Palm Trees and Acrobats

Day 1 of life in Playa del Carmen:

7am. I woke up to the sound of banging. Not just average ordinary knocks and noise of the apartment life.  No, this was the BANG BANG BANG BANG of the cops or an angry ex beating your door with all their might to let you know that you're in deep shit. The BAM! BAM! BAM! that makes you sit upright and go into a state of panic and confusion. What is HAPPENING?
I got up quickly and clumsily and headed toward my front door. But when I stumbled (oh yes stumbled. Part of that chronic disease thing I mentioned in an earlier post is that my body, especially my feet and hands, don't really work for a while in the morning. It's awesome! So, when I STUMBLED) toward the door, I heard all sorts of other noises. Men speaking spanish; a woosha woosha woosha of metal scraping on adobe; a weeeeeen weeeen of a drill; Bang Bang and that BAM BAM BAM that woke me up. Oh, yeah, there's that condo high rise going up next door. Normally, I'm certain I'd have been annoyed. There was no chance I'd be sleeping any more. Between the SWAT-team-esque banging, the plethora of Spanish voices, and the pounding of my still confused/panicked heartbeat, it was hopeless. So, I went for the coffee pot. I'd packed a coffee maker first thing. I know my priorities. Toilet paper, swim suit, coffee maker.

I rounded the corner to the kitchen and there it was. My palm tree. Good morning palm tree that fills my kitchen window. Good morning. I smiled. I'm pretty sure I've dreamed of waking up in my house to the sight of a palm tree since the first time I saw a palm tree. It's a symbol of everything I love; tropical, sunshiny, sand-in-your-everything, green-as-green-can-be, noisily swaying in the salty wind, coconuts and thatch roof providing palm trees. And that's all I could see. Oh, dear heaven, I'm in you. I smiled goofily at it while I waited for my hands to work enough to open my Mexican coffee (a fail, by the way. My son had to open it for me. The boys are used to that.)
He and I went onto the balcony because, well, outside is the only real place to be in this new fantasy world I'm living in. I suppose in my dream there aren't men climbing on scaffolding with ropes and harnesses, belting out fast words I can't understand or singing loud ballads of melodic nonsense while they bang and weeen and scrape scrape, but I suppose you can't have it all. In my dream, I watch my Palm tree sway in the breeze and take in the smell of screensavers. In my reality, I watched small, skinny men in hard hats seem to defy gravity and create an Adobe wall with an increasing tightening in my chest every time they moved.

Construction has got to be terrifying. How do u get used to being up in the air supported only by a 1 1/2 inch pipe or a 2×8 board laying careless over scaffolding. "Your ropes aren't even attached to anything. Why are you even wearing that harness? Please don't die tiny Mexican stranger man. Oooh, that's how adobe is made! That's kind of fascinating. You guys are sort of magic. This is a little like watching acrobats. I wish you had a net. I hope your wives make you great tamales when you get home. I bet they have no idea what you do all day. Oh damn, are yall installing a light THERE? That's gonna shine right in my window."
So, two cups of coffee and an acrobat show later, I knew how adobe was made and didn't care about the bang bam ween scrape alarm clock anymore. Time to start on that to do list.

10am Priority 1: Plastic to Pesos. I walked to the bank around rhe corner. (Everything here is down the street or around the corner). I cautiously look around, this IS Mexico, after all. The real estate guy told us to remember those words. He said them a lot. "This town is safe, but this IS Mexico" It's all in perspective. Insert card.  Ok, Checking your account balance in pesos is WAY cooler than dollars! That extra 0 on the end just makes mundane banking more fun. Current exchange rate: 13.25 pesos per 1 penny. I punch in a number and more zeros than most American ATMs allow and took my $500 bills out. Yeah, 500, Balling hard.

The couple at the next ATM were speaking french, the couple on the other side Spanish. Smile.

Time to head to the familiar. Walmart. It happens to be down the street AND around the corner. And so began my very long, hot day of regretting not paying more attention in my college spanish classes and simultaneously being grateful and dreadful that I'm living in a place with no car. My experiences in Walmart and the Mega grocery store deserve  their own post. I'll get to that. For now, I leave you with an adios!

All About That Base, No Treble

It never occurred to me to want be anything but what I was until I was an adult and people started telling me I needed to be something else. I remember the first moment I looked in the mirror and realized there were people who thought my body wasn't perfect just as it was and maybe I should lose weight. I was 20 years old and I weighed 215 lbs. I had just had my first child. Honestly, even at that weight, it hadn't occurred to me that I should be ashamed. I looked and thought that it'd be a good idea to weigh less. I looked and thought that I'd gained a lot of weight having a baby and it was time to get healthier and thinner. For me. Not for others. Me. And so I did.  I lost all that weight, gained some back, lost it, gained it, lost it. I still didn't develop any real body image problems until much later. I wore bikinis when I was 190 lbs. I never felt unattractive.  I felt like I was me. And I wore it proudly from size 10 to size 18 and back. I was just me and I was beautiful. 

