Loves Roundness, Or At Least Trying To

Trying to live into the womanist ideal of loving myself regardless

This week’s newsletter is a revision of a blog post that I wrote in 2011, as I’ve found myself wrestling with some old demons.

“Girl, where you been hiding those legs?!” my high school classmate shouted. Instantly, I regretted the decision to wear my favorite outfit – a purple mini-skirt and matching top. Ironically, I’d chosen it because the long gold-flecked shirt covered what I considered to be my worst asset: my butt. Until that day, I hadn’t realized that my thick, muscular calves were just as capable of eliciting attention. I tried to hush my classmate, but he was unhushable. His appraising stare and loud mouth followed me down the walkway and onto the bus.

It was the late 80s, when skinny Black women tried desperately to gain weight so that they’d be considered appealing to Black men, whose aesthetic was defined by a preference for things thick. From the waist down, I had thickness in abundance. And I hated it.

“Where did she get that butt? None of y’all got butts like that!” the woman shrieked. We were at my my grandparents' house and a longtime family friend was visiting. One of my aunts answered, “Her daddy’s people.” Oblivious to my shame, the woman kept going: “And ain’t got titties the first!” she cackled loudly. We don’t talk enough about how body shaming usually starts at home, in the critiques and teasing of people who claim to love us.

By the time I was a teenager, my body was frequently the fodder of family conversation. My hair was too coarse, my breasts too small, my butt and stomach too big. Even the way I walked was wrong. It didn’t help that I spent my middle school years in predominantly White schools, where skinniness was in and thickness was sin. I was built like an inverted P, my slim upper body suddenly giving way to a large mound at the base of my spine. I didn’t know it but I had internalized the Western European beauty ideals of moderation and symmetry. My body was out of compliance.

Nor did it help that my body elicited the wrong type of attention from men. By sixteen, I had the butt and hips of a BBL patient’s dreams. I once had to whip out my high school ID card to stave off the advances of a clearly-too-old-to-be-talking-to-me man who refused to accept that those hips, those thighs, that ass belonged to an underage girl.

Being a natural introvert, I hated the attention that my lower half brought, whether it was criticism or admiration. So I hid. I camouflaged my body with loose pants, shirts that hung below the waist, ankle-length skirts and dresses.

The irony was that I loved other women’s thickness even as I deplored my own. I find Jill Scott and Danielle Brooks downright breathtaking! The irony is never lost on me. I watch them in admiration, wondering why I have had such a hard time appreciating that same roundness in myself.

A dozen years ago, I vowed to stop waging war on my body by trying to force it into conformity with popular beauty ideals. I was, after all, a self-identified womanist. It was time for me to live more fully into the third part of Alice Walker’s definition of the term: “Loves music. Loves dance. Loves the moon. Loves the Spirit. Loves love and food and roundness. Loves struggle. Loves the Folk. Loves herself. Regardless.”

As I approached my 39th birthday, I decided that it was time for me to learn to love my roundness. Back then, I wrote: “I have realized that 20 years from now, I will look at images of the 38-year-old me and wish that I had enjoyed this body while I had it. I have realized that it is time to do with my body what I learned to do with my hair – delight in it and all of its big roundness – rotund belly, ample derriere, thick thighs, and boulder-sized calves. Even as it flagrantly violates the societal ideal of beauty, as it repeatedly sidelines me with chronic illness, and as it requires medication that causes it to regain much of the 35 pounds that I worked so hard to lose, I am committed to loving this body…this flesh…this round, brown flesh. And guess what? On more and more days lately, I actually do. Regardless.”

Since then, as I’ve aged and gone through illness, I’ve worked to make peace with the often-unwanted changes in my body. When, for example, my hair refused to grow back after chemo, I embraced baldness. Even when people project their hair insecurity on me by offering unsolicited and unwanted advice about hair growth strategies, I’m able to ignore it. Shiiiiiiiiit, you can’t tell me that I don’t rock this look.

And yet my self-love remains incomplete. As much as I strive to love roundness, I have been engaged in a silent battle with the roundest part of me, my belly. I have told myself that I wasn’t really warring against it, but rather against the gastrointestinal disorder that makes it so bloated and uncomfortable. If only I can get the disease under control, I tell myself, then my stomach will fall in line and we’ll live happily ever after. But those words keep coming back to me: “Loves love and food and roundness. Loves herself. Regardless.”

I’m still working on regardless. Today it begins with loving my belly, caressing its smooth fullness, and thanking it for its valiant efforts to hold the stress that I have endured. My belly, I have realized, has been keeping the score of intergenerational and childhood trauma, chronic stress, and invasive medical procedures. My belly has been holding much of my body’s dysfunction, so that the rest of me can function. And who knows? Twenty years from now, I may look at images of 51-year-old me and wish that I had enjoyed this body while I had it…regardless.