While Steve and Adele and I were walking our dogs one morning recently, an acquaintance called to me from far across the street:
"Every time I see you, you get smaller!"
"What?" I yelled back, thinking I hadn't heard right.
"Every time I see you," she yelled again cheerfully across the four-lane thoroughfare, "you get smaller!"
"Oh," I yelled back, stupefied, thinking, No I don't. I don't get smaller.
For the record, the nice woman was incorrect. I am still nearly six feet tall, and for the past ten years my weight has vacillated only a few pounds. But more importantly, my goal is not to be small. I have come to believe that it's a misuse of a woman's energy to try to be small. My goal is to be the strongest woman I can be in this body. I want to feel my power. I want to bring some muscle to all of the things that I do.
It bothered me, too, when Adele scolded me after this interaction.
"Why did you say 'What?' You knew what she said," she accused me. "You just wanted to hear it again."
"No, I didn't," I said, indignant. "It was weird! I didn't know what she said."
"It wasn't weird. You knew what she meant. You knew it was a compliment."
The fact that my younger daughter, not even a teenager yet, understood this odd exclamation to be a compliment instead of the mystifying utterance that it was means that her thinking about women's bodies is already being molded by our culture. Why else would she consider it a compliment when her tall, sturdy mother of stable weight, whom she counts on to meet all of her needs, whom she depends on to be strong and alive, is told she is shrinking on every encounter?
