New Friends

 I made a new friend yesterday. I've known her my entire life and have had a love/hate relationship, mostly hate. But as I looked at her yesterday, really looked at her, I realized I didn't want to give her anything but love anymore.

Avoiding mirrors is like an Olympic sport for fat girls. Who wants to face the double chin, the belly rolls (sounds like a dance move) (or a pastry: I'll have a belly roll please with strawberry jam). And age makes it even harder because I've avoided really looking at myself so studiously that now my own face is a little bit of a stranger to me.

And yesterday I looked. I really, truly looked. And I talked to her. It was time to treat that woman in the mirror with more love, more acceptance and understanding. Time to stop seeing her as a failure and recognize that she's worked hard her whole life and done her best. She's failed but she's also succeeded. She has resilience out the ass. Life has flattened her multiple times but she's always gotten back up and kept on her way.

And she is well loved. She has had an abundance of love from friends and oh! those friends. We have had some serious laughs and shared some hard tears.(I got my Christmas cards out yesterday and not only did I use the whole box up but it felt so good to reach out to women all over the world and say 'I'm thinking of you'.

What a blessed life me and that lady in the mirror have had. And we had a daughter we would live and die for. And that daughter, that star, that person who radiates from the love she's been given -- she loves me too! We are each other's number ones. I'm so well loved by that girl that I'm humbled and reborn by it.

So that woman I started talking to yesterday, she's all these wonderful things that I admire. She's strong, she's a fighter, she is loved and maybe finally, she's learning her own worth. I might really learn to like that old gal. And if I'm lucky, we might learn to love each other too.