Month: June 2016

With the last breath in my uncomfortably exposed bosom, I agree wholeheartedly with every last word in this essay from a few years ago in the Huffington Post:

Moms, Put on That Swimsuit. The writer (who, in the picture, is not at all fat! But she feels like she is, and that’s what counts) says:

I refuse to miss my children’s high-pitched, pool-induced giggles because of my insecurities.

I refuse to let other women’s judging eyes at the pool prevent me from exposing my kids’ eyes to the wonder of the sun glittering on the water.

I refuse to let my self-image influence my children’s.

I refuse to sacrifice memories with my children because of a soft tummy.

I want them to remember twirling in the water with their mom.

I want them to remember splash fights together.

I want them to remember jumping off the edge of the pool into my arms.

I want them to remember that their mom was there, with them.

This attitude resonates with me so much more than all those body positive slogans shrieking: “YES! YOU DEFINITELY HAVE A BIKINI BODY! ADORE YOUR BODY, NO MATTER WHAT! YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL BECAUSE IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR ANY WOMAN NOT TO BE BEAUTIFUL!”

As one of my friends pointed out, kids actually do kind of notice if you’re fat. They just don’t care, because you are at the beach and the beach is supposed to be fun. So, whatcha gonna do?

More than once last year, I just felt too damn fat to put on a bathing suit. Just couldn’t do it. So I would moodily schlep to the pond, and the kids would beg me to take them in the water and do that swooshing thing, or catch them when they jump off the big rock — and I couldn’t, because I didn’t have a suit on.

They were crushed. It didn’t make any sense to them. Why would you not wear your swimsuit to the beach?

And they were right. Yeah, there are skinny, perky teenagers at the beach. Yeah, there are other moms who are frolicking around with their kids, and they’re wearing the same size bikinis as their toddlers. Not even with stretch marks! How do they even do that? And here I am, weighing more than I did when I was nine months pregnant with the youngest kid, who is now a toddler. How did I even do that?

More to the point, who cares?

This year my motto is: Feel fat? Hide in the water. Unlike when you’re lurking unhappily on the sand, no one will see you, and you can feel light and graceful for once. Why would you deny yourself that?

If you insist on wondering what other people think about how you look, just enjoy feeling gracious and generous about how skinny they feel when they behold the massive twin craters you left behind in the sand when you struggled to your feet to join the cannonball contest. What a nice person you are! You just made their day so much better, bless their size 4 hearts.

 

But seriously. It’s not about making excuses for not being healthy. It’s not about being mediocre. It’s not about body positivity or normalizing obesity. It’s about letting the beach do what it’s designed to do: reminding you that there’s something bigger than you.

Sitting on the sand getting gritty and trying to tug your shorts and tank top over your flabby bits while the kids beg you to jump in? That is a great way to have a lousy afternoon.  If you want to be attractive, have fun. Laugh and be happy. That’s attractive, even when you’re fat.

 

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[A version of this post first appeared in 2014]

Last weekend, a dream came true.

We live on an acre and a quarter of land. To the south of our house is a little lawn and the road; to the west is a field and a grove of aspens and pines; to the north is the back yard, garden, swing set, trampoline, and a gorgeous little stream. And to the east, really really close to our living room windows, is a big ol’ apartment house.

It blocks out the sky, and it’s kind of weird that it’s jammed up so close to our property. I don’t really mind seeing it right out the window, even though their porch is peeling like crazy, there are miscellaneous broken toys, barrels, and scraps of cardboard strewn around the grass, and a mildewed couch is hulking in the weeds. Hey, live free or die. As I’ve mentioned, we ourselves haven’t graced the cover of House Beautiful lately.

However, we have this dog.

[img attachment=”105852″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”boomer” /]

This picture was taken three years ago, when he was still a little puppy.

As you can see, he loves our children very, very much. So much. So very much that, whenever our kids are threatened by outrageously dangerous things like a nice lady carrying a baby into her apartment house right outside our living room window, Mr. Protective does his best to murder them to death with the sheer murderforce of his frenzied superbark.

The barking was bad enough; but along with three sweet towheaded children, the neighbors also have a bitsy little dog-like creature of their own, and this foolish creature is bound and determined to go pee in our yard. Because he is just longing to disappear down the gullet of our dog.

The obvious answer is, of course, to put up a big fence. But unless your name is Drumpf and you’re a sociopath, you’ll realize this is prohibitively expensive.

Lo and behold: on Memorial Day, the neighbors did it for us! I’m so happy. So now, when when we look out the living room windows, we see this:

[img attachment=”105837″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”Screen Shot 2016-06-02 at 10.23.54 AM” /]

Which might as well be this:

[img attachment=”105845″ align=”aligncenter” size=”medium” alt=”small-easel-with-a-blank-canvas” /]

Oh, the possibilities!

