Tag Archives: identity

Your Daughter is Listening: Guest Post Written by My Sister Lorrie

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Lorrie's blog, strong armsI have always wondered whether or not I would go through a mid life crisis. As I approached and then passed age 40, I thought “what could possibly happen?” Then whamo! I was hit square in the stomach with a major personal crisis in November. When I was explaining this experience to a friend at Starbucks one day, she likened it to being clanged on both sides of the head with large cymbals. She said it was a wake up call and she was right.

Since then I have done a lot of thinking about who I am and how I see myself. Continue reading →

Pregnancy and Engorged Womanhood: Guest Post by HissyFit

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One of the most accurate representations of pregnancy I've seen: http://cdn.parenting.kidspot.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/pregnancy_sleep_640x360.jpg

One of the most accurate representations of pregnancy I’ve seen: http://cdn.parenting.kidspot.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/pregnancy_
sleep_640x360.jpg

When  one is 36 years old and pregnant for the first time, the changes that one’s body initiates are shocking. Throughout my adult life I have been in control of my nutritional and fitness regimen – splurging when I wanted to, directing bodily outcomes when specific goals were sought. With pregnancy, however, even my best attempts to control my rapidly expanding flesh are unsuccessful. No matter what I eat or tone, my belly – and my breasts, and my hips, and my veins – are following their own paths, growing larger, more engorged, more alien with each passing day. Continue reading →

Gorilla Hands: A Female Powerlifter Confronts Body Ideals (Guest Post by babyeaterlifts)

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My nickname through part of my undergraduate degree was “Gorilla Hands,” and the story behind this moniker is as follows: the boyfriend of a girl who lived on my floor during my short duration in the dormitories told his girlfriend that he thought I was “really cool, but that I have huge hands.” This girl—whose name I can no longer remember and am feeling vaguely guilty for it—relayed her boyfriend’s observation to me as I sat with her and a few other dwellers of the fourth floor of our dorm. I joked that I had “hands like a gorilla” and “Gorilla Hands” stuck. Continue reading →

The Ethics of Intervention

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The group of mottly New Brunswickers had no coxswain.

That will teach you to laugh at our hats, European bitches! 

Brits sure love to row, I think to myself, flashing back to the televised Heritage Minute in which a group of Canadians win the World Championship in 1867. Oh how the badly dressed fishermen sniggered as their heavy boat slid by the fancy pants team from Oxford. Now it’s my turn to show those weedy coxswain-knockers what’s what. After hunching over musty medical books at the Wellcome Library all week, I cannot wait to work my back. I settle onto a machine at the busy Tottenham Court Road gym—ah, the seat is still warm—turn the tension up to 10, pop in my earbuds, and push through my legs and torso before pulling the bar to mid chest while leaning back slightly. Check that form, baby! My feeling of euphoria does not last long, coming to an abrupt halt when a young woman awkwardly straddles the machine beside me. She is skeletal, her painfully knobby knees and shin bones protruding though a layer of thin skin.  Continue reading →