A couple of months ago, a friend drummed up quite the conversation when she posted the following on Facebook:

ok. 30 days of no sugar, no alcohol, no dairy, no grains, no coffee. and yet the muffin top? it persistith. time to get down with some of this ‘accepting yourself as you are’ BS i keep reading about.

First of all, allow me to clarify a few things about Little Miss Muffintop. Not only is she fit, healthy and downright adorable, but she’s earned her way into the hallowed handful of mamas whom I deeply admire for their confidence, creativity and authenticity. She’s clever, she’s witty, she’s an amazing artist and she’s kicking butt in the pursuit of her passions.

So hearing a friend I’ve long since deemed a badass criticize someone’s belly skin — even her own — made me first defensive for her, like, “How dare you talk about my friend that way” and then a little bit furious that our culture has conditioned even the loveliest among us to see their bodies as anything but beautiful.

Only thing is, I had little room to talk. Until just this year, you could have replaced ‘muffin top’ with ‘saddlebags’ and the comment may as well have been made by me.

Last year about this time, while sorting clothes in preparation for our move from one climatic extreme to another, I came across my dry-all-year swimsuit, decided to see where we stood, slipped it on and stood in front of the mirror.

Pretty sure I need not describe to a single woman (born and raised in the US, anyway) the sinking feeling that washed over me in that moment. The right onomatopoeia escapes me, though some combination of uggh and eeek and bleh is a good start.

My boobs — clearly as excited as my mind over the sudden spandex reunion — actually hid within the contoured cups that just a year before could barely even contain the very “same” milky wonders; the boy shorts I had once chosen to cover the bulk of my backside had clearly grown lazy since their last day on the job, and the river-like channels climbing ever-northward from unspeakable origins had apparently reached their final resting place in the cavern? crater? cave? of my belly button.

Suddenly depressed over my utterly unpresentable “beach body,” I tossed the suit aside, googled “bust-enhancing tankinis” and spent the next hour catching up on all the latest in buttock betterment.

Apparently, I could get on all fours, hike my leg out behind me, bend my knee and pulse it sideways 700 times a day for a couple of months and that might do it, but only if I also lowered my overall body fat (which was not going to go over very well with my already fat-free chi chis) and of course, I would need a 79 dollar and ninety-nine cent cream specially formulated to help reduce the appearance of reality if I really wanted to see some progress.

Hating myself as much for having wasted so much time as for breeding in the first place, I shut my laptop, got up from pissing puppy position and headed out the door to pick up the girls.

I’m sure the fifteen-minute walk to school was lovely as usual, only this time I hardly noticed for the mindfulness I was directing toward my butt cheeks. Clench, Beth! Make every step count! Only three weeks till the the grand unveiling!

Walking home, however, and finding it impossible to focus on the important stuff amidst the kid chaos I gave up on my glutes and gave in to my default distraction since moving to Mexico: marveling at Mayan mothers.

Mothers grilling street corn, wide-eyed babies content at their naked breasts.

Tribes of mothers laughing, cutting mango, stirring soup.

Markets of mothers — teenaged to ancient — swapping stories, tending toddlers, making craft for paltry pesos.

But even in the midst of their beauty, given the utter ridiculousness of my secretly-clenched buttocks (among girls exchanging their youth for survival) and while suddenly contemplating self consciousness within a global context, it wasn’t until my 11-year-old made it home before me, claimed “first dibs on the computer!” and I remembered the “better beach butt” tabs I’d not yet closed that I experienced a complete and utter body breakthrough.

“What — in the name of women and girls the world over and since the beginning of time — am I doing?”

Just minutes from me, Juana is hoeing corn fields to ensure her babies don’t starve come winter and I’m isolating my glutes for the sake of vanity. I’ve held her baby. I’ve smelled her sweat.

My new friend Lucia eats beans and tortillas every single meal because that’s what she can afford, and here I am considering a voluntary low-calorie diet because my thighs are thicker than…(get this)…some other women’s. I’ve been in her “house.” I’ve eaten in her “kitchen.”

I’m raising four young women in a world where millions of mothers struggle for postpartum survival, and I’m searching for bathing suit tops that suggest I prefer to pretend I never breastfed?? I treasure those years. I’d not trade them for anything.

