I FINALLY LOVE MY BULKY BELLY

There is something awesome and mind blowing about really, truly beginning to love your body. As I am thinking more and more about my impending double mastectomy, which involved taking the lovely fat from my abdomen to replace the breast tissue, I’m thinking about the parts of miss I’ll miss. Each blemish and scar tells a story, and I am just now getting it. The stretch marks I abhorred as a 19 year old, I now treasure as a reminder that my grown man was once a baby growing inside of me. A baby.  A baby who I loved and shaped into a grown up. Not one baby, but two babies. 

 I have scars from having my gall bladder removed at 22, which reminds of when I was highly over weight and unhealthy.  According to the doctors chart, I’m still over weight. But at 22, I was living off snickers bars, Pepsi soda, and KFC because I was working so much and on the go. I wasn’t exercising, I was eating lots of white starches and simple crabs, and mindfulness was a foreign concept to me. It was after this procedure I rediscovered exercise, switched to ground turkey and whole grains, and made water an addiction. Not to say, I still don’t crave fries and pizza, but I made life long changes that I could commit to. I discovered, meditation, pilates, yoga, zumba that I could do a 5k.
 On my lower right side is the scar from when I had my appendix removed.  And I was 7, so it was the old school "cut you open", in the hospital for 2 weeks, type of surgery. This little 2 inch long scar transports me back to that moment when I was in the hospital crying   “No” because the doctors said that I would need surgery immediately.  My father was so disturbed by my tears, he cried.I remember overhearing my grandmother tactfully tell him to basically man up, come back in the room and tell me that I was having the surgery and I would be okay. I was okay. I missed Halloween that year, but I got to get a happy meal with a chocolate shake in one of those jack-o’-lantern trick or treat buckets 
 as one of my first meals in the hospital. 


My latest scar is from having my ovaries removed the beginning of my journey to combat a disease that my grandmother and mother didn’t have the opportunity to.  And perhaps the most precious part of my stomach is my belly button...  proof that I was one connected physically to my mother by this remnant of an umbilical cord. And though a flat stomach is stomach I’ve always desired since Janet Jackson first introduced me to midriff, I love my ample, imperfect stomach, rolls and all. It still surprises me that today I’m so enamored by a part of my body that was the bane of my existence from age 11.