So, hit me with ideas. What do we do with our side of this big, beautiful wall? Plant climbing vines? Paint regrettable murals? Establish beehives? Make a sundial? Start training one of those crazy flat fruit trees? Hire Wile E. Coyote to construct a portal to another world? I’m willing to consider anything, because the only thing cheaper than making the neighbors build a wall is talking about what do to with it.

 

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Image: public domain

And so are Bert and Ernie. Do you see where I’m headed with this? That’s your warning. Don’t read this if you just want to enjoy children’s books, and don’t want to know too much about the authors.

The New Yorker has a short piece about Arnold Lobel, one of the greatest children’s authors and illustrators of all time. He’s most famous for the Frog and Toad books, but Mouse Tales, Mouse Soup, Owl At Home, and Fables are all great favorites at our house. We also love Pigericks, Ming Lo Moves the Mountain, and others.

So, it seems Lobel was gay, and he died of AIDS at age 54, in 1987. The article says he came out to his family in 1974.

Revelations like this used to disturb me very much. I only recently found out that Tomie dePaola is also gay, despite his obvious love for at least the stories and aesthetics that accrue to the Catholic Church. He’s the author of many books involving the Church indirectly or directly, and of many books about saints — “not a one of them has any proselytization in it,” he says. “I did it because they were good stories.”

So there it is. They are good stories, and he is careful only to show and tell the things that he still sees as true and universal, whether that means historically true, as with St. Benedict and Scholastica, or existentially true, as with St. Christopher — despite the fact that there are many aspects of the Church that he rejects. I admire this attitude immensely. Too often, we’re exhorted in the name of cleanliness to throw out the baby, and the bathwater, and the whole idea of tubs in general, just because there’s some aspect of one particular baby we don’t like one time.

Can we not do the same with Arnold Lobel, albeit from the other direction?

The New Yorker makes a medium-to-mildly obnoxious attempt to “proselytize” with the biography of Arnold Lobel, via the words of his daughter:

Adrianne suspects that there’s another dimension to the series’s sustained popularity. Frog and Toad are “of the same sex, and they love each other,” she told me. “It was quite ahead of its time in that respect.” In 1974, four years after the first book in the series was published, Lobel came out to his family as gay. “I think ‘Frog and Toad’ really was the beginning of him coming out,” Adrianne told me. Lobel never publicly discussed a connection between the series and his sexuality, but he did comment on the ways in which personal material made its way into his stories. In a 1977 interview with the children’s-book journal The Lion and the Unicorn, he said:

You know, if an adult has an unhappy love affair, he writes about it. He exorcises it out of himself, perhaps, by writing a novel about it. Well, if I have an unhappy love affair, I have to somehow use all that pain and suffering but turn it into a work for children.

Color me skeptical. I have no doubt that the poignance and melancholy that flicker in and out of the Frog and Toad books spring from Lobel’s personal life, whether that was associated with his homosexuality or not, whether he was in the closet or not.

But was Frog and Toad “ahead of its time” for portraying friends who love each other? Not unless you want it to be. These are books about friendship, about love, about human nature, about complementarity; and they have so much more in them that is good, true, and beautiful, never mind hilarious and touching, than almost any other children’s book I’ve ever read. (And if you’ve ever tried to write an easy reader story, you’ll recognize his almost superhuman talent for using short, simple words to tell a concise and polished story with surpassing wit and charm.)

I think we can and should take a page from Tomie dePaola: if he, as a liberal gay man, can take what seems valuable to him from the wisdom and culture of the Church, and if he can decline to waste any time publicly griping about what offends him, then we, as parents and as readers, should take what seems valuable in the work of Arnold Lobel, and decline to waste any time papering over what is good and true with extraneous information about the author — which, in the context of his stories, truly is extraneous, even meaningless.

Can we not learn to do this in general, not just with children’s books?  Can we not look for the good, the true, and the beautiful and hope to find them all together, even in unexpected places? “Test all things; hold fast that which is good.” There really isn’t any other way to live.

But achieving this world-turning forgiveness is not really a matter of figuring out how to sit in that spot where you care just enough, but not too much. It’s not a matter of finding a spot where you can be attracted and repulsed in equal measure. It’s something else, something that would never work if you were dealing with physics (or even physics as I imagined it as a child). It depends on having an inexhaustible source of energy.

Read the rest at the Register.

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Image: Norman Rockwell – Downloaded 2009-06-29 from Popular Science magazine, Vol.97, No.4 (October 1920), Bonnier Corp. New York, ISSN 0161-7370, front cover on Google Books