big girl

A little over a month ago, the skin around my mouth started looking red, raw, and irritated. I thought it might have to do with a new moisturizer, so I stopped using it and waited. The redness spread. Turns out the technical name is perioral dermatitis and it can happen for a number of hazy reasons, typically to women around my age. I finally made it to the dermatologist last week and I've been duly applying medicated cream twice a day, to no discernible positive effect as of yet.

I think talking about one's medical problems is terrible form, and nearly always boring (apologies!), but I bring it up now because despite my best efforts to ignore it, weeks of having an unsightly rash on my face is really bringing me down. It's stirring up my inner nine year old, a girl who hunches her shoulders and cringes a little before the camera.

I had a quite a few inches in height and probably twenty pounds on nearly all of my friends in elementary school. I could wear my mother's shoes in the second grade. (My size 11/12 feet remain the one extraordinary remnant of that time, still amazingly long on my more moderately-sized frame).  When I was a younger kid, I often liked being 'big' - I could pick up all my friends and was unstoppable at Red Rover, Red Rover (which, incidentally, may have been outlawed since the wild and free 80s - have you ever heard your kids mention it?). But by the time I was nine or ten, I was terribly self-conscious. No one had yet caught up with me, and my mother's insistence that my roundness was simply a case of persistent 'baby fat' just wasn't persuasive anymore. I can hear my grandfather's authoritative voice at the long Thanksgiving table around that time, ringing out after an excruciating back-and-forth between my incredulous relatives about - can memory truly serve here? - my shoe size, clothing size, and good gracious, weight. "What do you want??" he boomed. "She's a BIG GIRL!"

Well, that settled it. End of discussion.

When I first had Frances, I felt a sense of relief when it came to my own worries. I focused so much energy on the baby, there wasn't much left over to dedicate to the kind of little self-critical things that can set up shop in one's mind: everything from past failings to squishy thighs. I couldn't do a lot of self-directed hand-wringing because I was exhausted. It seemed like a good thing; a break from myself.

After settling into parenthood, all those discomforts did quiet down and find new footing. I focus my attention on others now more than ever, but sometimes that small insistent voice that says there is something wrong with you, and people can tell just by looking pipes up. As if the flaws of my body, or clothes or shoes or skin, are clues pointing to something deep and shameful about me. Most of the time I'm too connected to others, too caught up in the richness of life, and too dang busy for that voice to really undermine things, but every so often it finds an opening and takes it.

Sometimes I use my children as a shield to protect myself from that voice. (This is occurring to me for the first time now, nearly nine years into motherhood.) The thing is, I find them so perfectly beautiful. Their bodies, their faces, everything about them delights my eyes. I have a tendency to stand behind them in photos. It's a weird thing. My children arrived by way of my body, but they are most definitely not me. Yet maybe I would rather people associate their grace and beauty with me than my own face with me. It's strange, it's long, it's asymmetrical; it's the face of a big girl. Why not look at this dependably sweet mug instead?

Today was one of those days when the defenses were down. It rained and rained, the baby yelled and screamed for no reason and refused to nap, Frances and I got into a fight after school, and my red chin kept catching my eye in the rearview mirror. Ugly, ugly.

I think it's hard to be honest about how we think of ourselves, especially body image stuff, after a certain point in life. On a mama blog, indulging in concerns about beauty should be capped with some hard-won wisdom about how family life is indeed more sustaining and real than flawless skin, right? Or maybe something about how bad things were until I found a juice fast, or Pilates, or meditation? But the sad truth is I have no happy tidy ending to all this! 

All I can say is it was bad, and hard to shake, until it was better. Here's what made it better: stumbling on Belle and Sebastian in the car on the way to church this evening, singing along to those songs from another era as we inched across the Severn River, and then spending open unstructured time with kids and teens and adults in the Parish Hall while Frances practiced with the choir and Gabriel crafted with his favorite octogenarian. Somehow the best part was after dinner, settling an exhausted and sticky Beatrice into the lap of one of the sweetest girls in youth group while I gathered our things and chatted with her mother. Simple, easy, genuine connection. Perioral dermititis be damned.

Grace? Maybe grace.