Out of Frame

When my daughter was little, I helped her out of the bathtub.

I’d wrap her in a towel, dry her off, and help her get dressed. She never hesitated. There was no embarrassment, no instinct to cover herself.

Her body was simply her body.

Until one day, it wasn’t.

She asked me to turn around before she stepped out of the tub.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want you looking at me.”

I was confused. Surprised, even.

I didn’t push.

Soon, she was bathing and dressing independently. Doors that had once remained open began to close.

I understood that she was growing up. That wanting privacy was natural, even healthy.

Still, I wondered what had changed.

Years later, when she was twelve, I noticed her trying to hide stretch marks as she was putting on her swimsuit.

I wanted to say something.

I wanted to tell her that bodies grow and change. That skin stretches. That none of it makes a person less beautiful.

But I didn’t.

Around that age, she began telling me she was ugly.

I told her she was beautiful.

I still tell her. No matter what.

Sometimes she gets angry with me for saying it.

“You’re just my mom.”

As though loving her makes me incapable of seeing her clearly.

I wish I could lend her my eyes for a moment. Let her see the girl I see, without the judgment she’s learned to anticipate.

But I know how little reassurance can mean when you’ve already decided there’s something wrong with you.

Because for years, someone has been telling me I’m beautiful, too.

And I’ve never quite believed him.

I’ve been with B., my fiancé, since July of 2017.

Despite his kind words and best efforts, I have only allowed him to see me nude in the light a handful of times.

I’ve always been convinced that he has a microscope and has to be noticing every flaw my body possesses.

After nine years, I still anticipate him finding something so unattractive that he decides I’m not worth it anymore.

He tells me I’m beautiful.

I roll my eyes.

I tell him he’s wrong.

He insists.

When we’re intimate, I steer him away from places I’m uncomfortable with him seeing or touching. Since having our son, I usually keep my shirt on, despite his protests.

I close my eyes out of embarrassment. Otherwise, I hide my face in his shoulder.

Even then, my brain is playing referee.

Don’t touch there.

Keep that covered.

Don’t let him see.

His attempts to make me feel wanted are met with guilt and the feeling that I’m somehow unworthy.

Sometimes I wonder how much closeness I’ve sacrificed trying to conceal the very body he’s spent nine years telling me he loves.

I want to believe him.

I want to know what it feels like to be completely seen without being ashamed.

But I don’t know how to do either.

I gained a considerable amount of weight with my first two children, who were born only eighteen months apart.

I spent years trying to lose it.

Weight Watchers. Gyms. Diets. Anything that promised I could become a smaller version of myself.

I was miserable, but I was convinced that thin meant pretty.

I’d catch my reflection in store mirrors and think about how different I looked from the woman I remembered being.

I’d spent much of my early twenties in a hopeless marriage, one I’d convinced myself to stay in because I believed in its sanctity.

By the time it ended, I felt as though I’d lost years of my life.

Somewhere along the way, I’d begun associating my weight with that period. I think I believed that if I could lose enough of it, I might find my way back to the person I’d been before.

In 2023, I started taking a GLP-1 medication.

Over the next couple of years, I lost more than sixty pounds.

The medication made me incredibly sick. I pushed through restrictive fasting schedules, convinced the discomfort was simply the price I had to pay.

The weight came off.

But the skin didn’t tighten the way I wanted it to.

At one point, I had Kybella treatment beneath my chin because I was convinced it was too full.

Eleven needle pricks.

And I still wasn’t satisfied.

People complimented my weight loss.

My response was usually some variation of:

“Yeah, but…”

Yeah, but my stomach still looks terrible.

Yeah, but look at my arms.

There was always something left to correct.

Still, I could walk past those store mirrors without stopping to examine myself.

I felt less conspicuous. I no longer automatically identified myself as the overweight woman I’d been for so many years.

It wasn’t because I believed there was anything wrong with being heavy. I could see beauty in women of every size.

But I’d associated my own weight with a time in my life I wanted desperately to leave behind.

Losing it felt like finding my way back to someone I’d lost.

And perhaps that’s why I wanted people to notice.

I wanted them to see how far I’d come. That I wasn’t that person anymore.

But when the clothes came off, I was still the same woman hiding from the man who loved her.

I’d made my body smaller.

I hadn’t made the shame any less.

And then I became pregnant again.

At first, I wasn’t particularly concerned about gaining weight.

But as my pregnancy progressed, I struggled with the realization that I couldn’t continue trying to lose it.

I’d spent so much of my adult life dieting, exercising, counting, restricting, and trying to make myself smaller.

Years of my life spent trying to change a body I was never satisfied with.

My youngest son was a big baby, and I gained more weight than I’d anticipated.

I knew my body was doing what it needed to do.

That didn’t make it any easier to look at.

I’d always been uncomfortable with B.’s sexual advances, but during my pregnancy, I began apologizing for my appearance when we were intimate.

I’m sorry.

Sorry for the weight.

Sorry for the way my body looked.

