(ThySistas.com) Something shifts in a person the moment they decide your appearance is theirs to narrate out loud.
I have caught it at cookouts. In the break room at work. Three rows deep at church while the choir was warming up. Even down the phone line, from folks who love me and cannot help themselves. A cousin squints at my plate. An auntie tilts her head and says I’m looking a little thick lately, or a little thin, depending on the season. Somebody at work asks when I’m due, and I am not expecting anything but a paycheck. Each time, the assumption underneath is the same. My frame is a topic. The figure I carry is an open forum. Everybody gets a turn at the microphone.
For a long stretch I smiled through it. Smiling is the training, handed to those of us raised to keep a table easy no matter the cost. You learn it young. Swallow it, pass the potato salad, keep the evening moving. But somewhere in my forties I got tired of performing ease while a relative dissected my shape like it was a group project.
Let me be clear about what these remarks actually are. They are not concern. Concern is quiet, and it asks permission, and it usually comes from the two or three folks who have earned a seat close enough to say hard things. What most of them offer is not that. It is commentary dressed up as care, and the dressing is thin.
My weight is the one they reach for first. Gain a few pounds and out of nowhere a cousin is a nutritionist, a life coach, and a prophet all at once. Girl, you filling out. You need to watch that. Meanwhile you might be grieving, or healing, or simply living in a season where food brought comfort and you are not ashamed of it. Or you dropped some pounds and here comes the whisper, are you eating, you look sick, everything okay at home. Nobody wins that math. Bigger, smaller, either way your figure becomes a scoreboard strangers feel entitled to read aloud, like a box score in the Sunday paper.
The pregnancy question deserves its own reckoning. Please, I am begging, stop asking women when they are due unless a child is literally crowning in front of you. You have no idea what that soft middle holds. Fibroids. Bloating. Loss she has not spoken about. Medication that changed her whole shape. Maybe a belly she has made peace with after years of war. When you guess, you are not making conversation. You are pressing a bruise you cannot see and calling it friendly.
Aging loosens tongues in a way that catches me off guard. You look tired. Getting some gray up top, huh. Is that a new wrinkle or was it always here. As if the years arriving on my skin are a problem I forgot to solve. I earned every line, every silver strand at my temple. Growing old is something I survived to do, which is a privilege plenty of the people I loved never got. Do not stand in front of me acting like time is an insult.
So what do we do with all of it. Because keeping quiet was not working, and I know I am not alone in that fatigue.
What I first released was the urge to explain. For years I believed I owed people a paragraph. No, I have not gained anything, well actually, let me tell you about my thyroid. That reflex had to die. Refusing to justify yourself is a whole sentence on its own. Now when a relative comments on my figure, I might say, that is a strange thing to bring to me, and let the silence sit and do its work. You would be surprised how fast a person deflates once their remark has nowhere soft to land.
Kin get handled a little differently, because a stranger and your mama are not the same animal. With family I name it plain. Ma, when you talk about my shape like that, it hurts me, and I need it to stop. No lecture trailing behind it. Just a line drawn clear, and drawn again if I must. Real love makes room. The ones who keep pushing after you have asked them not to are showing you who they are, and I have learned to trust what they show.
Hardest of all, and I say this with some shame, was catching myself doing it to other women. We fuss about being measured, then wheel around and size up the next sister who comes through the door. She let herself go. Bless her heart, she getting old. Ooh, she must be expecting. If I want a world where my looks are nobody’s open business, my own gavel has to come down too, quiet as it is kept. That kind of change starts at home, in my own mouth.
Coworkers are their own animal. The office is not a family reunion, and yet the same nonsense finds you at the copier. When a colleague remarks about your figure at work, you have every right to be cool and brief. I would rather keep things professional, and pivot right back to the spreadsheet. You do not owe a colleague warmth about your changing appearance. Half the time a flat, bored answer does more than any speech could.
I think about my grandmother a lot in this. She spent decades apologizing for the space she took up. I can still see her tugging that blouse down over the hips at the dinner table, folding herself smaller to fit whatever the room wanted. That inheritance is not one I want. My nieces are watching how I carry myself, whether I flinch when a cousin pokes at my looks or whether I hold steady. That is legacy too. The quiet lessons stick.
None of this means I have gone cold. I still hug my kin. Still laugh loud at the function, still fix a plate for the elders first. But my form is not the town square, and I am done letting folks hold meetings in it. Grace lives in a firm no. Dignity lives in refusing to hand a stranger the map to your softest places just because they asked with a smile.
So the next time an auntie squints, or a coworker guesses, or an old friend decides your appearance needs a review, you are allowed to close the floor. You can be kind and closed at once. Loving hard and refusing them entry can happen in one breath. Your skin, your shape, your years, all of it belongs to you and you alone. It was never up for a vote, and it is certainly not up for discussion.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.