Siento Hermosa

Andy: So none of the girls here eat anything?

Nigel: Not since 2 became new 4 and 0 became the new 2.

Andy: Well, I'm a 6...

Nigel: Which is the new 14.

– Conversation between Anne Hathaway (as Andy) and Stanley Tucci (Nigel) in the movie, The Devil Wears Prada

We moved into our home the year Victoria, our youngest, was born. Now that she’s almost 20 – and fearful that a video crew from the new A&E show Hoarders might appear on our doorstep at any moment – I spent a good part of Thanksgiving weekend sorting through almost two decades’ worth of stuff that had accumulated up in the attic.

There – nestled among old baseball cards and Beanie Babies, amid obsolete computer equipment (1 GB hard drive!) and baby furniture, in a pile of clothing that included a red nightshirt of the type worn by Ebenezer Scrooge that had once belonged to my spouse as well as the top half of a Port Chester High School Marching Band uniform that our son’s best friend neglected to turn in after their last Band Night performance in 2003 – was a short denim skirt and a pair of snug black jeans that, based on reliable photographic evidence, I had last worn circa 1992-93. The tags read: size 4.

They’d probably fit my daughter Katie, who stands 4-foot-10 and weighs 90-something lbs.

Among the women of my maternal line, my 5-foot-1 stature was considered average – even tall – until the family’s current generation of muscular, iron-pumping, soccer-playing, track-running and indisputably tall goddesses put the height issue into clearer perspective. However, the last time I weighed 90-something lbs. was after a bout of mono in my junior year of high school and my brief size 4 phase some 20 years later coincided with a period in between two major episodes of depression – neither of which, I’m pretty certain, is a medically sanctioned approach to weight management.

Still, in my late 30s, the idea of a body that had spent most of the previous decade either pregnant or lactating fitting into clothing I would have had a hard time squeezing into in adolescence was almost seductive enough to cast all caution (and common sense) to the wind. If stress + insomnia + antidepressants = size 4, how much more of a disordered mood would you need to get into, say, a size 2, which by then would probably have become the new 4 anyway? Or, given the tyrannical politics of fashion and beauty, maybe even the new 14? (I was never very good at math.)

When my mother married my father, her waist was smaller than the circumference of his policeman’s hat – Scarlett O’Hara with her corseted 17-inch waist had nothing on her! But ironically, her goal was to fill out, to become mas gordita. (Now, at age 82 and asked on a regular basis to show proof that she’s eligible for senior citizen’s discounts, she is resolute in her conviction that a few extra pounds are better than Botox for minimizing wrinkles.) 

Earlier this year, West Side Story returned to Broadway for the first time since 1980 in a breathtaking bilingual production that included new lyrics by the brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Tony Award-winning genius who gave the theater world the gift that is In the Heights.

As the pit orchestra plays the familiar strains of I Feel Pretty, an even more confident María now sings:

Hoy me siento tan hermosa

Tan graciosa que puedo volar
Y no hay diosa
En el mundo que me va alcanzar

¿Vez en el espejo que hermosa soy? (See the pretty girl in that mirror there?)
¿Quién es esa bella mujer? (Who can that attractive woman be?)

¡Que bonita faz! (What a pretty face!)

¡Que bonita atrás! (How pretty from the back!)

¡Que bonita forma de ser! (What a lovely way to be!)

You just know that this María likes what she sees – from any and all angles, at any size.

I never really expected to wear those size 4s again. But after all this time, I don’t especially want to. With all due respect to the late Duchess of Windsor – a woman who might have benefitted from a few extra pounds herself – there is such a thing as being too flaca.

That’s not to say that I won’t make friends with my Wii Fit or maintain a healthy lifestyle. But as a woman in her mid-50s who has brought three amazing human beings into the world; helped take care of an aging parent; and partnered with a soulmate to create a new family, I’ve earned the the right to honor this temple – round and imperfect though it may be – where the Spirit makes herself at home.  It's earned my respect.

And while She settles in and pulls up a chair and makes herself comfortable, I'll be standing in front of one of those three-way dressing room mirrors and singing:

Hoy me siento tan hermosa…