Like the stern scolding of a patient parent finally putting her foot down, my conscience called me out and set me straight right then and there. I was suddenly held accountable, not by or to any one person, but by The Divine Feminine, by the whole of Maternal Wisdom and to The Eternal Mother who’d clearly had about enough of my shenanigans. Ashamed and embarrassed in the company of no one but She and my truer self (or is that redundant?), I vowed to shift that part of my story forever and always.

The reward was instant and absolute clarity:

The only thing my body “should” be is loved for the miracle it is and treated accordingly, and the only person responsible to give this love is me.

We moved to the beach (no butt cream, no leg lifts) and I began what has proven to be a powerful and revealing year of self reflection. One bikini, beach outing and naked-bellied down dog at a time (those of you who get this, get this), I’ve been slowly moving beyond accepting my body (the place I was stuck for many years, thinking it the best any woman could do once she realized she’d never achieve ‘Allison Stokke’) to honoring, proudly claiming and truly loving the uniquely beautiful body of Beth Berry. {I don’t know Allison Stokke from anyone, BTW, I just googled ‘hottest body in the world’ and she was the “lucky” winner.}

Back to Little Miss Muffin Top…

As a part of the 70-response Facebook thread following her flirtation with self acceptance, my friend further contemplated her conundrum:

“Part of it for me seems to be connected to that elusive desire to have control….cause where my brain tends to go is less “eew I’m hideous!” and more to ” WTF, bod? I exercise like a mofo (which I love) and eat like a health freak (which also makes me happy) so why is it that I seemingly CAN’T change my body?” It’s one of my personal arguments with God. It sounds spoiled and shallow, I know, but it’s there, niggling in the back of my head along with that recovering attachment parent who still wants to know why all that cosleeping and wood toy buying still delivered a boy child who loves nothing more than video games and pretending to shoot things and people.

It dawned on me (recently) that this body control issue is a surface manifestation of my ongoing dance with trying to let go of the fact that bad things happen to good people. And I don’t mean bad=muffin top and good=me. I mean bad=school shooting, cancer and mental illness and good=small children, otherwise healthy humans and the world’s greatest daddies. Sometimes I try so hard to control my surroundings (food, exercise, environment) in the chase for the world’s most sought after and elusive goal: safety from random harm to myself and my family. It always comes back to faith, right? Learning to trust? Muffin top angst as potential transformative energy?

There you have it, folks. Belly fat reduction for the sake of global justice and homeland security. {Oooo, and I can’t wait to blog about that attachment parenting bit!}

Thing is, she’s hardly alone in her complex and correlative body image breakdown. I think every one of us started a narrative in our most tender and formative years and has built our story based on partial truths and contorted cultural conditioning. Add to that hundreds of years of guilt and shame around women’s bodies as our collective history, sudden access to every image imaginable (real or just seemingly) and a culture too busy (as a whole) to even contemplate conventional wisdom much less counter it, and it’s little wonder so few women have managed to sift all this shit.

My own self “acceptance” for so many years had everything to do with the pursuit of perfection (quite related to control, I think), an unchecked connection I’d made between sex appeal and self worth and if I’m honest, a feeling that I must prove myself valuable and worthy after a bout of perplexingly self-destructive decisions in my adolescence.

And you? From what unchecked fallacy was your self-betrayal first born?

I once heard it said (by Sean Stephenson, if my memory serves me) that control is a complete and utter illusion; that there are two things and two things only that any of us ever has control over:

1. Our interpretations.
2. Our reactions.

In that case…

• I interpret the prevalence of manipulated magazine covers, promises of perfection through the purchase products and homogeneous representations of beauty as the bending of a burdened society under the weight of millions in marketing.
• I interpret the societal squeezing of breasts into such narrow and pre-maternal shapes (and elevated positions) to mean that we as women still associate motherhood with oppression and fear the fullness of femininity for its inherent vulnerabilities.
• I interpret the swapping out of ankle-length skirts and circulation-compromising corsets for photo editing and spanx as evidence that women’s freedom is so new, we’ve still yet to fully define it for ourselves and that oppression is so ingrained that we hardly even recognize it, even when the underwire is sticking us square in the armpit.
• I interpret our obsession with making our bodies conform to “fashion rules” (that bulged our bellies above our belt buckles in the first place) as a radical cultural disconnect from nature’s wisdom. I mean, fat has kind of ensured the survival of our species through times of starvation, so maybe the problem’s in the jeans, not the genes?

