My Body

Instead of a New Year's Resolution (which, if you are like most people, is already a fading memory), I'm going for a mindset change this year. I'm not going to lose 10 pounds, get more sleep or eat healthier. This year, I resolve to love my body.

Sounds simple enough, right?

Uh-uh. It will not be easy. My body has let me down time after time the past 5 years. We have quite a history.

I think yoga and running have both guided me down this path recently. They've helped me to focus on what my body CAN do rather than what it can't. For as long as I can remember, I've had a bad relationship with my body. Throw infertility in there and we had become mortal enemies.

I think a lot of women struggle with their body images. And who can blame us - we're going along minding our own business as girls and then BLAM - hips. WHAP - boobs (well, not so much for me on this one...). WHAM - cramps, moodiness, etc. Our bodies change right before our eyes and during a time in our lives when we feel like everyone is staring at us anyways. I remember in high school, a guy dumped me for another girl and then sent me diet pills C.O.D. Yeah. THAT helped.*

The changes that our bodies go through are to prepare us to have children. So when my body couldn't do that as an adult, it just added insult to injury. After all, wasn't a woman's body MADE to have children? If it couldn't do that, what good was it? It had let me down, cycle after cycle. In fact, I look back on my early runs and realize I was trying to punish my body for not being able to conceive. I was angry. Through all the treatments, I had rested, and thought positively, and made deals with it (and God). Why wasn't my body holding up its end of the bargain?

I don't know what light bulb went off in my head recently, but this is the only body I have. And I have limited time with it, so I should make the most of it. Maybe my particular model can't bear children. So what? It gets me where I want to go. It works hard. It has fun. So from now on, I'm going to try to love my body and be kind to it. To rejoice when it learns something new. To recognize and appreciate its strength. To challenge it to push farther.

Yet even as I write this, gritting my teeth through cramps, my body has played a horrible trick on me this week. My period is 6 days late - and I am NEVER late. But rather than berate it for torturing me, I am cheering my body on. My cycles are only 24 days, so 6 days late is much closer to "normal" than I've ever been. Don't get me wrong. I've been through a week of "no - it couldn't be", "do you think?", "what are the chances...". Even though I know the chances. Less than 1%. The doctors told me. But my old friend hope seems to sneak back in. Especially when my body plays a trick like this one! I even had a dream last night that we were at the doctor's to find out if I was pregnant. Turns out, I had been pregnant for awhile without knowing it and was ready to deliver. However, the doctor said that my body thought it was past that stage in life and didn't know how to deliver a baby, so they'd have to operate and weren't sure how it would go. Hmmmm.... guess I have a ways to go with my subconscious loving my body as well. ;-)

Does it look the way I want it to? Not really. Could it give me a baby? No. But how long can I dwell on that? How much does it matter? My body is good enough. And it's healthy and it does what I need it to do on a day to day basis, which is a pretty amazing thing. So wish me luck on this journey. I'm sure I'll stumble back into my old ways of self-flagellation every now and then. In the meantime, I plan to continue to use yoga and running to see what else this ol' body can do.



* To be fair, my sister and I had a free sample of "Depends" sent to him anonymously first for breaking my heart, but come on - that's just funny. Diet pills took it below the belt. (No pun intended...)