Recently, while scrolling through Instagram hoping to see cute pictures of my friends’ families on the 4^th of July, I ran across an ad for a tank top that’s designed to hide the skin that folds at my armpits. The product’s praises were being sung by a woman who looked like she was on the Olympic swim team. She caught me then, innocently going about my life never thinking about the skin that folds at my armpits until that very moment and now, well, now that I know about it, I guess I should hide it? 

It’s summer and I’m a 40-year-old woman living in the age of social media. Around every corner I am told about a part of my body I should be self-conscious of.  Buy the swimsuit to tuck in your tummy, buy the patches to smooth out your wrinkles, buy the pill to curb your appetite to take off the weight and while you’re at it did you notice those dark spots on your arms and face you started to develop because you’ve dared to be alive this long? You haven’t? Well, they’re there and you should fix those too. Buy this cream.  

Over the holiday weekend we loaded up our life and our lake gear and headed to Minnesota to spend a few days at the cabin with our extended family. The excitement my daughters had at the idea of spending the week in that cool, clear lake was unmatched only by Christmas. As soon as we arrived, they changed quickly into their bathing suits and jumped right in to begin playing mermaids or sea turtles or scuba diving treasure hunters, their little bodies morphing in their minds only to match the game they were playing. “Pretend we have fins, pretend we can breathe under water, pretend we have a tail that disappears when we’re on land.” There was no wishing away a thing on their bodies, only wishes to make it do more for them in a pretend world where you can be anything, asking only to cover up because they came out of the lake with goose bumps or because the mosquitos were biting. 

I put on my swimsuit and wished for my old body back, the one I saw before I was told that it wasn’t good enough. I was a girl in the 90s, so unfortunately that oblivion didn’t last long. Then I carried two big babies in my belly and it took a while to recognize that new mother as me. 

My little sister and I, we both have two daughters. We made a pact when they were younger to avoid talking negatively about our bodies in front of them, knowing full-well the world will eventually test their confidence, but until then, we only want them to think of their bodies as a vessel for running fast and swinging on the monkey bars and turning cartwheels and  cannonballing into this freezing cold lake. 

“I can’t wear a two-piece anymore,” I said to my sister in a range too close to my daughters. 

“Well yes, you can, you have a body,” she replied, scolding me with her eyes. 

“You’re right, yes I can. I guess I meant I just don’t want to,” I replied, mad at myself for breaking the rule and annoyed I was even thinking about this body in the first place when there were so many better things to think about and say, especially in that moment.   

When I first moved back to the ranch in my mid-twenties, almost ten years before I became a mother and in the season of my life where I tasked myself with truly focusing on who I wanted to be, I wrote a piece that started “When I grow up I want to be the kind of woman who lets her hair grow long and wild and silver.”

At the time becoming that woman with wild silver hair was decades away and I felt then, in that 25-year-old-body, I could handle silver hair, embrace it. I didn’t know that same body would also have to manage years of infertility, a cancer scare and barely manageable chronic pain. Silver hair? It should be the least of my worries. In fact, woman, you should be grateful, which makes me feel worse somehow…

Because here we are now, silver hair sprouting around my temples, and I’m wondering why I’m not the wild and carefree woman I promised myself I’d be all those years ago. Instead, I find myself battling with the idea of letting my age show or disguising it the way a proper American woman should. According to Instagram anyway. 

But then I watch my daughters, living so fully as themselves inside their skin, asking only of their bodies a little bit more to try to hold a headstand, asking only of their outfits to twirl the right way while they’re dancing, asking only of me to watch them jump off the dock or skip a rock, to tell them they’re strong. 

“And when my hair turns silver, I hope I remember that my favorite colors are the colors of the seasons, changing from brown to white to green to gold and back again,” I read and re-read the line I wrote all those years ago. A lump catches in my throat. 

The wildflowers never apologize for coming up slowly or blooming too brightly or wilting in the fall. Noone tells them to hide, they just celebrate the time they are here…Could this be our new and most important wish? To believe there’s nothing of ourselves worth hiding? How can we convince them? How can we convince ourselves?