Tapestry

As I face a crossroads in my life I am pondering many things.  The other morning as I lay in my hot bath staring at the scars on my leg, it made my mind wander.

In the age of physical dysmorphia in women, in my middle age I still struggle to lay it down, how unfair am I being to myself to not take stock of what I look like?

I know the adage, that we are all beautiful and not everyone can be a supermodel, and I’ll admit at 18 I wanted to be a super model, but that is not reality for, well, pretty much everyone except the super models of the world.

Lost in my thoughts, staring at my scars, thinking of the scars that are to come, taking stock of myself, I realized I am a tapestry.

I am a tapestry…

Of all of the family that came before me..

Of my mother..

Of my father…

I am the ties that bind of my ancestors…

They all reside in the fabric that is me…

And my body tells that story.

It tells why my hair was blond, then brown, now gray.  It tells why my face looks quite a bit younger than I actually am.  It tells why my eyes are both brown and green, why my teeth were crooked (thanks, Mom and Dad, for braces!), why I need glasses, why I am tall, why I am fair, why I burn and do not tan.

It tells of my growth from birth to middle age.  It tells of my cooking burns, my clumsiness.  It tells of my marriage, my child, and will continue to tell my story until it is no more.

As a continuation of my story, of the tapestry of ancestors to which I now belong, I add a bit of myself, of my husband and his tapestry to the child that lived inside of me, that I gave birth to, that now lives outside of my body growing into a man.  He is a continuation of the ties that bind, his own tapestry that lives on.

In contemplating my body, myself, as what I really am, a sum of all before me, marked by who and what I am, by my experiences, by my life and by God’s plan for me, I find beauty.

I am beautiful.

We all are.

And in the tapestry, we are immortal.