I'm so excited to share my first featured guest blogger in the Love Your Body series. Please give a warm welcome to Marie of Just Plain Marie...
I'm Marie of Just Plain Marie - I write about off-grid homesteading, simple living and preparedness. Homesteading essentially means striving towards living as self-sufficiently as possible, wherever you are, specifically regarding food. Off-grid means that we produce our own power - wood heat and solar electricity - and that we have a private well and septic. Yes, our family is completely off-grid (and fridgeless, too!)
There is a funny little graphic I saw recently that said, “I wish I were as thin as I was back when I thought I was fat.”
There’s a grain of truth in that.
Not much more than a grain, mind you.
We women are taught, from a very young age, to be embarrassed by our bodies, bashful about our achievements and humble about our skills.
As an example, we have all heard men bragging about something they do well. “You need to come over for my next barbecue. I make the best barbecued hamburgers in the neighborhood. No, the city. Wait, wait, make that the country. They should feature me on one of those celebrity cook shows. No, you can’t have my secret recipe, because it’s a secret.”
Compare that to a woman, when a friend compliments her amazing chocolate cake. “Well, thanks. Yes, I suppose I’m a pretty good baker. But a friend gave me the recipe. It’s not like I created it myself. And you should see the dust bunnies under my couch. Seriously, your house is SO much nicer than mine. I wish I could keep house like you do.”
Let’s put a stop this idea that we need to be modest and self-effacing all the time. Do you know what? I’m a darn good writer. I write well and I love to do it. And I’m smart, too. I’m friendly and sincere and I love people.
Let’s get down to the physical, though. Oh, yea, I’m going to go there.
You see, I am a 42 year old mother of six with a sweet tooth. I don’t wear makeup or fashionable clothes and I haven’t been to a hairdresser in seven years. Let me tell you about me and why I’m awesome from head to toe.
Normally if you meet me, I’d be wearing my hair in a bun with a head covering. That’s not because I’m ashamed of anything, but because my glory is my hair and it’s a private thing. (It’s okay if that doesn’t make sense to you. Really. I’m secure enough in what I value and want that I’m not threatened when it doesn’t make sense to someone else.) My hair is waist-length, thick and wavy. When I was a child, someone called it “mouse brown”, but there’s nothing dull or mousey about it. My toddler has my hair and now I understand why my mother always loved my hair. There are a few gray streaks in it, but I have many friends who have more. I absolutely love my hair and I spend a lot of time brushing it (and my daughter’s!). When I brush it, I can feel the scars from my brain surgery and I remember that eight years ago, I had to shave my head so that the surgeon could remove an egg-sized tumor.
I have wrinkles. They crinkle out from my eyes – crow’s feet is what people call those. They come from wrinkling up your eyes from laughing and smiling a lot. And deep creases – laugh lines – run up my cheeks beside my mouth. Even my worry lines across my forehead … they’re from worrying and praying and fretting over my children. If your face at twenty is the one you were born with and your face at forty is the one you’ve earned, then I’ve worked hard for every wrinkle. I love my wrinkles.
I have scars. From breast reduction surgery, from carrying six big babies, from living and working. There’s a tiny scar on my finger where I jabbed myself with a knife at my first job. There’s a bigger one by my eye where my cousin almost took my eye out with a rock. They tell the story of my life. I love my scars. My hands look old. They are not smooth and young looking anymore. They look like the hands of a woman who washes dishes, shovels manure, digs in the garden and is too busy for hand cream. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, because that’s who I am. My nails are short and bitten, a bad habit that I’ve never been able to break. Some people now say that it’s related to OCD. Regardless, they’re my hands, and I love them.
Over the past twenty years, I have carried, birthed and nursed six beautiful children. They have left their marks on my breasts and my belly, each baby adding to that road map of stretch marks until they reach all the way to my breasts. In fact, they left their marks on my insides, too, and I had a hysterectomy and internal “nip and tuck” to try and fix things. I think now of the pathetic jokes I used to hear about women no longer being women after hysterectomy. It’s not true. I have not lost what makes me a woman, and no surgery could take it away.
Finally, I’m tiny. Well, chubby and cuddly, sure, but tiny in height. I’m all of five feet tall (somehow, over the past twenty years, I lost the half inch that I was always so proud of!). My hands are tiny and I can buy size 4 children’s boots, which are warmer and less expensive.
It’s a pretty awesome body, let me tell you. I don’t really wish I were as thin now as I was when I thought I was fat, but I do wish that, back then, I had actually realized how beautiful I really was … and still am.
You can find me and connect with me on:
And finally, if you'd like a sneak peek at my food storage cookbook, and would like to know as soon it is is released, follow my newsletter at http://justplainmarie.ca/p/signup.html
