Bodies

At my gym, there are two little girls, both three years old, that come with their moms.  The gym owner babysits while the moms exercise.  Both girls are cute as a button.  Blond hair, blue eyes.  I don't know their names, so we'll call them Sarah and Megan.  Sarah is so willowy.  Even at three she seems tall.  She's so lean, and she's got the tiniest little butt.  Megan, on the other hand, is built completely differently.  She's shorter, stockier.  She's got a belly, a ba-donk-a-donk butt and thunder thighs. 

I was at the gym the other day, watching the girls play, and I was struck by this feeling of absolute sadness.  I was sad for Megan.  She's only three, so she's not aware of her body, but soon she will be.  She will realize that she is different from Megan.  She will probably not realize, for years yet, that she is bigger through no fault of her own. 

I feel incredibly sad for Megan, for the struggles she is going to have.  She will struggle her whole life to look like Sarah.  Sarah, tall and willowy.  Sarah, the same as Megan, has done nothing to influence her size.  They were both simply made that way.  Sarah is built exactly the same as her mom and it's the same for Megan. 

Poor Megan will probably spend a lifetime trying to achieve the impossible.  She will never be tall and willowy no matter what she does.  No matter how little she eats, how much she exercises.  She is not built that way.  Sarah and Megan's body shape and size were determined at conception.  Their body, color of their hair and eyes, skin tone.  It was all set long before they were even born.  It is in their DNA. Yet, somehow, Megan will try to change that.   She will spend month after month, year after year berating herself over something that she cannot change. No matter what she does.

Of course, I was reading a lot into a three year old, but Megan came to embody the struggle that I, and most women, face on a daily basis.  It's not just this tiny toddler that will struggle.  However, it really struck me as I plugged along,  at an embarrassingly slow rate on that godforsaken bicycle, that there are characteristics about ourselves that we simply cannot change.  We need to let those go.  Megan will never have mile long legs.  But we can't forget that, one day, Sarah might cry every night because she doesn't have a Brazilian woman's butt like Megan's.  It works both ways.  Oh, how much happier we'd all be if we could just learn to accept ourselves.  I know I would.