim-Fast. I had very unhealthy attitudes about eating tilting toward the disorder side all through high school even though I was very weight appropriate. I thought I was fat or fatish although one look at old pictures would prove I was delusional. (Just calculated my high school BMI: 19) When I went to college I did put on a bit of weight but that was because I was eating regularly and in the hubbub of the excitement of college, it didn't bother me except for that niggling thought in the back of my mind that I should lose some weight. When I got married, I almost immediately put on 10 more pounds and I was devastated. I was doomed to be fat just like my mother after all. There is no escaping your genes. Even though I didn't put on any more weight, I spent four years upset about it, convinced there was nothing I could do. (Calculated BMI: 24)
After four years of marriage, we started discussing the possibility of getting pregnant. In my mind, this was a turning point. If I were to get pregnant with the extra weight, I thought I would never, ever lose the weight because everybody knows that pregnancy dooms women to be fat forever. About three months before we were going to attempt to conceive, I was in a wedding and I was terribly unhappy with how I looked in the pictures and decided it was now or never. I consciously decided to start counting calories and measure my intake. And then, if by magic, the weight started to come off.
I cannot explain how shocked and surprised I was that I could actually lose weight. I had spent my whole life brainwashed that it was out of my control and solely determined by genetics. Over three or four months I learned what portions sizes really looked like and learned to resist my eating triggers. (I like to eat when I first get home from anywhere whether I'm hungry or not.) I lost about 12 pounds and felt, for the first time in my life, happy with my body. (BMI: 21.8) I was soon pregnant and wasn't sure what that would bring but was confident I could lose weight again if I had to do it.
It was a revelation. I do have some control. I am not doomed to only gain weight until I'm am certifiably obese. It is possible to have a healthy body image. Of course my mother says it is just because I have enough of my father's genes to counteract hers.
What I did is nothing on the scale of what you did, but I think I learned a similar lesson. It is true that I did obsess about it for those few months, but once you learn what to do and learn to view your body as accomplished and not a cruel joke, it is easier to implement the needed steps later. So I do agree with you that it is not a choice between being fat or being happy. These things can coincide as long as your "not-fat" goal is appropriate for your age and state. If I were trying to reattain my high school dimensions, I would be unhappy indeed.
Posted by: Jenny | 28 June 2014 at 11:20 AM
"Athleticism of a certain individualistic type is a family value for us. (It runs in Mark's family of origin"
I think that's a huge obstacle for me to overcome. Athleticism was never a high priority in my family of origin or in Dom's. Neither one of us is particularly interested in being athletic for its own sake and my geekery tends to focus on literature and theology and I have a hard time getting interested in crunching numbers and the kind of things you find interesting challenges.
For us to embrace the kind of several times a week gym going that you do so naturally would require a radical reordering or priorities and schedules for our family and would be fighting against our proclivities. I've never in my life been the type to exercise regularly other than taking daily walks, which for me has always been seasonal except the two year period when I was in grad school and didn't own a car and had to walk everywhere.
Posted by: Melanie B | 28 June 2014 at 12:23 PM
Jenny - fascinating comment . Every word of it. Especially the idea that accomplishment begets confidence which begets more success ( willingness to put up with self-denial) -- This is why learning to swim was such a turning point for me.
Melanie - I really only make it "naturally" to the pool about twice a week. Have to shuffle and scramble to get that to three times. Can't do four at all!
Posted by: Bearing | 28 June 2014 at 12:55 PM
My dad, on the other hand, has been a daily swimmer for ever. As far back as I can remember, he'd get up at 5, go to daily Mass, go for a swim and then go to work. He still does it now, except for the work part. Now he goes home and naps. And he might go to a later Mass. He had his stroke while swimming laps and ironically that's probably what got him to the hospital quickly enough that he could get treatment and have minimal lasting damage. Had he been at home, who knows how long it would have been till he was found.
But his exercise routine, like his prayer routine, was always just something he did on his own. It was never something we shared in. I don't think he knew how to let us in.
Posted by: Melanie B | 28 June 2014 at 09:12 PM
That is interesting too.
We haul all the kids to the gym a couple of times a week. I never really know if it "counts" as family time for them or not -- each of us is doing our own thing while we are there (unless they are in swim lessons, younger kids in child care, older boys might swim or try to throw a basketball through a hoop or use the exercise bike, Mark and I take turns with the baby). It's a convenient and easy way for us all to move around, especially in the winter when it's far too cold to go out. Sometimes in the middle of a school day that isn't going well, I will take the kids there -- it reboots the day, and I get a hot shower all to myself if nothing else.
The three oldest kids can go with Mark to the local climbing gym, too. They love that and we try to do it a few times a year.
I am envious of friends who regularly get their kids outdoors for a real hike, but it rarely seems to work when we have such a wide variety of ages. I mean, we can do it occasionally as a diversion or family activity, but it doesn't work to give everyone satisfying exercise. Family gym night replaces that.
Posted by: Bearing | 29 June 2014 at 09:34 PM