The Last Photo of My Body I Really Loved...

...was taken at age 9. I was pre-pubescent, just beginning to sense my body in a distinct way--sense it as being something other than simply hands that could grasp, legs that could kick, eyes that could see. By which I mean, I suppose, sense it as it appeared in the world. And I liked it: both my body, which was lanky and trouble-free, and its effect on others.

I think now that I may have liked it largely for its conformity to the slender ideal that had come in with Twiggy--because not too long after this picture was taken, with 110 film at my grandmother's pool, I stopped liking it. That happened when I started growing hips, and a booty (decades before J-Lo made them acceptable again), and cellulite, that ugly word created by (who else?) the French. (Did you know that six-month-old babies have cellulite?? But i digress...) Suddenly I wasn't a bony girl, I was a curvy, still-somewhat-awkward young woman, and the curves were in places that weren't at all chic. I felt lumbering, heavy, ugly. By seventh grade I felt compelled to scrawl in my photo album, next to my school picture: "Don't I look AWFUL?" I still have that album, and it still makes me sad to see that sentence.

Decades later, after chubby college years, aerobicized 20s, two children, followed by more aerobics, that easy self-approval of my childhood remains, if not entirely elusive, certainly not easy. But it's a fight worth waging--and I don't mean the aerobics. I mean the aspiration to love.