Hiding

Princess Morag recognised the issue that a fellow blogger wrote of last month: the phenomenon of people thinking you have your life altogether if you are thin and smile a lot.
http://momastery.com/blog/2012/01/19/telling-secrets

Smiling is Princess Morag's default polite face - it is her aim in all interactions with fellow human beings to try to help them feel more comfortable and flashing a smile is her normal strategy for this - it is not too difficult and it doesn't require touching the other person. Being thin is not part of Princess Morag's internal self-image but when she looks in the mirror she can understand that is what other people see. Pregnancy kind of messes up your internal self-image, way more than puberty ever did; where did enormous bump suddenly come from? And those boobs were massive for a while and then they shrunk :( It's a very confusing time when your body is invaded by two small humans in two consecutive years.

Anyway, Princess Morag wants to assure the world, as Glennon did, that being thin and smiling in NO WAY indicates that she has got everything together. There is no direct correlation between any body size/shape and level of happiness, it is just not that simple, but we like to think it maybe is because then we would be happy...if only....[insert your own condition]

Princess Morag is not UNhappy at being thin, but the reason she is thin is 2.5 years of breastfeeding and a smidgen of self-neglect. In fact she is pretty ambivalent about her body, not sure that she feels entirely at home in it. Sometimes she retreats so far into her body she feels like a bodyless baby in a shell with peepholes, and then she remembers that the people walking around her can only see the shell (so she smiles).

Princess Morag likes to think she is good at communication, and hopes one day that she might get trained to become a most excellent counsellor. But it was when she went to counselling herself she realised that eye contact is not always such a comfortable thing for her, letting people see who she is, that's a bit scary. And her body lets her know sometimes that it is not a shell, because it has muscles, that get sore and so her massage therapist is the other person who forces her to reveal herself and then release some of the pain that she has been carrying around, hiding in her shell, feeling small and unsure of herself.