On Taking Up Space

Befriending the Body, Part II

Two hours into my drive, I realized the fit of my pants had become untenable. I was a solo pastor in northern Iowa and going to make a visit to some congregants who were in the middle of a long stay at the Mayo Clinic. When I had dressed carefully that morning, the chinos I’d chosen felt snug but passable. My best option. A couple hours with the full force of my middle pushing against the woven cotton waistband with no stretch built in told me that my best option was crap.

As I approached Rochester, I called the couple to see how their appointment schedule had evolved. They would be able to see me in a couple more hours. I heaved a sigh of relief. There was time to go to the mall.

Why, you might ask, did it take this pastoral road trip reckoning for me to size up my pants? Let us count the reasons.

Sizing up (maybe for all people, but certainly for a woman) can feel like failure. Inherent in this is a whole slew of head trash, starting with fat phobia. (Fat phobia is the false but culturally pervasive belief that fat equals ugly, unhealthy, and uncontrolled, while thin equals beautiful, healthy, and disciplined.) There’s nostalgia for the body that once fit these clothes so well. Dread at the time sink shopping becomes when searching for the right combination of length, width, and curve. Revolted moralism at inching closer to the image of the ugly American whose overconsumption of the world’s resources shows on their body and in their ongoing purchase of more clothes. An inner cringe at the bigger number when women receive messaging from all sides that the best thing they can be is small.

If that seems like a lot to be bound up in the purchase of a new pair of pants, you’re not wrong. But this is calculus women do every day. A friend recently told me the story of another friend who sought advice from a columnist about whether to bite the bullet and size up or keep crunching their body into old clothes while trying to lose weight. The columnist’s advice: don’t size up. It will only give you permission to accept your body as it is now and you’ll never get back to the way you were before.

Let that sink in for a minute: it will only give you permission to accept your body as it is.

I’ve come to a couple of these size up crisis points in my adult life. (Maybe made worse by the fact that I’ve always received a lot of positive reinforcement for having the “right” kind of body and I’ve feared what might happen if I ever went “wrong.” By which I mean people have long interpreted and praised my body as “thin” and I worried what would happen, how they would treat me if I got “fat”.)

Anyway, I can say without any caveats that sizing up for me has always been an unqualified win. Clothing that fits well offers a literal sense of freedom. It doesn’t bind your flesh up in weird ways. And it makes me feel a sense of confidence and ease. When I do size up, I always wonder what took me so long. Instead of trying to squish into a smaller size and wrestling with the self-hatred that can accompany an uncooperative body, there is the gift of remembering that clothes are made for bodies, not bodies for clothes.

Mama Elizabet offered me my most profound experience of this. She was a seamstress I met in a market in Dar es Salaam when I was studying abroad in college. A couple months into the semester—with a diet that included much less animal protein and much more rice and fresh fruit—all of our bodies had changed. I didn’t know if I weighed more or less than when I left home, but I knew my clothes fit different. Mama Elizabet measured the body I had and made beautiful skirts and dresses that were just for me. I felt beautiful and the only size they were marked with was “Lindsey, circa 2003.”

I wish I could learn this lesson once and be done with it forever. But with the pressure to be smaller and take up less space being so pervasive, I’m making my peace with the necessity of proactively and regularly loving my body, and with telling myself I’m beautiful (and trying to believe it), no matter my size. It helps to remember that at absolutely every stage of my life I have looked back at pictures of a younger me (remembering how I felt about my body then) and wondered, “What on earth was I worried about??”

Pregnancy is a new frontier in taking up space. My body is changing and growing daily. The roomy flannel pjs I brought with me to Minnesota at Christmas? I heard threads rip when trying to pull them on. But for cis women like me, body and weight change during pregnancy is kind of the exception to the rule. People want to see my belly grow. There’s a standard image of a round pregnant woman that our culture holds as beautiful.

And yet. There are the pervasive recommendations about how much weight to gain. Opinions about how much is too much. And the sense that if you don’t start losing it immediately after birth that you’ve “let yourself go.” Another friend told me that right after the birth of their first child, her husband looked at her with surprise and said, “But you still look pregnant!” He wasn’t trying to be unkind, just stating his surprise at the fact.

I’ve been surprised to learn about the breakdown of recommended weight gain for a pregnant body, too, especially the diversity of places it goes. Pounds of extra blood volume. Pounds of extra breast tissue. Pounds of fat and protein and nutrient stores. Pounds of extra fluid. And all of this is in addition to the uterus, placenta, amniotic fluid, and actual baby! The body takes the duration of pregnancy to do the miraculous work of building up a whole infrastructure to support the growth and birth of a baby. That infrastructure doesn’t just disappear upon delivery of a child.

To state the obvious, pregnancy is reminding me that the health and constellation of abilities a body contains are better based on internal rather than external factors. Do I want to be healthy and active and capable and strong? Of course. Are those abilities causally linked to the little number sewn into the waistband of my pants? Nope.

The conditioning and social cues that teach women that it is good to be small, thin, and delicate can pressure women to take up less space in other areas of our lives as well. As an eager-to-please intuitive and rule-follower, I am sometimes horrified by how well I’ve learned these lessons. I’m working on being comfortable taking up more space in all areas of my life. Saying and writing what I think and feel in the hopes that my truth might be freeing for another. And loving my body through its changing shapes, sizes, and now Michelangelo-esque curves.

Give your body some love today, won’t you friends? And don’t be afraid to take up the space you need.

Much love,

Lindsey