Stomach Stuff

 Before more camping notes, I wanted to report back on having to take my mom to her colonoscopy Thursday morning. Some of you may remember how it went when I took her for bloodwork last November and understand my trepidation. My mother does not enjoy fasting, and this was a whole order of magnitude over bloodwork fasting. 

Naturally everything went swimmingly and she only criticized my driving once, and not even when I sort of almost got us hit by a bus (to be fair, she may not have noticed that).

The last time I got colonoscoped I went to a small hospital. The last time I took my mom it was a bigger hospital. This was a small, very shiny, state-of-the-art seeming clinic. Everything was clean and bright. There was a big screen tv flashing all the impressive statistics about the place. The only note I had was about saying something like "We find adenomas in 54% more patients than other clinics", which I assume means they have better equipment and find things that are smaller, but taken another way does not sound good AT ALL. 

Speaking of eating and not, the body positivity part of this post of Sarah's struck me hard. Refer back to America Ferrara's 'women can't win' speech in the Barbie movie. For decades we were supposed to feel bad about our bodies, and now we have to feel bad if we feel bad about our bodies? Of course I am grateful for the pushback against diet culture, diet culture is stupid, I love that people like Aubrey Gordon are pointing out the inaccuracies and hysteria surrounding the obesity panic. But I was born in the seventies and sometimes I DO wonder if being thin would feel better than lemon curd cheesecake tastes. Sometimes I wish fewer parts of my body rested on other parts of my body. 

I have done my best not to pass any of this bullshit on to my daughter - I can't remember who said it, but I read somewhere that one of the worst casualties of diet culture is the relationship between countless mothers and daughters and holy shit, does that ever ring true. I asked my daughter when she was a teenager how she felt about her body and she said "I don't worship it or anything, but we're homies". Then a year or two ago she went out for dinner with her friends and texted me that the waitress had come to clear their plates and said "wow, you guys were hungry!", and her friends were appalled and insulted that she was appetite-shaming them, but "you raised me to be so secure around food issues I didn't even notice". I cried a little, and also took this to mean that now and then I can complain a little about how fucking fat I am without scarring her for life. 

Sometimes when I'm getting dressed I put on something that doesn't feel comfortable or flattering right then, and I wonder for a second if I should just force myself to wear it. I'm not sure why - because fuck the notion of 'flattering?' Because if I'm not ashamed of my body I shouldn't care what I wear? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I have sensory issues, and sometimes an item of clothing will feel okay one day and not the next. I'm pretty sure it's not a triumph over diet culture to march myself around feeling uncomfortable. 

A couple of weeks ago Eve and I walked Lucy over to my parents' place and were having a drink out on the front step where it's shady, and one of Eve's friends was driving by with her girlfriend and the girlfriend's new puppy, so they stopped to show us the puppy. They took a picture of Eve and I with the dog and when I looked at it I was horrified by how bad I looked. Then I started to think about how when I see a bad picture of me I think "oh okay, I forgot that I'm hideous, I should remember not to walk around expecting people not to gag at the sight of me", but when I see a good picture I don't think "oh sweet, I'm hot now, cool cool cool". Years ago I wouldn't be able to think about it this rationally, I would just starve myself for a couple of weeks and then not be able to keep starving and feel shitty about myself. 

So I'm not throwing body positivity out with the bathwater. But it needs to stay in its lane.