By Jeannette Sanderson

I followed my mom into the bathroom and waited as she reluctantly removed her robe. I stood behind her, and we both stared into the mirror.

“I look like a freak,” she said.

I looked down at the concavity of her chest, the mean line of staples, and the raw red scar that was the only evidence of what once was. Then I raised my head, meeting her watery blue eyes in the mirror.

“No,” I said. “You’re more beautiful than ever.” And she was. She was alive.

Even as I celebrated my mother’s living, breathing body, I remembered a time when I was embarrassed by it. As a child, I adored everything about my mother. She was the parent who stayed, the one whose eternal optimism while raising five kids on her own buoyed my own overly sensitive young heart. I cherished everything about my mom, or at least I did until adolescence.

That’s when a veil was lifted, and I seemed to truly notice her body, her human and imperfect body, for the first time.

Bodies. As children, they’re all about function. How many toys can these arms carry? How fast can these legs pedal? How long can this chest hold a breath underwater? How much soda can this stomach hold?

Then adolescence changes the lens through which we see our bodies. Form takes the place of function. Do these arms have too many freckles? Are these legs too hairy? Is my chest too flat? Why isn’t my stomach as flat as my chest?

Our role models become women on TV, women in magazines. They are not our mothers. And although it would take years before my body would fully develop, it was clear in my thirteen-year-old mind that my mother’s body was not the end result that our society celebrated, not the one that I wanted for myself.

In my adolescent eyes, my mom had flesh in all the wrong places. She had a flabby belly, a generous behind, and small breasts.

I think what horrified my teenage self even more than my mother’s imperfect body was that she seemed happy in that body. Sure, she went on the occasional grapefruit diet; what woman in the seventies escaped that fate? And she sometimes stuffed her bra with toilet paper, though that was only when she was going somewhere special and she noticed that her blouse broadcast her crinkly bra cups. She even had what at the time was called a panty girdle. I realized watching my mother put it on one evening that it was a place to try to cram in extra fat. My mother said the girdle was as uncomfortable as it looked. She wore the thing only a few times, and then only because she needed to justify the expense of buying it.

But mostly my mother moved in the world as a woman who was happy with and comfortable in her body. I remember she had started dating a man who did maintenance work in the projects where we lived. The syrupy voice she used when talking to him on the phone was one thing, but the way she seemed to swing her hips whenever she walked away from him was more than my teenage heart could take.

Gross.

My disgust with my mother’s body was compounded by my fear of what it portended about the body I would one day have.

I worried, flat-chested as I was at thirteen, that I would take after my mom and never have breasts worth noticing. As for the rest of my body, I wanted fit, not flabby. My only consolation there was that I was ridiculously thin. My nana compared me to Julie on “The Mod Squad.” That meant that, though I would likely one day need a padded bra, at least I might escape the padded belly and behind.

I worry that I didn’t do a very good job hiding my loathing. I especially remember the days Mom wore her body hugging orange stretch pants. I’m surprised I never strained my eyes given how much I rolled them. In retrospect, I hope that she had too much on her mind to notice my contempt.

When I became an adult, and then became a mother myself, I fell back in love with my mother’s body. I cared less about how it looked—once past adolescence I resumed thinking that she was the most beautiful woman in the world—and mostly just cared that it worked. After all, this was the body that carried the heart of the woman I loved most.

Sadly, as she got older my mom didn’t take the same joy in her body as she once did. She no longer flaunted her figure in tight-fitting pants the way that had once embarrassed me. 

Oh, how I wish she had.

Now, as I beheld my mother’s body in the mirror, I forced myself to look beyond the jagged red scar. Instead I let my eyes caress the new concavity in her chest, like a drum tightened over a beating heart.

“Really?” Mom whispered.

I found her hopeful eyes in the mirror.

“Really,” I answered. “You’re more beautiful than ever.”

Jeannette Sanderson is a writer who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley. She remembers this conversation with her mother when she looks in the mirror after recently having her hip replaced. Instead of a scar, she chooses to see a pink ribbon signifying the gift of once again being able to comfortably walk, run, and travel with her husband, her pup, and her grown children. See jeannettesanderson.com for more of Jeannette’s writing.

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