Anti-Gravity

I am strong, big, and heavy.

     I am an extremely strong person. I came this way, physically strong, of solid ilk and stature. But I have not always identified as strong. Until I developed my strength, I just felt big. I come from big, northern European people. We have lifting arms and wide shoulders, boobs to nurse armies, and sturdy, potato eating jaws. I have always been aware of this bigness and, for most of my life, have tried to escape it. In my tweens, I tried to escape my body in the same way most the other tweens in the 80's and 90's were doing it: I threw up, avoided food, and/or chronically over exercised. As a teenager, I smoked cigarettes, drank too much coffee, and became a vegetarian. In my twenties, I was a poor bartender/college student and ate what was free or easy, drank too much liquor, and danced my ass off almost every night. For the most part, all these things worked in terms of escapism and warding off the inevitable bigness pulsing through my DNA. But, even at my most “small” and unhealthy, there has always been a dense set of bones and sturdiness about me. I have always been the friend you would call to help you move.

     When I was a young girl, no one talked to me about physical strength. It was all about big or small. Those weren't even the words of choice, of course, as any teen girl can tell you, there is skinny or fat. In my youth, we worked out to be hot (skinny) not strong. I never even considered building strength to be awesome or keep myself safe. We were taught avoidance in order to stay safe: Dress in a conservative manner to avoid rape, don’t go to certain parts of town to avoid being raped, (that was long before we talked about how it was the rich white dudes at the north end parties who were doing all the raping). And it's not like our cover models were muscular at that time. Not like now. I know there were female athletes, but no one was talking to me about them. Nope. Hot and skinny was why we hit the gym at 16.

So to review:

1)    Be skinny and hot

2)    Cover your skinny, hot self and stay home so that your slutty ass doesn’t get what you asked for by being skinny and hot

But, I digress.

     The thing about the kind of big and sturdy I happen to be is that it is also heavy. I am not talking about the word that some folks use instead of fat. I am not talking about girth. I am talking about gravity and mass, weight. When the leaders of our feminist and body positive movement write about judging books by their cover, this is one of the things they are talking about. In the same way that a person’s size cannot tell you how healthy they are, you may not be able to guess someone’s weight upon seeing them. I am heavy. I am heavier than you might guess. I have carried this heaviness through many sizes and degrees of health. I have pondered the benefit of this heaviness (too heavy to drag off!) and also it’s detriment. (Doctors LOVE to tell me to start exercising and stop eating fried foods after looking at my chart. What was that? Invisible? Right). The biggest detriment by far is due to the culture of numbers on a scale dictating self worth in this country. I have tried to shed this value at exactly the same rate as the numbers on the scale, consistently, throughout my whole life.

     Despite my big and sturdy, heavy self, I have always been drawn to physical activity. In my youth it was extracurricular sports and the teen skinny craze as explained above. I never excelled at sports due to what I thought was my size and weight. It wasn’t until my college years that I realized I was bad at sports because I was afraid to fall down. As a person who perceived themselves to be big and heavy, I had spent my whole life trying to avoid EVER falling down. I did not bomb hills on foot or bike. I walked carefully and did not take physical risks that may embarrass me. I had no interest in the extra attention of falling down or of the pain that the heaviness of my body would inflict as my solid, sturdy bones crashed to the earth.
     However, in college after a hard break up, I moved across town to a heavily wooded area and started wandering along the interurban trail by myself. I fancied myself a real woodsman though the trails started in the center of town. I was terrified alone on the trails (stay out of the woods to avoid being raped!) but needed to be on them to smell trees, dirt, and water and to walk as far away from my feelings as possible. My adventures steadily increased and I soon started challenging myself to walk further into the forest, take unknown turns, and, oddly, to run, really run, down the hills. This was the first time in my life that I felt ready to fall down. Though I cannot recall ever falling, I remember the moment when I felt ready for it if it happened.
   In my thirties I began my short-lived roller derby career. Needless to say, I was able to get deeply in touch with falling down during this time. My derby years were short-lived due to babies, multiple big city moves, and time commitments which was devastating as roller derby was the first time in my life where my heavy, sturdy body was looked at with eyes that saw potential and benefit. At about year two, I was doing a hitting drill with a new skater and through her exhaustion she spit, “It’s like hitting a brick wall over and over.”  I smiled proudly. “I know.” Little girl me cannot believe that I took that complaint as a compliment and even remembering it now I am a little misty eyed at how far I have come with regards to my body image. Now, as a full time yoga instructor and a hobby runner I look at the strength of my body as a tool. In my yoga practice, it allows me to move my body slowly through time and space and create beauty with the forms. As a runner, I am also slow but can run for a long time and can confidently climb hills and navigate technical trails.

    What I have found is that practicing yoga and running through the woods is my church. In recent months, I have been doing a great deal of both and started chanting with the goddesses some as well. I, like many folks, have been trying to make sense of what has happened, what has been happening, what it means for me, my children, and for the targeted communities in which many folks I love are a part. I run and I chant, and I open my heart to the sky. But I am cautious. I work hard not to fall.
     Yesterday as I ran through Pt Defiance, I sped up down a hill. I normally slow down. I sped up and hit a dirt mound in the center of the trail. I hit the mound with my foot, my knee bent, and the back of my leg flexed hard. For a reason unknown to me I pushed off instead of trying to steady myself. My jump was not awesome. I caught very little air. But, it was the first time that I realized that my strength is what could make me fly. That it is not the weight of my strength that keeps me so close to the ground, but the weight of my fear. This fucking fear that I carry around with me everywhere, all the time like a wet sand bag. The fear of being laughed at, misunderstood, blamed for suffering, of taking up space, of making mistakes, of being different, of being the same. The fear that I can do nothing, will say the wrong things, cannot and do not affect change. And so I am heavy and grounded but not, as it turns out, because of my body mass, but because I am scared. 

