Struggling

I've been back and forth on writing this post. It's very personal, but I am often miffed that more women are not honest about life, especially life as a woman. It's not easy to admit that you like being single, or that you don't like motherhood, or that your relationship with your mother (or child) is harder than you ever thought possible, or that your marriage isn't all it's cracked up to be. Somehow we expect perfection in our womanly roles, and it's become taboo to speak ill of certain sacred cows. I don't want to be one of those women who keeps quiet about the hard stuff, perpetuating the myth that life as a woman is all light and roses.

It's been hard for me since the miscarriage. I can say it's gotten better; much, much better. But it's not fine yet. Perhaps the worst part is that I feel like my body has betrayed me. And I can't stand to look at it. It looks ugly to me, that sort of avert-your-eyes ugliness that is embarrassing to both the ugly and the beautiful. My body is way out of shape, heavier than is healthy; I don't want pictures of me (which has never happened before), I don't like anything I wear, and despite trying to put on a happy face and ignore it, I can't seem to change the way I feel.

So I've decided that I am going to walk. I'm going to walk until my body is healthy again. Until I fit in my regular-body-weight clothes and until I can look myself in the eyes and believe that I am whole and beautiful. And if I happen to get pregnant while all of this is taking place (god I hope I do), all the better. But even if I never get pregnant, or stay pregnant, I want to be able to like my physical self again. This is something I can control, and it has to change. It just has to.