There you stand, smiling faces all around. First hike with your baby boys, all so smiley and satisfied from the adventure. You asked for this portrait, to commemorate the happy occasion of traipsing through woods together, obligingly taken by the one you married on this day eighteen years ago. The first family outing in four and a half long years after your beloved Pepper aged beyond the enjoyment of travel and then passed on, leaving just the two of you again.
Finally, a second opportunity to build a family: two boisterous pups, still new to the world and needing so much guidance, instruction and encouragement. But those grins, those toothy, tongue-lolling grins, and your joyful grin to match. Puppies are so much more work than you remembered - it's been seventeen years since you last raised a pup. But their warmth, their joy, their sparkling eyes focused intently on you, their effervescent personalities... it's everything you missed and savor having again.
You wore your new shirt and shorts to celebrate the occasion of this outing: cheerful rainbow stripes matching the excitement you felt when preparing to head out that morning. You wore rainbow socks to match, your favorite shoes, and a hat to keep your hair at bay.
You asked for this picture to be taken, you joyfully posed, and your pups even unexpectedly cooperated (no small feat for their wiggly bodies and curious minds). Your smile is radiant, one of pure joy. You look relaxed and comfortably at ease.
How mystifying then, that upon returning home and seeing the photo for the first time, you are drawn to the inadequacies you perceive instead: the cottage-cheese texture on your thighs, knobby knees, the veins protruding from your shin from a fifteen year old injury, the haircut that never was quite right sticking out of your hat like the straw on a scarecrow.
A picture-perfect moment of joy, delight, and all the hope and promise of starting a new family with your beloved and celebrating the day of your marriage - clouded over with an internalized sense of inadequacy, of imperfection, and of not being enough.
Saying that the cultural war against women's bodies has no place in a moment of such pleasure and delight is all well and good, but it doesn't undo four decades of acculturation telling you to be better, look better, hide any imperfection with all your might. The instinct to feel shame about your earthly vessel still remains.
So you struck a compromise. A quick caress from your Apple Pencil across pixelated flesh, and the veins disappear. With them eradicated, you realize the thighs really aren't so bad and the knees are okay - they're honest. You don't need to be perfect so much as you don't want a wandering eye to fixate on that which you deem the most undesirable. It's but one compromise, you say, in service of maintaining the joy of the overall image and avoiding some imagined, fixated distraction on one unsavory detail by some imagined viewer. Perhaps -- but it's also a small erasure of yourself and an acquiescence to the narrative that blemishes are synonymous with shame instead of markers of a life fully lived.
