This Is My Body

I crouch in the sand, and through the viewfinder of my iPhone camera, I watch my daughter bound towards me. I click, click, click and capture her in motion as she skitters along the line where the water meets the sand. It is July, but the weather is still cool and moody in Vancouver, BC. The sky is low, and the Pacific is opaque, grey, uninviting.

My daughter is three and a half and has the spindly limbs and unsteady gait of a new fawn. She can't resist the happy shock of the icy water passing over her feet, but she also gets cold very easily and doesn't like to be wet. So she inches towards the lapping ocean until a little wave slaps at her ankles. She yelps with surprise and delight and then cuts a quick retreat back up the beach to the dry sand. After a moment, she's at it again, creeping towards the water.

I move backwards a few steps to get a better angle and press the button on my phone camera again. Click, click, click. It's an unremarkable morning. At home, we flitted away an hour deciding what to do while my daughter lay around in pajamas watching a frenetic kids' show about birds who live in a tree house and go on imaginary adventures. We came to the beach mostly because we couldn't think of anywhere better to go. But one day, I imagine, when I've totally forgotten the other details of the morning, I'll look at these pictures of my daughter laughing as the surf hits her feet and be reminded of the piercing joy of watching a young child discover the world.

My daughter is wearing a toddler bikini my husband had bought her at Superstore the night before. It's dark blue with little cherries on it. My husband picked it because it was what they had in her size, but he's not thrilled with the pattern.

"Why do they always try to make clothes for little girls sexy," he says. And it is a little ghastly—couldn't they find a fruit without sexual connotations for the toddler bikini line?

I remember my high school best friend, Lauren, had skin-tight, cherry pattern pants that she bought on sale at Wet Seal one dim winter afternoon when we were shopping together in New York City. She told me she would stop wearing them once she had sex for the first time; she and her boyfriend were in negotiations. I was jealous of how she looked in them and jealous that she had a boyfriend.

It's a complicated thing, being a woman and having a body. I wonder if my daughter even knows she has a body yet—a body that is unique and fallible, that everyone she ever meets will notice and evaluate and make certain judgments and assumptions about. I'm sure she doesn't realize yet that even though her body is her—she obviously does not exist without it—it is possible to hate it and struggle with it and feel that it is at odds with who she really is and wants to be.

________

I am five years old, and I am with my mother at the old-fashioned, family-owned department store in my hometown where her own mother used to take her to buy church dresses and patent leather shoes when she was a girl. Within five years, the department store will be bought by Saks Fifth Avenue, gutted and remodeled into something glittering and unrecognizable. Every year of my childhood, my hometown seems to grow wealthier and more generic, but for now, that is still to come.

The children's section is in the basement and full of circular racks packed tight with clothes. Very few young children can resist the temptation of sliding between the hangers and into the center of the racks to take a break from the tedium of shopping in their own private clothing fort. I like to sit on the floor and look up at the little...