Lighter

So you guys, I have a confession. All of that fitness stuff I've been doing this summer? Part of my motivation was this class reunion. I mean, a big chunk of my motivation was that I wanted to keep up with my running group, and I wanted to work on strength training to see if it helped me avoid joint pain this season, and it has, which is fantastic, and also I like being able to open jars all by my own studly self. But that wasn't my only motivation.

In high school "thin" was part of my identity. When my BMI eased up to 17, I was aghast. Since then I've gained 25 pounds, 10 or 15 of which I need for things like strong bones and normal ovarian function, and 10 or 15 of which are a perpetual vexation. I envisioned myself (okay, preposterously, but also persistently) walking into the reunion and hearing whispers along the lines of "That Jamie Most has let herself GO."

It turns out that (a) two months isn't enough time to make big changes in a body plodding through its fifth decade. And (b), the thing about high school reunions is that everybody else has aged just as much as you have, so they're almost all carrying some extra poundage and they'd rather chat about how you've managed to have five -- FIVE?? really, five?!? five as in one more than four?? -- kids than about what size pants you're wearing these days. The comment I heard most often was "You haven't changed a bit." Which is ridiculous (do you know what my HAIR looked like in high school? before I discovered gel? when I blew it dry every day? I have pictures; I refuse to share), but I'm not complaining.

I'd spent so much time thinking about my teenaged body that I hadn't given much thought to my teenaged psyche. Last Saturday, though, I met some friends at a state park for a picnic lunch. A few minutes before I had to go, one of them said to me, "Jamie, I have nightmares about you."

I assumed it was a joke, because I am awfully bossy with an obnoxious streak, but he wasn't smiling. He said he still regretted being so mean to me in our geometry class. He said he had liked me, and he had wanted to be cool and flirty, but instead he had just been mean. He mentioned an incident I didn't even remember. He looked stricken.

It brought back a welter of memories. One day he tied a length of broken cassette tape to my belt loop, so that when I marched down the hall to the cafeteria it unfurled behind me, yards and yards of it, like a tattered sail. I was mortified, in the way that only a 14-year-old can be mortified. I felt so lost that year, uncertain why I was so lonely. By graduation we were friends, though, and I would never have expected to hear him sound so remorseful.

"All forgiven," I said. He looked grateful, and relieved.

The exchange reminded me of the relentless soul-sucking stupidity of high school -- the posturing, the gossip, the putdowns, the casual ugliness. I am so grateful, thinking back, that I don't live like that these days. I can tell the people I love that I love them. I can know that I am loved in return. My friends are usually careful about gossip. I no longer worry about being trapped in a coal country small town for the rest of my days. I have learned that I would rather be kind than dazzling, and that the laughter that follows a joke made at another's expense is a uniquely unsatisfying kind of laughter. (Candor compels me to admit that the tone of voice I use to admonish a child to be kind to a sibling is not always what you'd call a kind tone. Working on that one.)

If you'd told me in high school what my waist would measure after 25 years and 5 children, I would have been appalled. I would have envisioned myself as something on the scale of Jabba the Hut, doomed to a life of muumuus and self-loathing. I wonder if my high school self would have believed what I could tell her: that her post-pregnancy ribcage would no longer fit in that prom dress, but that it would hold a fuller heart -- a heart less afraid of what other people might think or say. I wonder if she would believe this thing I know to be true: that she could gain 25 pounds, and still feel a thousand pounds lighter.