like moss

I rather like the softness of my belly, the curve of my hips and the soft sway of my low back as it curves out to meet my ass. I like the way as I’ve gotten older, my hips have shown a new silouette. I don’t want a six-pack or super low body fat. I want softness and strength. I think that’s because that’s who I am and have always been. Soft but strong. I like the way my body feels when my hand rests on my stomach as I drift off to sleep. I like that I know which little stretch marks were made by each baby. But how do you stay soft when you have had to be so ridiculously strong for most of your life?

I have always been obsessed with moss for its softness and ability to make a rock a safe, soft spot to birth a baby or to sit upon or to just touch and notice how it manages to grow on anything and just be what it is. I love running my hands over it, noticing how it fills cracks and crevices, making everything look like one. I wanted to use moss in a business name, but so frequently everyone associates it with passive softness, covering and softening. The truth is “moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into top soil.”

I was told once that I was like the black widow spider when it comes to men. I don’t need to bite off the head of my lover or have it in me to destroy them. I think in that way I’m more like moss. Most people don’t think I have it in me, don’t know what I went through to get to where I am. The strength it’s taken to get to where I am is quiet, unsuspecting and determined to make any hard spots soft…for myself, for my kids and for (almost) anyone in my life. Is it the maternal nature that lives within me? Is it because I’m a cancer? Is it just who I am that I have this innate ability to make hard edges softer and yet not necessarily more palatable? I don’t want to be more palatable. I push the edges, the boundaries of what’s expected, of what I want to say and what I do say. I’m sure it makes people uncomfortable because I have always gone my own way. I devour every challenge that comes my way, breaking it down into digestible bites. Moss will literally break down whatever it covers. But unless it’s removed, no one notices moss and what it does. I feel like that’s how I love. I don’t mean to smother or break anyone down, and I definitely am open when I love someone, so maybe I do, or maybe it’s so subtle they don’t recognize it until I’m gone and they realize what’s happened and they see where they were broken open and could have done better. Moss is tough as hell and yet a soft landing place. Women are like that. We don’t even know how tough we are until we have to be and until we stop to rest and that’s when we notice as our little worlds start to fall apart because that’s how much we hold it together. Since becoming more present in life, I really love noticing the feelings I have when falling slowly in love. I want that; the slowly then all at once.

I am proud of my quiet strength, my ability to just keep going and hang onto what’s available to me to keep going. To make my own way, to not give up and to have achieved such a deep sense of self-acceptance and self-love. I battled this body and wondered why I am the way I am or so long. I used to think I wanted a tummy tuck and a boob lift and honestly, let me be a soft landing place, for myself and for my kids and for the ones I let into my life. And this body is just that, a home for a soft but strong woman full of love. One with tenacity and guts and grit and love and one where when your fingers trace my ribs and the curve of my hip, and they feel the rise and fall of my chest or my tummy, you feel the warmth of an eternity inside her.