all my marbles

cw: body image stuff

Girls on the Internet with perfect skin keep telling me to “sync my diet with my cycle” – what is the luteal phase? I can’t tell pop-healthcare culture from scientific innovation – I’m still tracking my period with a method similar to water dowsing. I have the forked stick and everything. 

This morning I rolled onto my stomach and felt the tender crush of my own weight heavy on my chest. I cried twice before noon – the first time because I looked up a several years old Zillow listing for my childhood home and the second time because the widget on my home screen showed me a photo of my several years dead childhood dog. Intuitively, I decided it was a good day to go shopping for a new pair of jeans. 

The Eaton Centre is a place I hate to be – especially alone. Alone, I am washed away by the current. I wander strangely, wide eyed. I lose track of time.  Unfortunately, jeans shopping has to be done alone. Denim is unforgiving. Inching up and down in waist widths, hating my thighs, sickening at the sight of the price tag. These are activities I prefer to do in private. On my way to the fitting rooms I impulsively polish off the pile of jeans in my arms with a beautiful linen dress. This is a risky maneuver. I am expecting to hate the way I look in the jeans, but to hate the way I look in a pretty dress? This could send me over the edge. There is something about the end of winter – the soft, paleness of my body and the weakness of my under-utilized muscles – that makes the approach of sundress season sinister. When I was a child, sundresses were my favorite thing to wear. There is a photo hanging on my bedroom wall of me, eight years old, contemplating the beloved crabapple tree on my front lawn with my family’s golden retriever at my side. My blonde hair, not yet darkened by age, is bright in the sunlight. I am wearing a beautiful white dress, muddied at the knees. With the crabapple tree sold and the retriever gone, I sometimes feel there is little left in my life the girl in the photo would recognize. She would hate jeans shopping. Not nearly enough ruffles.   

In the fitting room now, I try the jeans on. The first pair too high waisted, the second too tight, the third just right. Small mercy of the day. I am all about little gifts from the universe – I line them up on my windowsill like seashells. 

I weigh the white linen dress in my hands: unexpectedly heavy. Double lined, with a billowing skirt that gathers gracefully at each hip. I put it on and I am transformed. I am like the Swan Princess from my favorite fairytale. The lines of my body are long and elegant – I feel a deep appreciation for the shape of me. No sucking in my stomach or wishing for platform shoes. The gratitude that wells in my chest is deep and overwhelming. It eddies in the corners of my eyes and streams down my cheeks. How embarrassing it is to be crying over my own beauty in a fitting room at the Eaton Centre. At the same time, how miraculous to go from hating my one precious body for all its aesthetic failings to loving it for the way it fits into a simple, overpriced piece of fabric. I hate the man who invented “business casual” for stealing from me the opportunity to feel this way when I get dressed every morning. It is a kind of superpower, however, to have rare items in my wardrobe that make me feel I am playing a covert game of dress-up. Today, I am dressing up as the most beautiful version of me. I am suddenly successfully channeling this confidence, in spite of every terrible thing I thought about myself just moments prior.

As a woman, I resent the idea that I should ever be expected or required to appear pretty in any circumstance for any reason at all. As a Catholic, I am well versed in the perils of vanity and cringe when I recognize its motivating force against my actions. As a critic of capitalism, I recognize I am being sold a myth that one can buy confidence and wish I could be the sort of woman who can wear a sustainable burlap sack and still radiate self love. As a little girl, however, I wore princess dresses to the grocery store and I felt proud any time I caught sight of my own reflection. The dress is too expensive, but I make big girl money now. I buy it anyway.