As I grow older, my body becomes more like my mother's or at least more like my memories of her body, flashing past in apology.

We always had the same body, so this is not new; the pictures of her youth slim in bikinis was mine at that age too. Only she never apologised for that body; was glad to have had it. The body I have now was hers when I was a child, a teen; she taught me to resent it then as she resented it herself—grapefruit for breakfast Fit for Life on the kitchen counter apologising for eating cake fried eggs in the morning another round of Atkins. I first dieted when I was thirteen, embarrassed of my thighs. I look at them now—girl legs, legs of a girl.

I try not to hate my body now the way my mother taught me to hate her body then. At what point did we join in? Ew! Yuck! More apologies from her as she ran across the room with an arm across her breasts racing to the bathroom after we'd burst in unannounced wailing muuuuum and wanting a favour in a lifetime of favours.

Our bodies are such replicas hers and mine that I wouldn't be surprised if she had a chronic illness too. They were unaccustomed to diagnosing us back then, unaccustomed to caring—still are I suppose. I went with her to the doctors' appointments, watched the vials fill with the dark of her blood, samples more samples and no answers for her fatigue. My childhood memories of my mother are ones of exhaustion, of her laid out on the couch after working on her feet all day for five maybe six days a week. Now that is me, always on the couch only I don't work on my feet and I'm forced to rest so I can work, walk, socialise.

Anyway, she can walk further than I can now. Most sixty-five-year-olds can, telling me I'm too young to be so tired because they don't understand that I'm sick and I won't get better. I force a smile when I can't be bothered explaining it to them. Sometimes, people ask me if chronic illness runs in my family not because they care but because they want a reason not to worry that it might happen to them too. I say, I don't know. Because in the generations before me chronic illness in women was called stress hysteria imagination. I think it's the wrong question—I think it was being a woman—passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter. Being a woman, increasing the risk of unexplained chronic disease; our immune systems heightened our awareness heightened our responses our apologies heightened as we teach each other, one by one, how to be safe in a world of men. How to be compliant in a world of men. How to fit in the structures built by men for men. Some say it's the yes yes okay yes when we mean no god of course not no that makes us sick. Years and years of saying yes when we mean no, wearing us down burrowing into our bones until the body alone dragging screaming fracturing says: no.

Now I must say no all the time, even when I'd like to say yes.

They took out my mother's uterus when she wasn't much older than I am now, but she had no pain to warn her; she barely felt the fibroid the size of a football. The size of a football! she'd said. I didn't understand how you could miss that, how you could be so out of tune with your body that you went in complaining of another ulcer and the scan showed up a fibroid in your womb the size of a football. My body was lithe then, although of course I didn't feel it; I took for granted that my body would always be the same that is before they found the endometriosis before they cut me open once then twice and now it was also adenomyosis and if no-one could pronounce the first osis they definitely wouldn't be attempting to pronounce the second and chronic fatigue is hard to diagnose with an osis so I guess I'm just tired; all-over tired bone tired aching tired can't walk twenty minutes tired.

I understand it now—the will to ignore the inner workings of your body, when all it brings you is pain, when the changes of midlife and illness bring a new shame and an avoidance of the mirror after a shower cover it cover it but don't apologise because it's 2025 and we don't apologise for our bodies anymore. We pretend we love them in public and then despise them in private. When my 9-year-old nephew points out the fat the lumps the huge!ness of me, I pretend I love my body, I pretend his words bring no shame. It's better this way—I won't teach him the lessons my mother taught me.

The thing is, everyone always told me my mother was beautiful. They say it to me still.

If I'd relayed this to her back then, if I tell her now, she'll laugh shrug it off roll her eyes make a gagging noise deny. She taught me to think so too. As I unlearn the lessons my mother taught me, I see too now that she is beautiful, that her body is perfect. For cuddles for warmth for function yes but also for being a woman.

What is it to be womanly if not leaving behind the bodies we had as girls.

 

 

 

Bio: Rochelle Pickles is an emerging writer and editor. You can find her work in Locative Magazine and the anthologies Our Selves and Soak: 2023 UTS Writers' Anthology. Rochelle has an MA in Creative Writing and she is working on a novel.