Equally empowering is the control I have over my reactions:

• I can reject the ruthless rulers of scales and clothing sizers and recognize my self worth and beauty as immeasurable by any number.
• I can demonstrate a totally different definition of “healthy” for my daughters than consumed with calorie counts and dime-a-dozen diets.
• I can decide for myself whether I think breasts more beautiful when contorted into unnatural positions or skin more lovely when it shows no evidence of miracles.
• I can choose not to spend my money on magazines that lie to me or “dolls” that lie to my daughters.
• I can tell a new and truer story every time I am tempted to see myself with disgust: “My belly skin hangs down like that when I do yoga because it was stretched to enormous proportions in order to create space for my favorite people on the planet. The truest ME knows this to be beautiful, and I reject the misleading messages of the mind-washed mainstream.”

So, why not just love ourselves more and leave it at that? Why do I think the world needs to see your “muffin top,” my “saddlebags” and all the stretch marks we can possibly bring ourselves to bare?

Because as much as women in other countries are starved for a meal, people in our culture are starved for REAL.

Because my daughters deserve to know what unaltered women’s bodies look like as they come to know their own and are forced to filter fallacy left and right.

Because your sons deserve the chance to define beauty based on what’s actually attainable and healthy and born of good living, not good legs.

Because in order to reverse the sickening trends toward starvation as the ultimate sacrifice in the pursuit of “pretty” (what a slap in the face to the undernourished majority of the world), and self-loathing as fundamental to femininity, there’s got to be a countermovement of confident women to compete with the cover girls.

Just the other day, my gorgeous, brilliant, confident, bilingual now 12-year-old (who thankfully didn’t see the beach butt tabs afterall) announced that her BMI had decreased by 2% but that she was still “too fat.” Turns out, she’s been required to weigh herself and check her body fat once a month as a part of a school project, of all wretched realities.

This conversation prompted the tearful admission by my eight-year-old that the girls in her class call her gordita, which made my six-year old run to the mirror to inspect her own body for inadequacies. And you are aware, I hope, that Adderall is popped like tic tacs among high school girls for its bonus as an appetite suppressant, right? Four daughters, folks.

Clearly, this conversation extends far beyond our belly bulge or how unfair it is that wisdom comes with wrinkles or what size jeans we’re able to squeeze our muffins into postpartum. This is about giving our children a fighting chance to see and feel and be beautiful no matter how confused the coming culture. It’s about claiming the privilege to define beauty for ourselves instead of waiting for it to go on sale. It’s about being as real as we possibly can so that, if nothing else, our babies can feel the falsehood for themselves, dig deep within their own stories, and remember their own mother loving her body and treating herself accordingly.

Of course, we could all just “accept” ourselves and leave it at that. Just like I could have simply extended to my daughter the the same sentiment I’ve afforded myself all these years. Can you imagine?…

“It’s alright, honey, I still accept you even though you’re not as thin as some other 12-year-old girls. Maybe you just need to work out more and try that new raw food diet and download some motivational podcasts so you can learn some self control and fit into those size 4 jeans by NEXT summer.”

But of course I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything even remotely like that. I FREAK OUT on falsehood when it threatens my girls. I told her that I thought it was ridiculous to teach teenage girls to measure their bodies through pinch tests at the onslaught of adolescence. That determining body mass index is clearly no way for young girls to feel feminine for the first time. I told her that this is only the beginning of what will be a lifetime of decoding truth from bullshit when it comes to her body, her mind and her worth and that fortunately she was plenty strong and smart enough to handle it.

And then, just as every other time they’ve been beat down by the soul-sucking lies of life, I looked her straight in the eye, teared up ‘cause I couldn’t help it, and begged her to believe me, “You are unbelievably, utterly and immeasurably beautiful. You are exactly perfect just as you are.”

Huh. Seems I’ve only just scratched the surface of this self-love thing.

Many thanks to Miss Muffin Top, Jade from A Beautiful Body Project and a hefty handful of my readers for encouraging and inspiring me to tackle this topic. I really did that. I really just posted my stretch marks on the internet.