     I would like to thank the recent election for making me come to and look closer at my fear; the abundance of it, the privilege that it is rooted in, the sheer uselessness of it. I am committed to shedding it and replacing it with more strength as I train for the revolution (oh yes, I have started). I will let the strength of my body hold me and ground me still. I will remember that falling down isn't so bad and also that it could mean more from greater heights. I will try to push off more than land. And I invite anyone who would like to use my strength to let me know, as I have plenty, and I am just coming to realize what it is for. 

Ghoul Talk

It is of relatively little surprise that I would have some opinions about the television programming being aimed at little girls these days. There are, of course, some shows that are working really hard to neutralize the gender pushing and to portray female characters as something more than catty or compliant. And then there are the shows that my daughter likes to watch; the shows where all the female characters are about high school age, have legs for days, wear butt cheek grazing skirts and high heels, and talk with a valley girl stab.

Plots to these shows hardly stray from the formula where a group of girl friends work together to solve problems in their greater community. Along the way, there are staples in the conflict:

• ·      The villainous leader girl whose valley girl accent is thick and mean, as opposed to just present, and generally leads at least two dumb minions who are not intentionally as mean as much as they are sheep.
• ·      The unbalancing of harmony or spirit as a prized possession is lost, stolen or destroyed.
• ·      The confrontation of tradition and the pushback from older or male characters.

I have an ongoing contention with my 6 year-old-daughter about these shows. I call them “sassy girl” shows and otherwise judge them in front of her, in a poor attempt to create dialogue around concerning issues. She only hears the judgment part (she’s pretty intuitive…) and then blocks out the other parts (…and stubborn).

Recently, as summer is winding down and camps are running out but I still have the same amount of work to do, my daughter has been watching these shows with greater abundance. Because of my intolerance for her attitude after having watched a “sassy girl” show, I have started banning certain shows like Barbie and Brats (the obvious sassy factors), and I teeter on Monster High (more on that later). So, she decides to revisit My Little Pony Friendship is Magic.  (Now, this show I stand with. I was an avid My Little Pony collector as a child. I still have ALL of them and am just waiting for a clear weekend to clean them up, comb their hair and display them in a china hutch we recently inherited). The ponies are great! They are headed for gender neutral, none of them has a valley lisp, they all WORK, and their whole purpose is to build community. However, my little teenager trapped inside a young girl gets tired of all this practical entertainment and switches to Equestria Girls, which is basically an elongated sassy-fied pony girl with legs for days, a short skirt, and chunky boots. (HASBRO! Why did you need to do that!?!? The ponies were just fine as they were!) For the most part, the main characters maintain their character but as teenage girls, they all now have boy crushes, human female insecurities, and rely a little more heavily on the guidance of a leader (Twilight Sparkle) instead of working together as a group. And the skirts! What is with that?!

A couple days later, I hear my daughter sneaking an episode of Monster High and wander around the corner to start being contentious when I am frozen by the high degree of sexism that is taking place before my eyes. I realize that I am walking in mid-show and that there is context missing, however, no amount of context could make what I was seeing okay. I decide that I need to sit down and watch this episode start to finish, whilst taking notes, so that I can more confidently bring the hammer down on this once and for all.

I had been waffling on Monster High for months and would not allow her to watch it at the house. She was watching it at her grandmother’s house and playing with her friend’s MH dolls at school. My waffling was due to the fact, solely I think, that they are monsters. They still have waif waists, SUPER short skirts and Carrie Bradshaw heels, but they are also monsters and so I was trying to be a little more open to them. I mean, monsters are a step in the right direction, yes?

Truth be told, I was unaware whether or not they were “sassy girls” as I never watch the show with her. The only reason my kids watch TV is because I need to work, cook, clean, breathe, hide, internet shop, or otherwise be unengaged with them. But the other day I said to my daughter, “Hey will you watch the roller skate episode of Monster High with me later today?”  Her face lit up like an octogenarian birthday cake. Her smile wrapped clear around to the back of her head. She couldn’t believe it. She agreed with all the happiness and excitement I have ever seen her respond with and she set out to find the right episode and get it ready.

At that point, seeing her sheer and pure joy that I would want to watch a “sassy girl” show in its entirety, without doing anything else at the same time, WITH HER, took all the air out of my need to assess and deconstruct what I might see. We watched it and I have another essay prepared about what I saw (Roller derby being an all boy sport? Boyfriends putting their paws down about stuff? Team support coming with the slinky costume change? Egh!) but I also have to say that I had made some assumptions about the show that weren’t true. The monster girls are kind, they overcome a pretty big sexist conflict, and many of the characters are two and half dimensional.

Mostly what happened though, was that after watching the show together, my daughter was newly open to talking about what we saw. She asked me, over pizza, what I had written about the show. I said I hadn’t written anything yet and then I asked her if she wanted to know what I learned. She did. We had a really cool conversation about the team uniforms and how I thought it was weird that no one supported the team when they wore big clunky uniforms. But after the monster girl team decided they needed to play “more like themselves” instead of playing “like the boys” and changed into short dresses and high heel skates, the whole school showed up to cheer them on.

She thought hard about this. I could tell as her chewing slowed and her eyes looked up into her brain searching for clarity. She responded, “Ya, mommy, that’s because they trained SO HARD in those big armor suits that they earned their fashion.” She repeated, “They EARNED their fashion.”

I’m still not sure what to make of that. But I like it. I like that we can talk about it. And I’ll call this one a tie: Monster High-1/ Mommy-1.