 Then, one day many years later,  I had a real moment. An impactful moment. Someone close to me was getting some old clothes from me and the girl said "I'm so upset that I'm having to wear your old clothes. It's gotten so bad. I'm so embarrassed. I have to go on a serious diet."  She wasnt being cruel. She didnt even realize that she'd been insensitive. She meant no harm. She was genuinely upset. Those clothes  were size 12. I cried for days. Someone was ashamed that they were the size of me. Someone was genuinely devastated that they looked like I look. I was truly affected. I think that may have been the true moment I realized women were supposed to want to be skinny. I really hurt from that moment. I was embarrassed of my appearance for the first time in my life. I felt like I'd been walking around being a total fool believing I was beautiful when I was something women did not want to become. But that moment passed. I recovered my esteem. I recovered my sense of my own beauty. I didn't want to be "skinny"; I wanted to be perfectly me. 

That wanting, interestly, didn't come until I had lost more weight and was smaller than I'd ever been. I'd lost most of it in a perfectly effortless, metabolism speeding up, just got happier and felt better kind of way. But then, I started to obsess over being thinner and thinner. I started making a goal to be "a six." A "perfect" size 6. I realize as I write this that the ideal for beauty has become so misguided that a size six is still too big for most girls. That's still "fat". The ideal of the generations after me became size 2 or 0 or 00. I'm glad to not be a part of that generation. There is still a notion of a "perfect size six" in my subconscious. That was the message society gave me way back when I was supposed to care. Be A Six. I'd never really picked it up until then. When I finally decided I was supposed to want to be "skinny", the number was six. 

 The last and only time my body was a size 6 was when I was 11 years old; a passing station on the puberty train. I'd always known my body wasn't structured to be a size 6.  I simply wasn't built that way. That wasn't an excuse. It never occurred to me that I'd ever even need an excuse for my body. It was simply a reality. A reality I was not ashamed of. As a teenager, I was a strong beautiful dancer, an athlete. My art WAS my body and I was perfect. No one told me to be a size 6 instead. I was a size 10. My body was in the best shape it has and will ever be in. I am not a size 6 or a 4 or a 2 or that odd 00 girl. And it took me over 30 years to care that I wasn't.

At the height of my body hate, I was a size 8. I weighed less than I had in 20 years. And I looked in the mirror and hated my body. I looked in the mirror and I was ashamed of my size. This, in hindsight, really floors me. Aren't you supposed to feel BETTER when you lose weight? Isn't that the selling point? I thought I was absolutely sexy in a size 16 but half that and I hated myself. Self perception can be a tricky little bitch, can't it? I started buying one piece swimsuits for the first time in my life and I wore them with shorts and still felt exposed. I still felt embarrassed. I felt "fat". But, I was in some sort of internal struggle between the girl inside of me who had never thought body hate was a "thing" that made any sense and this new woman who cried when I stared at my naked body. The woman who did that almost every single day. I not only was fat but suddenly those stretchmarks that looked perfectly natural to me before now looked hideous and were to be hidden. The cellulite that had accumulated on my 30-something body was the worst on my growing list of things that were now wrong with my body. I was ashamed. 

But, I was also angry. I was angry at myself for the hating. I was angry at myself for being ashamed. I was angry at my body for being perfectly itself. I was angry at nature for its injustice. But I was REALLY angry at the messages that led me here. The messages my friends were giving me when they talked of or wished for or actually got plastic surgery to be "better." I was angry at the biting comments I was now remembering that people had said to me that I'd barely noticed about how I was somehow inferior as a woman and I should be ashamed or expect less because I was larger than the girls on TV or in magazines or who had had those surgeries to "better" their bodies. I was angry at the random guy in a bar who had told me that I'd be cheated on by men because I was "overweight" but that girl (pointing to a girl who was probably a size 6) would not because he'd want to not risk losing her. It was a ridiculous statement by a guy who'd never met either of us and knew nothing of us; a statement that he probably made in some Tucker Max-esque attempt to gain an advantage in taking me home. I'd looked at him at the time incredulously and laughed and informed him that I was not "over" weight, I was MY weight and I'd never want a man so shallow as to base his fidelity of the size of a girls ass. Admittedly, though, I cried later and somewhere inside I believed him. I certainly never forgot. I didn't walk as tall and confidently after that. I was angry at some things that someone very very close to me who's opinion was very important to me had said about my appearance that probably had more to do with my final decent into being the "norm" than anything else. Things suggesting I should be embarrassed, suggesting I was hideous, suggesting I should consider drastic measures to "fix" me. Some pretty brutal things that were later revealed to have an ulterior motive. I had become a "normal" girl now who hated her body and would starve or puke or give herself diarrhea or take any pill that someone else said would work just to be "skinny." I even started trying to run. I have tachycardia; running can become life-threatening to me in a very short time. I didn't care. I did it anyway. I did it because of size six.  I was angry. I was sad. I was frustrated because I was failing. And I was miserable. But, the most devastating part of the story is that I was still beautiful. I just didn't see it anymore. I didn't see it at all.

