Girls

M asks me this morning whether a breast gets droopy after breastfeeding. (Not, I swear, to connect all body dots to her father, but invariably these sorts of questions follow prolonged time in Baltimore.) "Breasts get droopy for all kinds of reasons, most of all growing older," I tell her. "Yes, breastfeeding can change the way a breast looks." She tells me that her older sister--her Dad's other daughter--had breast surgery to repair droopy breasts after breastfeeding her three children.

I am dumbfounded by this information. This woman is only in her 30s, and has spent the majority of her adult life unemployed or barely employed. (She's also, incidentally, drop-dead gorgeous.) For her to fund plastic surgery--well, it strikes me a bizarre ordering of priorities in a life. Must've been a whole lot of unhappiness about those boobs, I guess.

I tell M, "Your body is a roadmap of your life. As you get older, you carry more history on your body." I'm panicked by her fear of wrinkles, of fat, of freckles--by her criticisms of me, masked in something else. "It's something to celebrate--not hide. I'd never want to erase the signs that I was able to use my own body to feed you." Body not as temple, but tapestry.

It's a whole lot of politics, I know, and I'm not always opposed to plastic surgery. And I heartily approve of waxed brows and flattering bras, and I would love to slim down to slink, like in the old days. But God, it's a brutal landscape for raising well-adjusted girls--girls who like themselves and their bodies. Especially when we, ourselves, are so ambivalent about ourselves, so fucking weary of our own bodies.

"That dress looks awful on her," M notes just now, looking at Jennifer Lopez in a fairly classic evening gown in some movie. If Jennifer Lopez looks awful in a classic evening gown, the battle's lost.