When We Hide from the Mirror
Do you hide from the mirror?
You moms out there – you know what I mean. You get undressed, into and out of the shower, without looking in the mirror. Because if you turn your head to just the right angle, you don’t have to look. You don’t have to see.
I do it, too.
We seem to have a hard time saying goodbye to our pre-motherhood bodies. They were slimmer. They were firmer. They were smoother. We liked them a lot more than these wider, softer bodies we have now.
These bodies that have carried life inside them. These bodies that have participated in the very act of Creation. These bodies that were designed by the God of the universe to nurture the next generation of his children.
I worked hard for my pre-baby body. I wrestled with my weight all through my growing-up years, and in college, it got out of control. Then, in my mid-twenties, I conquered the weight loss and fitness beasts and finally achieved the slim, sculpted body I’d always dreamed of. For the first time in my life, I could look in the mirror and smile for real, because for the first time in my life, I liked what I saw. Maybe too much.
There was a point when two of my girlfriends confronted me about my determination to hit the “right” BMI, and told me that I needed to stop. That I was already too thin. That I didn’t need to lose any more weight.
And then I met E, and got married. I stopped living solely on salad and did more with my free time than just run and lift weights. Life got fuller and happier, and my body got a little wider and a little softer.
And then I got pregnant, and it got wider and softer still, to make room for L.
And of course I’m 38, so the weight doesn’t come off as easily as it does from a 25-year-old body.
I see moms in the grocery store in their size 6 skinny jeans, and I have to look away. I see moms rail-thin in their running gear being chased by children on bicycles, and I feel guilty for being wider and softer than they are. I feel envious. I wonder how hard it was for them to see the number on the scale drop. I assume – maybe wrongly – that it was far easier than it is for me. It’s unfair, because I have no idea what that mom in the grocery store or that one running down the street are struggling with. We all have our own battles with the mirror, no matter what others see on the outside.
And my wideness is also the wideness of my love, the wideness of the sacrifice I made in giving my body to my daughter. The softness is also the softness of my embrace, the one that holds her day and night.
So are yours.
What we really need is to give ourselves grace.
Grace enough to look in the mirror without self-recrimination for what our bodies are not.
Grace enough to celebrate what our bodies are. Grace enough to allow ourselves to see the beauty in these bodies that carried and nourished and now nurture and love another human being, another soul.
One of my dearest friends, who is three months postpartum and struggling to take off extra pounds left from her pregnancy, told me the other day that if losing the baby weight from this third child was going to be this hard, well then, she just might not have a fourth.
When she said that, something in me just broke. That this young woman who loves mothering, who would gather a hundred children to her if she had the strength and means, that she would consider deciding against a fourth child because she is seeing her younger, firmer body slip farther and farther away, out of her grasp, and it matters that much. That slayed me, what that said about the power of the mirror over us all.
Because no matter what we do, our bodies will fall apart. They are temporary. They are part of this fallen world that will eventually pass away. And even though our culture tells us that youth and beauty are more important than anything else, we will all eventually lose the battle.
The good news is that in Heaven, we’ll have new bodies. And the standards of our fallen culture will no longer be there to press in on us, make us fear the mirror.
I’m not arguing for us to stop taking care of our bodies. God asks us to be good stewards of all He gives us, and I believe that includes our bodies. A healthy diet and regular exercise help us live our earthly lives to the fullest, for His glory. Diet and exercise are ways of loving ourselves.
What I am arguing is that maybe we ought to work on our expectations of our bodies. Maybe we ought to stop hiding from the mirror, work to change how we see what’s in it. Maybe true beauty is in what our bodies can do, not what they appear to be. Maybe true beauty is inherent in the fact that we were all, each one of us, shaped in our mothers’ wombs by the hands of a loving Father-Creator. Just like the children we’ve borne.
