My mom taught me to hate my body. I'm still trying to love it anyway.

• My mom taught me to hate bodies that weren't perfect, including mine. 
• I grew up in a diet culture that pushed thin, cellulite-free bodies as the ideal. 
• I'm constantly relearning how to love and appreciate my body regardless of what it looks like. 

My mother would never tell you that she taught me to hate my body, but that's what she did. Not just my body, but any body. Every body, really. Or, really, every body that showed too much skin, that took up too much space, or that proved to have an underwhelming capacity to burn fat, by her standard. Every cellulite-ridden thigh, every belly that hung over a waistband, every bum that didn't look like it could make the cover of a '90s Redbook magazine. 

"I don't look like her, do I?" my mother would ask as we passed unwitting strangers. "Please tell me if I ever start looking like that," she'd say. Nobody was exempt from observation and commentary.

"Roger that," I'd think, as my brain filed away yet another iteration of this familiar message. Cellulite: bad. Atkins diet: good. Got it.

I grew up in diet culture

As an 1980s baby, my formative years were saturated with a culture pushing fat alternatives and thinly veiled eating disorders. 

Decades later, we're seeing more challenging the toxic, fatphobic, white-centric norm than before. But the fact remains, we're still living in a culture that unapologetically refuses to let us be satisfied with, much less love, the way we look. 

After giving birth, I had to relearn to love my body

In early 2013, I gave birth to my firstborn. I was 30 years old, freshly postpartum, and unable to recognize or reconcile the soft, stretched, and striped body reflected back at me in the mirror. Anyone who's given birth can attest to the fragility of those early postpartum days and the way our realities so often don't align with our expectations. People who give birth are expected to accept a momentous reframing of how we see our place in the hierarchy of things, and I was no exception. Feeling abjectly raw, empty, and alien in my own skin, I was tasked with the long and arduous work of deconstruction, unlearning, and relearning what it might mean to live in, show up for, and love this body I'm in.

Ten years, multiple pregnancies, and two live births later, I can't say I've cornered the market on radical self-love and acceptance, but I'm trying. Each baby step I take involves broadening my perspective, realigning my priorities, and conjuring up shreds of grace.

Loving myself today doesn't negate I won't tomorrow

I've learned that maintaining any semblance of a healthy relationship with my body requires conscious and consistent effort and demands a clear understanding that there are no days off and no antidote to the harm inflicted in the past or that inevitably lies ahead. There is no passing go and no collecting $200 until I've come to terms with the simple fact that loving my body today does not preclude me from self-loathing tomorrow. 

I have sometimes demanded more of my mirror's reflection, as though my body has some obligation to conform and perform to soften the disappointment, but time and again, my body has said no. That's not how this works. 

And honestly, in the quietest parts of me, I think that blatant refusal is beautiful.

Diet culture doesn't allow our bodies to simply — quietly or loudly — exist as they are. It's a culture that doesn't want us to embrace or celebrate any part of ourselves that deviates from the unwritten rules; it entices us to conform, to get in line, and to earn its acceptance and validation as though our very livelihood depends on it. And in many cases, it actually does. But when I consider that the end result is the same regardless of whether we comply or rebel, I wonder why I ever bothered to care.

We're born, we live, and we die. One day, my body will cease to exist. So where did I find the audacity to admonish my belly for being soft, my thighs for being madly in love with one another, or my skin and bones for existing as they do when they never needed permission at all?

Those unattainable beauty standards may bang on the door of my carefully guarded conscience, and I'll never be immune; my internal narrative is wont to waver precariously. But it occurs to me that as I'm relentlessly called to bend and break, perhaps the most radical act of self-love is to simply say no.