Arielle Greenberg
Ten Pounds Thinner than That If I were ten pounds thinner than I am right now, I would be at my normal adult weight, the weight my body seems to have preferred since I became sexually active at seventeen (and thus a woman, some might say) and went on the Pill and gained about ten pounds more than I had been previously as a teenager, a weight about which, at the time, I never gave much thought. If I were ten pounds thinner than that, twenty pounds thinner than I am right now, I would be the weight I had previously been as a teenager and that is a weight I usually feel really good being, even though as a teenager I never thought about it and mostly wore oversized rock concert t-shirts and billowy clothing from the Indian import shop and kitschy finds like ladybug skirts and Catholic schoolgirl uniforms from the Salvation Army and my boyfriend’s jeans. This weight I’m talking about is not a thin weight. It is a healthy weight; it is medically considered within the normal weight for my height, but it is by no one’s definition thin. If I were ten pounds thinner than that, which would be thirty pounds thinner than I am right now and forty-three pounds thinner than I was a few months ago, I would be at a weight at which I imagine society might begin to consider me for the qualification of “thin,” but maybe not even then. And I don’t think I could ever be thinner that that weight. Nor would I want to be. I myself don’t admire bodies thinner than that weight. What does it mean for a thirty-seven-year-old woman who has been pregnant three times and breastfed for two years and pumped other breastmilk for someone else’s baby for two weeks and then breastfed again to want to be the same size she was when she was sixteen? Does it matter that this was not actually a thin weight? Because yes, I’d like to like how my body looks naked, but mostly I care about how I look in clothes.
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www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015