Making Friends (Again) With My Body
It started when I injured my right shoulder. I would like to tell you that it was a tennis injury or something cool, like a wakeboarding incident. Instead, I must admit that I hurt my shoulder by reaching into the back seat of my Volvo too many times. Is there a more boring, middle-aged white lady injury on the planet than a shoulder strain from reaching for cloth grocery bags and yoga mats?
I started physical therapy and thought I was making good progress, until I decided to go snorkeling with my husband. I’m a good swimmer, so I arrogantly left the flippers in the boat. After about thirty seconds in the water, I realized that I couldn’t use my right arm to swim freestyle. My arm couldn’t go above my head. I was swimming in circles like Nemo. I thought, “If this is how I die, I’m going to be so mad.” My husband swam back to the boat, got the flippers for me and suggested I switch to breast stroke. It wasn’t my best day in the water. I was mad at my body for a number of reasons.
The frustration that I felt with my body reminded me of being a teenager, in the way that your body is changing so much that it can feel like the enemy. I didn’t like that feeling in 1987 and I don’t like it now. I worked really hard in the years between adolescence and menopause to appreciate all that my body could do, instead of just focusing on how it looked. I’d learned in pregnancy, labor and delivery and breastfeeding to be thankful for the wondrous things my body could do. In menopause, though, I was keeping a running tally of all the ways my body was looking weird or acting wonky. I reverted to my adolescent self-criticism. It was like living with a Russian gymnastics coach in my head all the time.
I decided that I needed to make friends with my body and cajole her back to life. I stopped singing, “The old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be” as I started my morning walk. I stopped referring to my body as “it”, as in “It just won’t act right!” I decided to give my body a name that she could live up to; an aspirational name, if you will. I started with Willow because it sounded breezy and graceful, but that name just didn’t work for me. I’m the person often facing the wrong direction in Pilates class and I somehow regularly bruise my limbs just walking around my own house. Willow was too far out of my range.
I needed a sportier name, something braver. I landed on “Thomas,” which is my maiden name. I don’t think anyone on any athletic team has ever called me Thomas, but I’ve heard other girls called by their last name and it always sounded tough and badass.
Addressing my body as Thomas has actually helped a lot. Now, when I’m doing painfully slow shoulder exercises at physical therapy, I’ll think to myself, “That’s it, Thomas! Look at you go. You’ll be dunking in no time.” When I really don’t want to go to an exercise class that I’ve signed up for, I say to myself, “Come on, Thomas. This is for eighty year old us.” Thomas and I are a good team.
Thomas was my last name from birth until I was twenty-three years old, which makes her my oldest friend. She’s my partner and cares about me as a person, not just as a mom. She’s invested in me living a good and long life.
I should confess that it’s not always kind words and sunshine between me and my body. Just recently, I found out during my yearly exam that a polyp was growing on my cervix. As my gynecologist was removing the tissue to send it away to pathology, I thought, “What the hell, Thomas? You get plenty of attention without going rogue and growing new shit. This isn’t cute. Tighten up.” I’m also not crazy about the fact that Thomas has surrendered to gravity and my boobs are making a run for the border. I’m not mad at Thomas, though—she’s fighting the good fight. She and I are waging an uphill battle against gravity, age and impossible beauty standards. I know we’ve been through harder things than menopause, but it does feel nice to have a companion as we navigate these changes. No matter what, Thomas and I are a in it for the long haul. We might as well be friends.
-Anna McArthur
Anna McArthur is a mom to four kids, including two recent college graduates and twin girls who are high-schoolers. She is a blogger, newspaper guest columnist and contributor to parenting magazines and websites, including “Her View from Home” and “Motherly Collective.” Anna’s essays have recently been published by Grown and Flown and Business Insider. A graduate of Clemson University and Columbia Theological Seminary, she lives in Athens, GA with her husband Bryan and their teenaged girls, who are much cooler than her. Anna loves to read, garden, hike and eat dips for dinner. Her first book, Hope For Moms: It’s Tough Out There, but So Are You was published in April 2025.
