The Present & Future You

I’ve been talking to friends about self-perception. If you’ve read earlier things I've written, you know I had a baby. And it wasn’t yesterday. It was 2 years ago, and, at this point, I'm feeling like the "you just had a baby" excuse is no longer such a good one. My body has changed - but I’ve just been waiting to get back to “normal". In my neighborhood, there's a lot of women pushing strollers looking as if they never had a baby and I always thought that would also be me. But now I'm starting to wonder if I need to accept a new normal and make peace with it. Maybe. I am actually going to try a little more before giving up my old clothes. And that's positive. The less positive part is that self-acceptance is just not that easy.

When I told a friend this, she said, “You know, when I was skinny I didn’t even think about it. I thought it was normal and I just found other things wrong with me.” I know so many women – smart, beautiful, interesting women – who talk about what they wish they had or didn’t have and what they’d like to change about themselves. I even hear it from models and actresses and women everyone would describe as nothing less than beautiful.

In the best of worlds we just wouldn't care – but we all know there is a certain standard of what's considered beautiful (and not). Still, it doesn’t mean we should let it define who we are or make us unable to love what we have. I think that sometimes when we're so busy looking at what we don't like we don't even realize what we do.

I mentioned this to another friend and she made me laugh because she said, “You know what? Sometimes I look at pictures and think about how bad I look. And then I realize that in 10 years I’ll look back and think I looked awesome!” This, I think, is amazing - because as we go through life it all becomes relative. And if the future you is going to look back and see how great you look and are, why not let the present you see it too?

Not Dreaming of Olympic Gold

I've been watching the Olympic gymnastics competitions all week. A gymnast would waver slightly off-balance after doing a full-twisting backflip on beam and you'd hear the commentators say something like, “Ah! Oh, that is going to cost her." If it was worse you might hear something like "this is catastrophic."

So when the reigning world champion didn't make it into the final all-around competition because her “tiniest mistakes added up” and she came in behind two of her teammates, the look on her face broke my heart.

Mistakes in gymnastics are so devastating at this level - you can work your entire life to that moment and if you’re not perfect, your Olympic dream can be gone in one misstep.

I was a gymnast for many years. Every year before a big competition, I'd be in tears because I’d think about how I worked so hard all these years and tomorrow I could fall and have to wait another year to have the opportunity to try again. By then you could have gotten injured, grown too much or any of the many things that can happen in between.I was in acro-gymnastics, which is much more forgiving than artistic gymnastics. You can make mistakes and it doesn’t guarantee a loss. And you can do the sport much longer than peaking at 16. But even then (although maybe I just wasn’t cut out for it because I don’t think everyone is crying before every big meet) there is just so much on the line in such a small space of time that equals years and years of dedication and very hard work. That, of course, is not unique to gymnastics and I don't think it's a bad thing. But I don’t think anyone should feel all is lost if they step out of bounds with the edge of their heel. Or that success is defined so narrowly (and subjectively) that anything less than perfect makes you a loser. Sometimes accepting our imperfections is a thing of beauty – life is, as they say, much of the time about the journey and not the destination.

Dreams are meant to be chased, whether we achieve them or not. I love gymnastics and there is a lot to be said for the discipline, toughness and dedication it instills. But to me, the negative outweighs the positive here when it shapes how a girl comes to define herself. I'm sure that's not true for everyone – I am sure some may only take away the good with them. But I think many do not.

That’s why I hope my daughter doesn't dream of one day making the Olympic gymnastics team. I realize it's not the worst thing that could happen. I want her to grow up chasing her dreams too, but I don't want it to ever be "catastrophic" if she steps on the line.