Sorry for something I wasn’t doing wrong.

He would tell me how much he loved me. That I had absolutely nothing to apologize for.

He thought I was beautiful, no matter what.

And still, I apologized.

I was growing our child, and somehow I still felt I owed the man who loved me an apology for the space my body occupied.

Now, months after giving birth, I find myself thinking about losing weight again.

Part of me wants to return to the body I worked so hard to achieve.

Another part remembers exactly what it cost.

The sickness. The restrictions. The endless scrutiny.

And the knowledge that even after losing more than sixty pounds, I still wasn’t happy.

I don’t know whether I have it in me to begin that pursuit again.

But I don’t know how to stop wanting to, either.

Sometimes I wonder what my body would say if it could speak for itself.

Would it remind me of the three children it carried? Of the pregnancies that ended before I ever got to hold them?

Would it tell me about the things it survived?

Some of my scars were left by people who claimed to love me.

Others, I left myself.

As a teenager, cutting became a way to release pain I couldn’t explain. I thought that if I could make the hurt physical, give it somewhere to exist outside of me, perhaps it would stop consuming me from within.

It didn’t.

But the marks remained.

There were also times I allowed people to do things to me that hurt because I believed making them happy might make them love me.

I told myself that because I’d said yes, I had no right to feel hurt afterward.

For years, I confused being wanted with being loved.

My body endured anxiety that made me physically ill. Nosebleeds. Vomiting. Fear that seemed to take over every part of me.

And periods of psychological distress when I discovered how frightening it could be to feel unsafe inside my own body.

Some experiences still haunt me, though not as fiercely as they once did.

A friend once told me I’d put my life in danger by having children.

I’d never thought about it that way.

Pregnancy and childbirth were simply things I’d done to become a mother. I knew they came with risks, but I’d never considered what my body accomplished particularly extraordinary.

I could admire another woman for bringing a child into the world.

But when I looked at myself, I saw someone who’d done what millions of women had done before me.

Nothing special.

Just me.

A lifetime spent living inside a body I’ve spent so much of that time criticizing.

I look at the marks on my skin and think about what needs to be concealed.

I rarely stop to consider what it took to get here.

I’ve spent years treating my body like evidence of everything that’s wrong with me.

When perhaps it is also evidence of everything I’ve survived.

B. has changed in the nine years we’ve been together.

His hair is longer now, and it’s turned gray. I actually prefer it to the brown it used to be.

His weight has fluctuated, but I’ve never found him any less attractive because of it.

When he walks around without a shirt, I still find myself looking.

His hands have grown rougher from years of manual labor. To me, they’re a reminder of how hard he works to take care of our family.

And his eyes are the same ice blue that drew me to him in the beginning.

I don’t examine his stomach or catalog the changes in his body.

I simply want to touch him.

Sometimes he admits to feeling self-conscious, and it surprises me. Not because he has no insecurities, but because he doesn’t let them stop him from being himself.

He allows himself to be seen.

And yet, when he looks at me, I imagine he’s noticing every flaw.

Every pound.

Every mark.

I can believe that the passing years have made him more attractive to me.

But I struggle to believe he could look at me and feel the same.

I think I learned to dislike myself long before I learned to dislike my body.

My mother told me I was the reason my father left.

I grew up believing I wasn’t wanted.

I played alone.

I cried alone while my mother slept.

Sometimes I thought about running away, but I had nowhere to go.

I wondered what I was supposed to become if even my parents had no hopes for me.

I don’t think I ever stopped asking myself that question.

As I grew older, I became desperate to be loved.

Somewhere along the way, I began treating love as something I had to earn.

If I could be prettier.

Thinner.

More agreeable.

Less difficult.

Perhaps someone would finally decide I was worth keeping.

And I think that belief followed me into relationships where no one was asking me to make those sacrifices.

Even now, when B. tells me I’m beautiful, some part of me is waiting for him to change his mind.

Not because of anything he’s done.

But because I learned so young that being loved didn’t mean I couldn’t be abandoned.

When I look back through photographs of my older children, I notice how few of them include me.

I was there.

The birthdays. The holidays. The ordinary afternoons.

I remember taking the pictures.

But I rarely allowed anyone to take pictures of me.

I avoided the camera deliberately.

There was always something I needed to fix first.

My hair.

My clothes.

The angle.

My stomach.

Sometimes I simply stepped aside.

I told myself I’d be more comfortable having my picture taken once I’d lost the weight. Once I looked better. Once there was less of me to see.

Now I look through those photographs and find years of my children’s lives documented without much evidence that I was standing right there beside them.

And I’m doing it again with my youngest.

Wait. Let me fix my hair. Let me turn. Let me put the baby in front of my stomach.

I wonder whether my children will notice how often I was missing.

Whether they’ll understand that I wasn’t trying to disappear from their lives.

I was trying to disappear from my own body.

Written for Sasha Desideri’s A Very Vocal Beauty Pageant — Unofficial Challenge: