It's a process

I first wrote "Its a process." I'm usually a great speller - especially out loud, for long words. You'
re, your - do not phase me. This short one though, I never, ever remember. I usually avoid it, spell out "it is" and sound way more formal than I've intended.

As for the process, it is my legs. Or, rather, coming to terms with them. Looking at hairy legs and not immediately thinking them ugly. Or unfeminine. I'm still smack-dab in the middle of that process. I still find they look strange. I don't like them very often, yet sometimes I get over it and don't care. And I think this may be part of the difficulty I've been having. With my legs, and with anyone (especially a women) who doesn't look magazine-perfect. My legs are a total failure of what fashion magazines tell me I should look like. The rest of me, I can do a pretty good job of molding into a "tall enough to hide I'm not skinny enough" image of mainstream advertised femininity. I'm lucky that way. What isn't up to snuff I can hide easily enough. I have great skin, and thick hair.

But the issue is that I've been trying to see my hairy legs as beautiful.

And I'm not so sure they are. I mean, I like my legs for what they can do, but the problem (even on blogs that encourage women not to care what people think of their legs) is that the question is still in terms of how I look. To myself, but really that means to others, too. I think what I'd rather feel is that they are strong and who cares how they look, it matters they can dance, and take me to work, and help me give horse-rides to my kid, and hang out on the side of the amazing coffee I can brew, next to the Sunday New York Times crossword I can actually solve, by Monday some weeks. By. My. Self. That is what I want to think about me, and not about how my legs look.

 

















This also goes along with the problems I have "just noticing, not judging" how people look. I've realized that in the same minute, I can see a woman, notice that she would not be featured in a magazine (the classifying my brain does immediately), and then also tell myself she is a perfect example of a human being. Not just a woman, but a person, who thinks, laughs, talks, works, cries, and is. This works much better for me than just trying not to judge how a person's body looks. And I'm thinking it can apply to me, too.

My hairy legs don't look like anything in a magazine. I don't know if I'll ever call them gorgeous. But some of this exercise, at least for me, is to think of myself as a human being first, and not in comparison to how someone in a photo looks.

And, based on a TED talk I watched last week, about the sexual objectification of women, part of what I stumble on in looking at these blog photos of women's legs only, is that it is only one part of the body you see. Instead of the whole person.

If that third photo is of a woman who wants to be elegant and gorgeous, I think that is a FAIL in my mind. If it is of a person, who can do and think and make, it is fine. It is good. And both the crossword and the coffee make me proud.

Hei Pipi Langstockings, la la la la la la la!

One of A's best friends got her a Pipi Longstockings book for a birthday gift last year. Two books, actually, one in English and one in Swiss German. And at first A was too young to understand them, but she's gotten into them lately. She and this friend, L, are like two peas in a pod, and at daycare they will drive the teachers a bit nutty singing the Pipi song. So much so that they wind up relegated to the nap room to sing ad nauseum. I approve of this solution.

I also highly approve of Pipi. She's the strongest girl in the world. Stronger than the strong man at the circus. She can carry her horse on her shoulders. She wears mismatched socks, plays "don't touch the floor" around her kitchen furniture, gets eggs and hot chocolate in her hair when she cooks, and is generally a bad-ass.

And last weekend, when we had to go under the train station to get to the tram, and A had her scooter with her, she didn't ask us for any help with it. She hauled that thing up on her chest, and headed down some steep stairs. As only a proud 3 year old can do. And all she said, pleased as punch, was "I'm strong like Pipi."

My little girl was trying to emulate a female role model by being strong. And liking her own strength. Feeling good about it.

In this underpass, filled with Beyonce's new clothing like for H&M that makes you wonder are they selling clothing too cheaply or selling female sexuality too cheaply (answer: both), my daughter was only concerned with how great it was to be able to carry one's own scooter by oneself.

I love Pipi Longstockings.

The alumni newsletter just came in! Great.

I just finished filling out an online survey for a Prestigious Graduate School Fellowship I once received, back when I was in Astronomy (about 1500 years ago). It dropped me right smack down in the middle of all the mixed (okay, mostly bad, actually) emotions I had every time I got my yearly "What kind of cancer have you cured this year?" call from the head of a different Pretigious Graduate School Fellowship program. Let's say that I started off my university life as a pretty prestigious kind of student. I studies physics and math and astronomy and I did really well in homeworks and exams. I did research projects and went to conferences and even taught some lectures as an undergrad. I got into all the grad schools I applied for, and I didn't set the bar low. 

And at the end of 9 years in astronomy grad school, I quit. Dejected, depressed, no publications to my name, very little belief in myself. Single. Childless. (Although, I was going to be married soon, which was one of the very few points of light in my days back then). But every year since I'd spent a year at Cambridge, I'd get a call to see what glorious accomplishments I'd racked up. My fellow Fellows had gotten early tenure and professorships, some at Harvard or Princeton. They had research groups and I had a cat with kidney failure that I treated with subcutaneous fluids each day, I small house my mom had been smart enough to encourage me to buy in super-cheap Tucson, and a surprising hidden talent as a swing dance teacher.  These yearly calls made me feel so low, so unaccomplished. 

And let's face it, the alumni updates from, well pretty much anywhere I had attended, were depressing. So, in honor of not having started crying filling out this online survey just now while marking "extremely poor" on a number of aspect of my grad experience, I've decided to put up my own alumni update. 

Or rather, two of them. Because, in the intervening years I've learned that everyone has their pain and failures, even the early tenure at Harvard folks, and that some are just better at masking it, or have it in more private aspects of their life.

Almuni update that makes me feel good about myself

 

"A" received both an NSF Graduate Fellowship and a Churchill Scholarship after graduating with a 4.0 GPA in Astronomy and Physics. She went on to get master's degrees in astronomy from both Cambridge University and the University of Arizona. While completing a PhD in science education, she was asked to talk about her research on the culture of communication in academia at locations as varied as IBM and Harvard, and internationally. She and her husband, daughter and beloved dog currently live in Zurich, Switzerland, where she works part time in academia and concentrates the rest of her time on raising her daughter in Lithuanian (her parent's first language), English and Swiss German. They have been enjoying traveling across Europe especially this summer - to Rhodes, Amsterdam, Torino, Istanbul and Stockholm. Also, she has recently decided just to love her 6 foot tall frame as it is and give up on worrying about fashion trends, instead following her creative instincts.

But really, wouldn't we all prefer the kind of alumni update that made the rest of us feel better about ourselves?

Alumni update that should make you feel better about yourself.

"A" did really well in college, on paper,  and managed to come away with a fairly bad grasp of physics. She rode the good GPA wave to a few fellowships, but wound up not publishing anything she felt she had made an intellectual contribution to in her 9 years as an astronomy graduate student. And as for the papers she made no intellectual contribution to, there was one. She spent many days, after her coursework was done, not getting anywhere in her research, and at least half of those not having the heart to even try. She developed a great eye for vintage clothing and jewelry that she managed to sell for a spell on eBay. She felt she slipped farther behind her peers, until she realized she was clinically depressed and quit her program. After picking a research topic in education that she had no topic-specific mentors for,  she defended her dissertation and left Tucson. Her husband got a job in Switzerland where part of the stipulation was that she get a part time, temporary job. The birth of her daughter ended in an unplanned C-section and her daughter woke up 12 times a night for 6 months. "A" was in a hopsital for a month, returned to antidepressants, and used daycare and a babysitter to help her survive the first 1.5 years of her daughter's life, even though she wasn't back to  work. She's been through a lot of counseling in the last 8 years. Recently, she had a miscarriage, so to try to make the best of not being pregnant or getting pregnant again for a while, she convinced her family to go on too many trips across Europe this summer. In between trips, she was often in bed and unable to even use a laptop, due to a ruptured disc in her lower back. And somehow strangely connected to this disc, she can no longer wear jeans or any other slim fitting pants.

It's about perspective

I looked up body dysmorphic disorder this morning. I do not suffer from something this extreme. But I do have a skewed version of what I look like. For a long time, I've felt like I need to worry about what I wear so I don't look too masculine. It probably didn't help that in college I tried to blend (or maybe disappear) and in physics that meant wearing oversized t-shirts and shapeless jeans. I had to buy men's boots for my first super-freezing winter at school, and a men's leather biker jacket (I didn't have to buy this, but I had to buy a men's size to fit my shoulders in a sweater in it). And more than once I was mistaken for a man from behind.

Given that I'm six feet tall and not super curvy, and was wearing a large biker jacket one of those times, I can see how that happened. And that it doesn't mean I look like a man.

I still worry that I do, though.

I also realized over the winter that I feel a lot bigger than I actually am. The shoulders require me to buy at least one size up from what the rest of my upper body needs as far as size goes. I have to do a quick-cross-my-arms-in-front-of-me test for any shirt or jacket to make sure it won't tear if I go to pick up something. So yes, I have broad shoulders. And big feet. And that is about it.

Yet I feel huge a lot. Or I feel like my thighs are big. And I blame a lack of perspective.

Or the existence of perspective. Or both.

This is what I see when I look down on my legs and feet from my towering 72 inches.


So if my feet are already big, my thighs must be huge. And those pants look like 80's pleated things. Ugh.

