4.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF THE LEGS I USED TO HATE

Gradually, graciously, I’ve made peace with myself from the waist up.

I’ve learned to appreciate my evolving face like a poem, one fine line at a time. A slow, gentle morph into a slightly older version of me. My eyes have adjusted to my maturing hands and arms too, little by little, like they adjust to the sun. I no longer have to squint when I look at them, not blinded anymore by what I see.

But this. What I’m looking at now. This came from nowhere with no warning.

The legs I’ve always hated have overnight been replaced by Grandma’s legs. The young legs I used to think were so horrible have suddenly, irrevocably, turned into old-person legs that actually are horrible. I stare in disbelief.

I want the legs I used to hate back! I want my untoned, overweight young legs! The legs I hid from public view most of my life! Come back, horrid fat young legs! Come back! I am ready to love you now!!

Another silent scream into a mirror. Another Celebration of Me Day ruined by getting a good look at me, and I am ticked. I do not deserve this.

I didn’t wear skirts or shorts for years because I thought my legs were too ugly. Didn’t wear a swimsuit for decades because I thought my legs were too fat, too flabby, too cellulite-y, too stretch-marky. My legs humiliated me. They ruined all my outfits. They destroyed my self-confidence. They made me cry when I tried on boots. I hid them behind muumuus, long skirts, and jeans. Today, for the first time, I was finally ready to accept them exactly as they are. And now they aren’t what they are anymore.

The mirror that just ruined my life is in the dressing room of a store I’ve previously refused to enter because I was offended by the mannequins in the window. Mannequins with long, slim, perfectly sculpted plastic legs. Mannequins that walk all over a woman’s sense of well-being like a parade of seven-foot-tall Barbie dolls.

I was feeling too good about me to boycott today. I strode in on real-life legs I was finally mature enough to accept and love after all these years of being ashamed. I am through hiding, I declared this morning. Finished feeling “less than” because of some delusion that my lower half is “more than.” I strode right past the perfect plastic legs in the window, right up to the summer shorts display, plucked a few cute pairs off the rack and was shown into a dressing room. The first pair I put on fit perfectly. I joyfully turned to the mirror to begin my Celebration of Me.

And here I am. Not celebrating. I’m staring at the worst my legs have ever looked in my life with the full, sick new knowledge that this is the best they’re ever going to be. Fat legs can get thin. Cellulite-y legs can get smooth. Flabby legs can get toned. Old lady legs can’t get anything except worse.

I want the legs I used to hate back! I want my untoned, overweight young legs! The legs I hid from public view most of my life! Come back, horrid fat young legs! Come back! I am ready to love you now!!

My fat young legs don’t come back. Neither does my skinny young salesperson, who swore she’d be back to get me anything I need. Why do they even offer? There’s never anything women need when we’re in a fitting room except for someone to shove some answers under the door.

Why are there 5,000 products to prevent eye wrinkles and nothing to prevent thigh wrinkles?

Why is there a zillion-dollar industry to deal with the aging of a few inches of face skin, but zip to deal with the aging of the many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many inches of leg skin?

Why are there clinics all over the globe to “plump” the lips, yet only shame if we on our own plump the hips?

I stare at my new old legs in the mirror. Swimwear has just been destroyed for an entirely new irreparable unthinkable reason, trumping the hundreds of ways legs have already destroyed swimwear for me up until now. This one can’t be dieted or exercised away. Nothing can make old lady legs sticking out of a swimsuit look like anything but old lady legs sticking out of a swimsuit. Ditto shorts. Skirts and dresses would be possible, except we liberated ourselves from the tyranny of pantyhose years ago, and now have to display our age from at least the knee down when we wear them. The only thing that can possibly make old legs look worse is old legs in pantyhose worn to try to disguise old legs.

Even the wonderful Spanx Revolution missed the point. Old-fashioned control-top pantyhose used to control the top and then politely control and cover everything all the way down to the toes. Spanx stop above the hemline, leaving everything from the hem up looking youthful and smooth and everything from the hem down looking as if it’s attached to an elderly relative.

Since the invention of stockings, no other generation of women has been expected to wear skirts and dresses with bare, aging legs. A complication of life that no one’s protested because all the time we gained from not having to shop for pantyhose is now spent trying to figure out how to get out the front door without pantyhose. Longer skirts. Drapey capes. Self-tanners. Taller boots. Huge scarves that direct the eye to the neck instead of the knee.

I think of my mother, who used to apologize for giving me her thighs. Thighs I would be overjoyed to see again. Thighs Mom would be overjoyed to see again. She never talked about the day hers changed. Never shared the trauma of realizing how beautiful and perfect her legs used to be when she noticed they weren’t beautiful and perfect anymore. She suffered in silence. Was it too horrible to mention? Did she want it to be a surprise?

I think of my daughter, who hates the perfect young legs she has right now. I want to shake her. I do not want to be silent. I want to show her my legs to warn her of the future. But showing her my legs would involve showing her my legs. Much as I love her, I’ve already suffered enough.

I put my pants back on without trying on the other pairs of shorts. I walk out without saying goodbye to the salesperson, walk away without even glaring at the Barbies, who are still showing off in the window.

In time, I’ll accept my changed legs just as I’ve accepted all the other changed parts of me. I’ll quit being sad about the places I didn’t take them and the cute clothes I didn’t buy them when I could. I’ll forget how perfect they were back when I hated them. I’ll even forget how bad they look today, because by then they’ll be older and they’ll look even worse.

I walk into a shop down the street. For today, I’ll focus beyond the legs. I’ll celebrate other parts of me. There are at least ten parts I can think of that are still stubbornly, heroically, mercifully unchanged by time.

“May I help you?” the woman asks.

“Yes,” I say with pride, “I’d like to buy my lovely young toes a pedicure.”