There was a period in my downfall where I admitted what had happened to me and why. And then there was a period of denial where not only was I ashamed of my new body image but I was also ashamed of being ashamed. I would look in the mirror and try to remember the things I used to think and feel. I said I was beautiful the way I was. I would wear my bikini. But it wasn't working. I was deeper than ever into shame and hate. And I was ashamed to even let anyone know. I hid it. My sons had glimpses. They would tell me to eat when I wouldn't. But I never told them the whole truth. I was embarrassed of how embarrassed I was with my own body. I was a mess. I was, probably, like most women. Obsessed with my flaws, deeply ashamed, self loathing. That thought still makes me sad, that this was all pretty normal. That thought makes me more angry at society than any friend or man or random comment. Society is a judgmental perfectionist bitch. And I hate her. 

And then something happened. Life got a little complicated.  My body started to talk to me in a whole different way. I started to develop some symptoms of a scary condition that ran in my family. And then I suddenly just sort of fell apart. It had nothing to do with my body image or my weight or my obsession with being so incredibly hideously imperfect. I just got slapped with the reality that my body had a real flaw. A chronic debilitating disease kind of flaw. The kind that put my measly manageable heart condition to shame. The kind that made me forget about the number 6 and start looking at other numbers. Number like: the number of years I have left that I'm still able to walk, scuba dive, dance, climb mountains. I had to spend 2 weeks in bed and I forgot I hated my body. I forgot that I didn't eat anymore and how important it was a week ago that the scale moved a millimeter one direction or another. I forgot all about it all. I had other wars to fight with my body. I gained 10 lbs. 

The flare up passed and I could walk again and the doctors appointments got made and specialists were scheduled. I felt relatively like my self again within a month. The disease stuck around. So did the 10 pounds. And then I noticed I was eating meals again. I noticed I hadn't weighed myself in a couple of weeks. I noticed that I wasn't staring in the mirror every day. And I'd slipped into size 10 clothes without even thinking about it. I wanted to be comfortable because my body had been so uncomfortable.  I'd completely forgotten to hate myself. I'd completely forgotten to want to be skinny. 

My family went on a vacation and I took bikinis and forgot I was supposed to hide. I was just excited I could swim and walk and dive. But when I noticed my husband's eye wandering ever so subtly to some vacationing 20 year old bodies, I remembered. I remembered hard and fast and painfully. I choked on it. I grabbed for something to hide my body behind. I fell hard into that remembering and it hurt. 

But then something happened. I looked around and noticed that there were about 3 of those perfect little young tiny bodies around and about 100 women. There were women twice my size wearing tiny bathing suits and laughing with their friends. There were tall and short and huge and tiny and everything in between. A woman with cellulite and stretchmarks and an enchantingly beautiful smile was dancing with her husband on the deck to some salsa music blaring from the air. He was looking at her like she was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. She forgot to hate herself that day. She was beautiful. Those three "perfect" girls were surrounded by friends who were all shapes and sizes. And they were all beautiful. Every single one of them. 

Another girl came down the steps into the water and everyone noticed her. It was clear she had spent a good amount of money to go through painful surgeries to look like she did. Her boobs stood at attention that unnaturally perfect way mine never would and her back side had clearly undergone as much implantation as her front. And my sons and my husband started to discuss her as though she were a circus clown. In fairness, she did come across as a bit cartoonish, but I defended her. She was beautiful even if a bit overdone. And another thought occurred to me. This girl had paid and bled and suffered to have her butt made bigger. BIGGER. MORE BUTT! What? 

I had another moment. This one, though, was an epiphany far greater than the one I'd had at 20 years old in my bedroom mirror. I realized that society wasn't universal in its messages about what we should hate about ourselves. This girl had come from a message that told her to envy my big ass! This girl would have killed for my natural DDD's. She paid someone to get the exaggerated features I was born with. The ones I'd spent the better part of the last 2 years of my life crying over and trying to destroy. The ones I, too, had visited a plastic surgeon to consult about eliminating! (My truer self ended up winning the plastic surgery battle. I cried and tortured over the decision for a week  and then celebrated my choice not to unnaturally alter my body and engage in an act I'd been vehemently opposed to my entire life by eating the first cheeseburger I'd had in months. A decision I didn't regret for a moment afterward. ) Society was a whole different bitch to that girl. And then I remembered a whole lot of other comments I'd barely noticed throughout my life. Comments like "I'd kill for your boobs" and "Damn girl, look at that ass" Or that guy who told me once that he usually liked girls who worked out all the time but I was more beautiful; there was "just something about my attitude, my confidence."  I also started to remember all the times men had called me beautiful and how their eyes not so subtly turned to look at ME. 

That was just over a month ago. I'd love to tell you that I've been fully restored back to the same old girl who loved herself without a second thought for 30 years or so but that would be a lie. I have my moments of mirror hate. I have moments of feeling less than. But they are farther and farther between. I eat. I wear my size 10 and even some 12 and don't mind so much. I have no aspiration for that silly unattainable 6 on this body it wasn't meant for. I smile a lot. I walk almost as tall as I always have. I tug on my clothes less and I bought a new bikini.