Undressed.

It's been a long winter. Thankfully, Spring is marching in and my brain is finally thawing (I think).

I had an interesting experience in January, while at the gym with my son. Three girls, pre-teens, were camped out in the women's changing room, texting and commiserating over some boy-related drama. For the first time in a long time, I felt self-conscious about getting out of my wet bathing suit, so I dried and changed my son first and let him toddle from locker to vacant locker, opening and closing the metal doors.

Inevitably, I also had to get undressed, of course. It was January and I wasn't about to go outside with a wet swimsuit under my clothes. I started with the bottom half of my I-had-a-baby-and-I'm-not-quite-ready-for-a-real-bikini-yet two-piece bathing suit and dried off so I could get my pants on. "Ew," I heard one of the girls mumble to her friend. I was caught off-guard only by the fact that she said this so audibly. I looked up to check on my son, who was still engrossed in charting new locker frontiers.

Next, I peeled off the top of my bathing suit, my cleavage obeying the law of gravity. The giggles from the corner were not remotely concealed. I wasn't angry or (the real shocker) embarassed, but I did start to feel a little defiant- "Just you wait, girls," I thought to myself. I finished drying, got dressed, gathered my charge and kissed his curly golden hair. My son has grown strong and beautiful on his mother's milk. I will never regret what I have given him, no matter what anyone thinks or says, no matter how it has changed my physical landscape.

I remember being young and being totally horrified when older women changed clothes in the locker room at the pool, so unashamed of the folds and the heft. I remember not wanting to look, but having to, and trying to peek without making it look like I was. We don't see naked people that much, but if we do, they are usually Photoshop-ed, airbrushed and made up past the point of realism. I didn't know what real women looked like under their clothes. Sure there was a degree of shock, maybe disgust and certainly fear (is that what I'm going to look like in 20, 30, 40 years?), but wasn't there also a degree of amazement, as if the curtain was being pulled back and we were seeing the truth for the first time? Not only about what bodies really look like, but that- hello- we will grow up and we will grow old. But we cannot find revelation in the naked bodies of mothers and grandmothers, right? That just wouldn't sell (and literally, how much of the economy depends on women fearing and fighting their bodies?).

So we mask the potentially revelatory experience of seeing things as they really are, and loving them, by expressing disgust. This is part of the process of rejecting ourselves, of course. And when did that battle begin? Oh yeah, when I was the same age as those girls snickering in the corner; when I started to separate, catalog and judge each part of my corporeal self.

By the end of the day, I realized, I don't envy those girls their young, beautiful bodies. I wish I had appreciated mine when I had it- maybe they are lucky and they do. As much as I feared the aging bodies I snuck peeks at in the gym when I was young, I had also hated the one I carried. One day those girls' bodies will do magical things like mine does and with any luck they will appreciate it, like I do- finally.