Meet Abigail and Matilda
Matilda is the older of the two; the one wearing the evening dress, and Abigail is the younger. But even she must be at least 15 years old.
Both Matilda and Abigail were in storage for essentially a couple of years, since I moved out of the condo and into this house. Their rediscovery has been revelatory. First of all, dressing them was a bit of a challenge. Then, when I looked at them across the room, for the first time really in a long long time, I noticed how long, small and willowy Matilda was. Both are my height. Both are wearing my old clothes, garments I have loved and worn again and again. But I never, in my entire life, considered myself willowy.
That seems sad.
I dubbed them Laurel and Hardy, for reasons I will now explain. Size and the perception of size are interesting things. Stan Laurel, for example was not particularly thin. He was of average size but looked small and thin compared to Oliver Hardy who was 6’1” and bulky. Matilda probably is slender but still curvaceous, as was I at that time, but her smallness, as compared to her height, surprised and almost shocked me. She is probably closest to an American size 6, if there is any standard. Abigail is probably closest to an American size 14 or 16, and she looks large compared to Matilda, but she is closer in size to the average American woman.
I named them Laurel and Hardy because of the shock factor, of the idea of the terms “skinny” and “fat” which I have come to realize more often than not have nothing to do with actual scientific data and relate more to cultural norms and biases. When most women say they feel skinny, they mean attractive, and this is triggered by a cultural bias in which women are supposed to be small, take up little space, to be insignificant. Of course many will argue with me. I know women who consider thinness and the ability to wear towering heels as a symbol of power; I may have been one of those women. Turning a symbol of weakness into supposed power is not new, but it may also not be helpful. The same is true of the word fat, at least as it applies to women’s appearance. When I say I am fat, I am basically saying I feel unhappy about myself, and more often than not, that has nothing to do with my actual weight. I am fairly confident that I am not alone. These words are the words of shaming. Matilda and Abigail reminded me of this, and reminded me to stop it. And we all should. But I don’t want to go into shaming and shaming words in this post.
When I wore that evening dress. I did not consider myself willowy. In fact I probably thought of myself as fat. I was probably a good 30 or 40 pounds heavier than I had been in college, but even then, I never thought of myself as thin. I did not have an eating disorder, but I was deeply conditioned into the way I thought about myself and if I had not been “fortunate” enough that I could eat anything and everything and still remain unusually thin, I might well have developed an eating disorder. But eating disorders are not really about weight. And despite the fact that we tell ourselves that “thin” is healthy and “fat” is not, this is belief is based only partially in fact and does not correlate in the way our biases assume. The obverse can just as easily true, and often is.
So, if I was shocked to see Matilda dressed, I was equally surprised by Abigail. I had always planned to pad Matilda out eventually and use her for fitting as I started to sew again. I knew I would never look like Matilda again. Discovering I was celiac (a malabsorption syndrome) and having an atrial septal defect (which made my heart work extra hard just to move my skinny self around) repaired, put a stop to that. But in my head I kept telling myself “if only I can get back to being as thin as Abigail again, I will be happy”. But there are no conditions on love, including self love. I remember telling my (step) children that there is no such thing as “I love you, but...” or “I will love you if....” But did I apply that to myself? to self-love? Obviously not.
So dressing Abigail was a shock. None of my current clothes fit her. In fact I could not get them on her. Abigail is bigger than I am, so why am I condemning myself? Yes, Abigail’s waist is smaller than mine, but Abigail is eternally in her early 40s and I most certainly am not. When I say I am fat, I don’t mean that I am obese. I am not. A little overweight yes. But really I am saying that I can’t walk as far as I want. I don’t have as much energy as I would like. I have trouble with the first 10 or 15 minutes I walk, and in fact may always as that is a residual effect stemming from my scoliosis. Some of those things I can change, some of them I cannot. I honestly don’t believe attractiveness has anything to do with weight. In fact I think almost every woman, or man, I meet is attractive. But Abigail and Matilda reminded me that I did not extend the same courtesy to myself. And this was in large part a big reason that I pulled inward and away from the blog for a while. Because I know my self-criticisms are not true, that the little girl who was shamed is grown up now, that I only have to please myself.
The plan was always to pad Matilda out eventually. I thought I would be padding Abigail out as well, but we will see. She has padding now, and she captures the curve of my spine well because she was made from a cast of my actual body. The dress Abigail is wearing is a dress I loved and plan to copy. I still plan to copy it even though it is a bit big now and I am less curvy.
Abigail and Matilda reminded me to stop fretting. I had several beloved things I had made but not worn for a while, things I would say that will look better when I am ....... Surprisingly, or not actually, they all fit better than I thought they would. I cannot wear them in the same way I did when I was 45, but who cares about that? I have been wearing the cashmere cardigan seen above, knit sometime before 2005, which is when I joined Ravelry. Yesterday I wore a sweater I knit in 2008. The photo below is from 2008. But I am just as happy with the sweater now as I was then.
But this is not really about wearing old things, or trying to regain lost youth. It is about settling into who I am now without burdens. This process of settling is physical, is mental, is emotional. It is time to let go. This is my space. This is my time. Here I am.
