A little brilliance for your Thursday

No, not from me - from this fantastic essay. :) Although I do have a few thoughts of my own.

My sister-in-law recently shared this essay with me. It has seriously changed my life. In a nutshell, it's about the sacrifices we make as mothers and the way our bodies change.

Over the last few years, I've been on a quest to change my thinking about body-image - to try and get away from the insane (unhealthy, unrealistic, CRAZY!) standards and expectations that society has set forth for women. Basically, I feel that our bodies were made to be lived in! Not to be nipped and tucked and tanned and starved into some mold that society tells us is what's acceptable. (Yes, we want to be healthy, and comely, and take care of ourselves, but there is a wide range of what that is for each individual person.) But, our bodies were meant to be USED, for pete's sake. To have kids (where possible), to enjoy the beauties of the Earth, to serve others. There is a fantastic quote by Marjorie Hinckley that sums up how I feel about the concept of actually living REAL life in our bodies:

"I don't want to drive up to the pearly gates in a shiny sports car, wearing beautifully, tailored clothes, my hair expertly coiffed, and with long, perfectly manicured fingernails. I want to drive up in a station wagon that has mud on the wheels from taking kids to scout camp. I want to be there with a smudge of peanut butter on my shirt from making sandwiches for a sick neighbor's children. I want to be there with a little dirt under my fingernails from helping to weed someone's garden. I want to be there with children's sticky kisses on my cheeks and the tears of a friend on my shoulder. I want the Lord to know I was really here and that I really lived."

Ah, I'm getting off on a rant. :) But anyways, I've been trying to love and accept my body more and to have a healthy, realistic, reverent view towards the amazing body I have been blessed with, with the hope that I can teach that to my children as well. I felt like this essay was such a revelation to me in this area.

And it was also a revelation to me in my mothering. Here are a few gems from the essay:

• "Lowell Bennion had an acquaintance who said 'Put on the level of routine everything that belongs there'. He supposes she meant we should not spend thought and energy deciding if and when we should do the chores that must be done. I would like to think that I am learning that my physical responses to my children's needs are not optional. I must respond. Not that mothering is a chore, but that their needs are constant. They will not, cannot go away. Children must grow, eat, learn, question, be comforted. That is the nature of childhood."

• "My spirit and this woman's body inseparably connected constitute my fullness of joy."

• "I cannot help but think as I remember those births, that this body which makes us human also can make us most divine, that the peculiar pains of a womans flesh teach her exquisitely, intimately. What they teach she cannot know beforehand, or even know that she needs to know, but when the pain subsides, or is grown accustomed to she realizes: sometime during the darkest of nights or mundanest of mornings, knowledge has descended like the dews from heaven and enlarged her soul."

• "If we mother well, we wear out our lives bringing to pass the lives of others. Of the physical fruits- our wider hips, our sagging breasts, our flatter feet, and rounder buttocks we need not be so ashamed."

Seriously, click the link and read it. It's phenomenal!