Celebrating Our Bodies

Celebrating Our Glorious Goddess Bodies
By Janet Lucy

"Mommy, do you ever think about being thinner?" my ten-year-old daughter, Sarah, asked from the back seat of the car one morning on our way to school. Once I got past my initial thought that perhaps she was suggesting that I should lose some weight, I realized that I had been given a golden opportunity, plus a literally captive audience in my car. This is the main reason I don't mind the fifteen-minute drive to and from school each day: some of our best conversations happen in my red Toyota. For the last six months she has been increasingly critical of her own body, even using the F word (fat) to describe it. "So how honest am I willing to be?" I wondered in the few moments I had to formulate an appropriate response to her question. Did I want to tell her that being thin had been an obsession of mine for most of my life? Should I mention all of the unhealthy ways in which I had sought to achieve a culturally ideal body image, that is until I turned forty and began my new quest for self-acceptance?

"Yes, I do think about being thinner," I confessed. "But these days, I am much more interested in accepting myself and my body the way I am. My body is strong and healthy and I'm grateful for that." And here's my favorite part: "I am a goddess," I told her. "And so are you." I like to say that from time to time, in case I begin to forget again.

"That's good, Mommy. I like that," she replied, then hugged me and climbed out of the car.

I watched her walk into the schoolyard, marveling at how strong, sturdy, and well-proportioned her body is, and acknowledging how tender and vulnerable she also is on the inside. I felt like I'd been able to plant one small seed in her very fertile and receptive mind, knowing that she was just beginning to face the inevitable challenge of being a female in a culture that has forgotten that the female body is to be revered and honored, no matter what size or shape. I drove away wondering how I could help my daughter learn to accept and even love the natural body she has been graced with, and to discover and celebrate her true inner beauty.

I have been vigilant about not bringing negative body and weight-related topics into our household. We do not own a scale, count calories, diet, or talk about our weight or fat. In spite of my best efforts, I know that the culture we live in makes it nearly impossible for girls and women to appreciate and accept their bodies. Studies show that over half of all girls are unhappy with their bodies by the age of thirteen. We are constantly bombarded with unattainable images and definitions of physical beauty. Most advertisements are computer-enhanced and airbrushed to produce a culturally idealistic and physically unrealistic female form. Not even the women in those advertisements look like the final copy. The truth is, actresses and models wake up just like we do, with blemishes and insecurities about their physical appearance.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow confessed her own insecurities about her body in a recent interview. "Sure I'm insecure," she admitted. "I never think that I'm thin enough or my boobs are big enough or whatever." She blamed the media for pressuring women to be thin. "We are bombarded with images of twelve-year-old girls with makeup and we think we are supposed to look like that. Well, I'm never gonna look like me either," she continued. "With the way they airbrush the pictures and all, I don't look like that."

"Living in a woman's body is not easy," agrees Geneen Roth in her book Breaking Free From Compulsive Eating. "Especially if you happen to look like a woman and not like an adolescent boy. We've spent years trying to slice away what makes our bodies womanly: the roundness, the lushness. And we've sliced our spirits instead."

The mysterious power of the female body has been expressed in art, religion, and mythology since the beginning of time. Every culture in the world has deified the earth as the Great Goddess, and honored her image in all forms of art, including poetry and songs. Goddess images"hstatues, figurines, drawings, carvings, and sculptures"hfrom all over the world portray the female body as full and abundant and celebrate the body's power to create and sustain life. Could the myths and images of the Great Goddess as a full and powerful female offer women and girls today a more natural understanding and perhaps a new perspective of our female bodies? I considered. What if my daughter could see the correlation between her own female body and that of the Great Earth Goddesses? What if women and girls alike could re-imagine their own female bodies to be goddess-like?

Sarah has always loved art. At a young age she began to dabble in mixed media, and her body was often her canvas. When she was three years old, she rubbed Elmer's glue on her bare belly and sprinkled it with sparkling flecks of gold glitter. When I brought out the brown earthy clay, she rubbed that too onto her belly, face, arms, and legs. And naturally, when the watercolors came out later on, her body became her canvas again.