How To Be Body Positive With An 80-Year-Old Body

If I can do it with this wrinkled, crumbling body, anyone can.

Is there a woman in the western world who has not lamented the curse of body issues?

I’ve heard curvy women in some third world countries celebrate their size as a sign of prosperity.

And to them I say, how do I apply for citizenship?

Not only do I find ethnic food more interesting than burgers and fries, but oh how I’d love to live among people who don’t have an emotional breakdown if they balloon up from a size 2 to a size 4 over the holidays.

Like I should be so lucky to have that problem!

The only time I was a size two was the day I was born.

To make it clear, my weight usually registers average on the height and weight scale, whatever normal is. Meaning, I’ve never had a doctor give me “the talk.” That my weight was bad for my health. My sugar jones, maybe, but that’s another story. You can read it here. So why have I worried about how I look?

I don’t recall exactly when I became aware of my body’s defects. Somewhere in grammar school, my best friend’s mother mentioned I had fat legs. She was a bit of a control freak, always sitting on her daughter’s head about getting spots on her clothes and gaining weight. Last I heard, my formerly trim, athletic friend weighed 300 pounds and was agoraphobic. True story. I wonder it it had anything to do with her mother’s parenting style?

A few years later, I had my first run-in with body image issues. It snuck up on me like a thief in the night. Despite my friend’s mother’s disparaging remark, I never gave my weight a thought. At age sixteen, I broke my big toe. I was hospitalized and put on bed rest for three months. Yeah, times have changed. Today, they’d stick me in a boot and send me back to school so I wouldn’t miss a pop quiz, but what can I say?

I’d been an active teenager who ate three squares and a dessert when I could get it. My mother wasn’t big on sweets, so I usually spent some babysitting money on a candy bar once in a while, and that was that. But my enforced bed rest sent me straight to the cookie jar, or wherever my mother hid snacks. When I returned to school, I could barely fit in my uniform.

That was the beginning of emotional eating and yo-yo dieting. Did I love it? Let me count the therapy bills.

So, like most of my friends over the years, my self-love was based on the number on my scale in the morning or the size of my jeans. If my dating life lagged, I ran to the fridge for comfort. When I couldn’t stand my size, I’d go on a fad diet.

Interesting fact: I recently saw a photo of me at time when I was tied up in knots about my size. I looked perfectly fine. What was the BFD? It was an interesting lesson as I started to read so many articles about body positivity.

Women writing about eating disorders (a thing, I’ve had a touch myself (ahem), women with body dysmorphia who can’t see their bodies in a positive light. Women who have rules about the way we see their bodies. Look. Don’t look. I started cringing when I’d read these pieces, wondering if I’d offended someone inadvertently. Staring into space on the bus and a curvy woman glaring back thinking I’m giving her a side-eye.

It’s enough to give a body a headache if we didn’t enough problems with our bodies as it is.

Then I began reading about the body positive movement. Let me tell you, if anyone needed a positive spin on her body, ’tis moi, folks.

Some ageists think old people don’t care how we look. Like we have some misguided notion that canes and walkers are fashion statements along with dumpy clothes and orthopedic shoes.

Well, let me tell you, bunky, if there’s anyone who needs a body positive movement, it’s an old geezer in droopy jeans from the sale table at Costco and a nylon windbreaker that was out of style when he bought it twenty years ago.

But what’s a poor guy to do? He’s had a spell of COPD and a scary time dealing with prostate cancer, during which he had to give up his tennis game and daily walks. When he recovered, he took a look in the mirror and said, WTF? Where did my ass go? So forget trying looking like a GQ model. The challenge is finding a pair of tube socks to go with those huge white athletic shoes, the only kicks he can walk in anymore.

Woman don’t fare any better, what with boobs sailing south like a 17th-century explorer, skin that looks like a rendering of a prehistoric mammal, and hair you could mistake for the fuzz you take out of the vacuum cleaner.

When the force of gravity strips your skeleton of a good three inches over time, you’re going to end up with a spare tire around your midriff even if you’re a workout junkie. I‘d like to see a designer come up with a good look for 5’ 5" of skin on a 5'2" skeleton.

