READER POST: The first time I realized my body was wrong for Morming (abmormal?)
was when the t-shirts arrived for Girl’s Camp.
How beautiful upon the mountains was the cotton-poly
On the wise virgins who had saved all their body fat for their breasts,
The only curve that we were supposed to hint through the veil of Hanes.
They rolled up their already-short sleeves, their arms so slender in the billowing white, and tucked and bloused the shirts in their jeans.
My genes were different. The shirt both tight (in the wrong places) and not tight enough (again, in the wrong places). An unsanctified temple.
“But it should fit,” the beautiful Young Women’s leaders said.
“After all, we ordered adult men’s sizes.” The sweet rebuke.
The other girls swam modestly inside these men’s shirts, safe, wanted, their polite smallness inside men’s clothing leaving plenty of room for the invisible patriarchal grip. But I couldn’t receive it.
The Facebook groups for eating disorder recovery/being a middle-aged large-size woman in a small-minded culture (is it all the same thing? nearly?)
say that we should do kindness to ourselves in making sure our clothes are good to us.
I had a sweatshirt, perfect in every way–thin, stretchy, fuchsia; all the things I wanted to be–
That spent its time on my body reminding me that my omphalos has too much divine connection.
So I did all the things. I politely thanked it for its feedback and gave it to a friend with my blessing that we could part ways and be better people for it.
My thin friend wore it the last time we met, mostly likely as a show of gratitude. On her, it’s not a casing. On her, it’s a perfectly draping tunic. A modest dress, if you will.
She says, “The church is easy.” She says, “My mother is a convert and it changed her life.” The yoke fits her shoulders well.
I think about my grandmother. Her parents took her to a doctor, who said, “There’s nothing wrong with her a solid meal wouldn’t fix.” The church changed our lives too.
Dutch famine studies say matrilineal starvation changes us forever, the emptiness baptizing our mother’s eggs a-borning, initiating the loins and sinews of the daughters and daughters’ daughters into a silent testament of lack.
Five generations of my mothers went to a different Mormon church, with different miracles. Move over, water into wine. We make bricks without straw, lived on nothing but mountain air.
My grandmother, whose portraits emphasized her tiny, breakable waist, fit neatly inside the looming shadow of the temple. But I, I had to move west, there was no room for my brick house.
~Sachiko~
Sachiko is a Japanese-American Mormon-but-not-saint living among radioactive tumbleweeds. She used to make a lot of babies. Now she makes quilts instead and writes the occasional poem.
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