The first time I realized my body
was built 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.
My shirt was either tight
(in the wrong places)
Or not tight enough
(again, in the wrong places).
It poorly veiled my 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 embrace.
I barely had room enough for me.
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?)
tell me we should show kindness to ourselves
We should help our clothes treat us well.
Here’s how I tried:
I had a sweatshirt, perfect in every way–
thin, stretchy, fuchsia; all the things I wanted to be–
Every seam a stretching reminder that
my omphalos has too much divine connection.
So I did all the right things, I thought.
I politely thanked it for its feedback
and gave its perfect pinkness to a friend with
my blessing, my hope
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 wore it to Primary, where she fits comfortably.
She politely tries to understand how her church could not hold me.
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, daughter of Deseret,
pullers of heavy handcarts,
a pioneer line that hadn’t eaten well since the seagulls had.
Her parents took her to a doctor, who said,
“There’s nothing wrong with her a solid meal wouldn’t fix.”
Dutch famine studies say matrilineal starvation changes us forever, that
emptiness
baptizes our mother’s eggs a-borning
initiates the loins and sinews of the daughters and daughters’ daughters
into a silent testament of lack.
The church changed our lives too.
Five generations of my mothers
went to a different Mormon church,
with different miracles.
Move over, water- into- wine.
We make bricks without straw,
live on nothing but mountain air.
My grandmother, whose portraits emphasized
her tiny
breakable
waist,
fits neatly inside the looming shadow of the temple.
But I, I had to move further west,
to find room enough for me.