Where we once stopped traffic, now we hear car horns blaring at us to get out of the way. No matter when it starts, in our 50s, 60s, or 70s, we all have to cope with a body that has become a cruel joke of Mother Nature.

If I had trouble loving my temple of the spirit when I was young and beautiful, what am I supposed to do about this wreck of protoplasm for the next decade, assuming it stays healthy enough to live that long? Hate myself every day? Because that’s the standard.

Better to look good than feel good.

I have all of the above. Well, except my hair has held up. But I can’t even recognize the rest of me these days. I get occasional bouts of the grumpies over one minor thing or another, but otherwise, I’m healthy and fit because I eat well (enough), and I exercise (often enough).

Yet, the currency on which I once based my worth has lost its value. So, I think to myself when I read about women struggling with body images and writing about body positivity, I don’t care how big you are, how bony, or flat-chested. If you’re healthy, I’ll trade you your body images for mine any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

I don’t say that to diminish the suffering of others. But as I read these heartfelt articles about women coming to terms with a body that doesn’t match up to the ideal set by cosmetics companies and fashion designers, I had an epiphany.

For someone who always obsessed over her looks, who sometimes spent more than she should keeping neck and neck with the latest fashion statements, how do I craft a body positive attitude for a body nobody cares about anymore?

Well, it turns out people do still care about this body. The doctors and nurses who worked on it and cared for it during nine surgeries this century and counting, including cancer scares and a life-saving measure on my heart.

Though I wouldn’t have expected them to do less, when I had a chance to see these medical warriors devoting themselves to me, it put a different spin on how I saw my body. I recall one especially difficult night in the hospital after my open-heart surgery. I was having trouble breathing, and everything hurt. A nurse spent hours with me, checking my incisions, my IVs, getting a pulmonary specialist in to help me.

My surgeons and cardiologist checked every stat on my chart and talked to me as if I was the only life in the hospital that mattered. When, in fact, more than a dozen people in the ward had the same surgery and were getting the same level of care.

After I recovered from this ordeal, it hit me like a bolt. If these people can care so much about my body, how dare I complain about it, criticize it, beat it up with diets to change it?

Of course, I valued my life, but it was the vessel that contains it that I believed came up short. I recalled the days when someone said I should be grateful for whatever age I was because I’d never be that young again.

Of course, that’s right. Back in my younger days, I didn’t appreciate what I had. I only focused on the number on the scale instead of my unwrinkled skin, my strong bones and muscles, my whipsharp memory that could recall a phone number twenty years after I last used it.

But that wasn’t good enough for me back then. I needed to look like a runway model to feel positive about my body. Or I needed a man to come along and tell me I was the best thing since sliced bread.

Funny, though, even though I had moments when I liked what I saw in the mirror, that didn’t stop the progression of time. Very few of us reach old age looking like spring chickens. That means we all have to come to terms with loving ourselves and appreciating a body that’s far from ready for a photo op.

And I think I found the clue. Certainly appreciating the life-saving care I received when I was ill helped me see myself in a different light. But it was more that I had come close to losing my life. My thyroid surgery might have revealed cancer, but thankfully, it didn’t. Likewise, when I had a hysterectomy. Got it out in the nick of time I was told.

The big hit was the surgery on my heart. When I was a kid, a bad heart valve killed people. It killed a first cousin and possibly my aunt. But I won the lottery. I came through surgery with flying colors.

But it could have gone sideways. It does for some people. It’s a pretty drastic maneuver to have your innards cut open and fixed with spare parts. I came out of that surgery with a big dose of gratitude. For my health care team, my DNA that gave me the wherewithal to survive. And my body for going through all that and allowing me to live another day. Another year, and almost, so far, another decade.

Do I feel positive about my body these days? I wouldn’t prance around in a bikini, but I don’t have to. I just live my life and don’t look in the mirror anymore on days when I’m a bit shocked at how old I look. I make peace with the scar on my chest and the rumpled body that carries me around. I don’t give a flying fuckerator anymore whether I’m a few pounds more than I’d like, whether my jeans make my ass look young, or that my days of wearing sleeveless dresses is over. I put on as much bling and lipstick as I can and strut my stuff.

If I didn’t have this body, I wouldn’t be alive. You can’t get more body positive than that.