A REAL GIRL

When D was six years old, we took her to see Disney’s Pocahontas. As we filed out of the cavernous theater and into the crowded lobby, we noticed that D was crying. John and I were holding her hands—one on each side—in an effort to cushion her against the tide of people swarming in to see the next round of shows. D’s lip quivered and tears poured down her cheeks as we gently pulled her to the side, knelt down beside her and asked what was wrong.

“I’ll never be as pretty as Pocahontas,” she said.

What? My mouth dropped.

“Pocahontas is so beautiful,” she continued. “I’ll never look like her.”

Her proportions are not anatomically correct! She is hyper-sexualized for marketing purposes, I wanted to scream. But D is only a small girl. She wouldn’t understand that.

“She’s a cartoon,” I told her. “She’s not real.”

D continued to sob.

“You’re real. And you’re beautiful,” I insisted.

But it was too late. D had already set her beauty bar impossibly high. She would aim for a look that only a cartoon character could achieve … a look that would require surgical alteration or the absence of a rib cage for a normal, human girl.

As I picked up D, held her in my arms and told her how much we loved HER … how she would always be more beautiful to us than anyone else in the world …the primal animal that paces inside my heart was howling, “WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OUR GIRLS?” And, more importantly, albeit in a whisper because the animal is exhausted and panting from her own fight against this machine, “How do we stop it?”

As I sit inside Victoria’s Secret with D while she picks out bras—in the same mall where we’d seen Pocahontas years earlier—I feel like I’ve entered a foreign land. This is a world I’ve avoided my entire adult life. Pounding dance music pulses in my ears. Candy-colored bras line the walls … floor-to-ceiling billboards of half-dressed women gaze down at me sexily. The thing I find most shocking is not how much skin they are exposing, but instead how confidently they are raising their arms and revealing their arm pits.

This part under my arms is my greatest shame. Instead of hollows that cave in like a normal woman, I have arm mounds that poof out in a monstrous way … a John Merrick, I-am-not-an-animal way.

I’ve been told, by the first doctor who examined me … after he gasped and then laughed … and then brought in his colleagues to observe … that I have two extra breasts, one under each arm pit … “You’re lucky you don’t have nipples, too.” He told me.

“Nipples?!”

“Yes, nipples,” the breast expert at Northwestern Memorial Hospital continued. Some women even have rows of breasts, with nipples, up and down their chests like animals. I think about the nursing kittens, pigs and puppies I've seen in my life and cringe. No, I don’t want that. Who would? “But what can I do about this?” I asked, trying to restrain the panic in my voice.

“Well, I could remove them,” he said, but chances are I’d upset nerves and surrounding tissue in the process. If so, you’d have numbness and tingling down your arms and into your fingers. Troubles with swelling could occur, too. This could last for years. I consider my options. Surgical alteration. Maybe they can take out a few ribs while they’re at it.

I think about the first time a co-worker had seen one of my arm mountains. It happened by accident. I’d been wearing a shirt with short sleeves. I’ve always been hyper-conscious about this … never wearing sleeveless or strapless anything. … always making sure the material on my shirt hangs down low enough to cover the whole top of my arm. I always keep my arms down, too. I don’t ever point at something overhead. But on this sunny day, I’d lost myself. We were standing outside on break when a small plane flew overhead. Behind it was a banner … “Becky, will you marry me?” I’d pointed up in the sky to show my friend. But instead of looking up, he looked down into my sleeve. He was starring at my arm mound inside my shirt sleeve. I heard him gasp, and then watched him point at it. “What is that?” he asked, before I could lower my arm. He acted like the very words of the question repulsed his tongue.

I explained about the breasts under my arms and watched him cringe. “Ick,” he said. Yes, “Ick,” I agreed. Ick indeed.

The sales woman at Victoria’s Secret makes me move. I’m blocking the drawers of bras she’d like to show a customer. I notice this customer is twice my size, and she’s patiently listening to the sales woman about cup size verses inches. “And here are our matching thongs,” says the sales woman, opening a drawer to reveal rows of strappy ridiculousness. The customer smiles. I shake my head to shut off my brain, because I’ve simultaneously pictured the customer in a thong, the sales woman in a thong and me in a thong. Gross! Gross! Gross! The self-loathing-warning alarm sounds in my head. But why doesn’t the customer see it this way? Why is she seriously considering the thong and holding up the thready nonsense like it is a pot of gold?

D comes out of the fitting room with two bras she loves. An electric pink lacy number with underwire and soft padding, and an animal print with black, satin accents. Both are beautiful. I hold them up to D’s skin and can tell they will each look lovely on her.

D has grown up to have proportions even Pocahontas might kill for. She is curvy and narrow in all the right places. Her arms and legs are solid and shapely from obsessive work outs. There isn’t one odd, out of place, awkward or ugly body part on her. Unfortunately, D doesn’t see it this way.

She looks at herself in the mirror with the same über-judgemental eyes that I’ve used all my life. The same eyes that caused me to grab my stomach and call myself fat as a size 4. The same eyes that many of us girls use that never allow us to see a skinny girl, a pretty girl no matter what is standing before us in the mirror. These eyes focus on the flaws: the pimples, the wrinkles, the flabby overhangs, the hips, the butts and the arm pits to show us what we aren’t.

For some reason, I think of Pinocchio, the Disney movie I saw as a kid. “I want to be a real boy,” says the wooden puppet to Gepetto. I think about his desire, and realize my own desire to feel like, “A real girl.” I think about how I don’t wear bras, but instead wrap myself up in tight sports tanks, like girls in movies who try to pose as boys. I think about D who complains about her thighs; my mom who comments every time she eats something sweet that it is going to her hips; a friend who claims she has, “Man hands,” and another friend who won’t wear open-toed shoes because she has convinced herself that she has ugly feet. I think about the Victoria's Secret model looming over my head, mocking me with her impossible, air-brushed perfection. Inside, she might be feeling like a monster … but outside, she’s showing the entire world what it’s like to be a “real girl.”