We'll Laugh About This SomedaySample

I had actually become a fat kid. Well, chubby is a better word. I won’t deny it: I liked to sneak into the kitchen when no one was around and dunk potato chips into ketchup. But I wasn’t completely unhinged. I was just old enough to be aware of my chubbiness and somehow knew that, at least according to the world I lived in, I should be ashamed of it. . . .

I’m almost forty now, and the chubby girl is still here. I hear it’s your sixties when you really don’t give a roaring rip about what other people think, but that seems so far away. The chubby girl seems to be frozen in time, a duplicate who never grew up. She’s clipped my heels every step, every year. She doesn’t always make herself known. She doesn’t intrude. She takes vacations sometimes, or maybe stays in the lower level, out of my hair. But every once in a while, when my husband takes photos of precious moments between me and the girls and I later delete them with a “please tell me this isn’t what I look like from the back”; or when my thighs swish together just so; or when someone ignores me, discards me, or tosses me aside—I feel her presence.

Through salty tears and a snotty nose, I look around for her hiding somewhere.

And I can usually spot her, peeking out behind a tree, a door, underneath my bed. She hides, but only because she wants to be found.

So I find her. I speak to her. I soothe her. Oh, no, no, no, I assure her. You aren’t my shame; you are my most precious gift. Without her, I surely would have focused on superficial things that appear beautiful one day but are thrown into the fire the next. I wouldn’t have, instead, spent hundreds of hours reading and writing in my room. If beauty had been my hot ticket, I wouldn’t have made laughter into a craft. I would have become colder, less compassionate, more flippant, and crueler if I didn’t know the pain she endured. Her pain made me more whole.

So, I thank her, and this usually makes her feel better.

Prayer

Father, thank you for creating me to be unique, and thank you for loving me so deeply. Please help me to see myself as you see me and to love the way you have made me. Amen.