But let's see this same person, a minute later, from the side.



Uh huh. Not quite the same. The shoulders are still broad, and now the legs look completely different. Where this those mom pants go? Who is this woman? Oh, wait, that's me. And right now, with my decreased appetite and Baby A's increased energy (really? has she started fusing Helium now instead of Hydrogen? where does this child get the calories to do what she does?), I'm skinny. Even if I don't "feel" skinny.

I think I need to stop looking earthward for a while, at my feet. Perspective can be problematic. So can a culture obsessed with women as objects and women's looks, but let's face it, perspective isn't helping.

Yes, I believe I would like fries with that

There I was, with my tuna salad wrap, on the tram heading home. Once again, I was eating lunch too late and I was starving. Three teenagers, two girls and a guy, maybe 17 or 18 years old sat in the seats around me - the girls facing me, the guy next to me. The guy spoke just a bit too loudly as teenage boys sometimes do, and the girls both had the huge sunglasses and carefully done hair. Not a super snobby group, but not un-self conscious, either.

I ate most of the wrap, down to a final half handful of tuna salad, that had slid out of the wrap into its cardboard holder. Dang. I was still hungry and I wanted all my tuna salad, but I could clearly feel that there was no way I was going to go in there with my bare fingers. Not in front of Swiss teenagers. Not these teenagers.

I really shouldn't care. I've got a kid, I'm busy, I'm hungry, deal with it. But nope, I left that tuna salad where it fell and wrapped it, and put it back in my backpack. I'd be switching trams soon anyway. I could eat it then.

Two stops before mine, the teenagers got off. And across the way from me was a vision in "I could care less" - two twelve year old boys with Whoppers and fries.

The tram took off again. The boys were inhaling those burgers and fries with the kind of abandon I respect. If I were indulging in that meal, I'd want the freedom to do exactly the same. Fries flying on the floor, lettuce drenched in mayo dripping into the box. Fingers covered in awesome.

I pulled out my tuna salad remains, stuck my fingers in and, in the best of company, finished my lunch. When it comes to food and hungry, I'd rather be a twelve year old boy at heart. And wish I could say that of twelve year old girls, too. But I think they are already too worried about how they look, what other people think. I'm going to have to figure out how to avoid that as much as I can with baby A.

Then again, given that I am the one sadly stashing my tuna salad, and she most definitely gets into her food body and soul, maybe she's going to need to do her best to save my butt instead.

The orange trench coat wants to go somewhere

I've been lusting after bright (not light) orange clothing items online for the last few months. There was this J Crew coat that I stalked for a while, watching the price go down, then realizing the quantities in my size had just done the same. Oops. It was a great coat and I'm sure I would have been an overall happier person wearing it instead of my mainstay black coat.

Just like I was sure about the orange H&M sweater today that I didn't buy, and the orange H&M trench coat that I did. There sure are a lot of orange coats that I'm not sure I'd be happier in on Etsy, too. Now the weather has to actually get a bit warmer so it can be a grey, rainy but not so cold day and I can brighten it up in my orange trench coat.

I am also frantically emailing all manor of B&B's and vacation rentals for an upcoming trip. I put this part off a bit too long, and there is not a lot left now. Although, yet again, AirBnB.com seems to have come through again. They list rooms, apartments and houses for rent all over the world. We stayed in one in Chicago that was perfect - a one bedroom loft apartment with a washer dryer and baby bed available. Free street parking. Close to museums and shopping. Great person doing the renting. Large cities have a lot of options on AirBnB, smaller cities, not so many. But with a toddler, it is nice to have more floor space, a fridge, a stove, etc.

But back to the coat that will make me happier (as well as prettier, more interesting, and way cooler). It really needs to warm up now, because I'm stuck being boring, bland, and tragically unhip right now. Ok, I'm mostly joking. But I do judge myself pretty harshly on a daily basis about things like this. I see those happier, better woman on the tram, bus, coffee shop, everywhere but in the mirror. And it isn't just about learning to feel good enough intrinsically anymore (although this should be the main goal). It is about teaching my daughter the same. I mean, she's absolutely adorable (and, conversely, can be a screaming demon) no matter what she's wearing. I love her just the same. And my husband. And my friends. Family. Pretty much everyone gets this pass from me but me.

That's not true. I can be brutal to women on trams and buses. In my head. But (have I written about this before?) I notice so many little details. Now, the step that follows, where I then connect those details to the person's worth, that's the part I'm trying to change. Because I'll always notice a lot. But it doesn't have to turn into America's Next Top Model in my brain.

The trench coat is very quiet at this moment. But I've promised her that even if I do find some hidden spring of confidence, she'll still be going out to see the sights soon. I mean, she's bright orange after all.