Before I was pregnant, I hated my ankles. Loathed them. Cursed them, tried to hide them, wished I could change them (tried several times), and eventually gave up on them and resigned myself to the fact that they'd be one of my "problem areas" forever. But then they got worse. Much worse.
Pregnancy has been full of many surprises, mainly in the way my body has changed, but the one thing that caught me the most by surprise was how swollen ankles could actually make me thankful for (and actually miss) my normal, pre-pregnancy ankles.
It was hot a few weeks ago--incredibly hot--106 degrees, in fact. And no, I don't have air conditioning. To say I was miserable would be an understatement, and I know that you ladies who've been pregnant through heat waves will understand. One day, I got home from work, sat on the couch and put my feet up because they were aching after having been on them all day. When I glanced down at them, I was shocked to see they'd tripled in size. Tripled. It reminded me of the scene in Hitch when Will Smith's character has an allergic reaction to seafood and his face swells up to the point where he's virtually unrecognizable. My ankles did the same sort of thing.
When Joey got home that evening, he asked me how I was surviving the heat. All I had to do was show him my ankles--they spoke for themselves. From that moment on, I decided that I had to laugh at them (they were comical, after all), otherwise I would cry. I cried anyway, though. Those things stuck around for several days; they were there so often that they became the new normal, and I started forgetting what my normal ankles looked like.
Then one morning when I got out of bed, I looked in the mirror (as I often do), and noticed something incredible--my ankles. They were beautiful! They were slender and dainty and made my feet feel pretty again. And then a strange thought struck me: they were back to their normal selves. I hadn't had to work hard for them or put up a huge fight--nope, all I had to do was recognize the beauty that had always been there, the beauty that I failed to see before. I wished I had a short skirt and high heels that were made for 8 month pregnant ladies, but alas, I settled for my regular work pants and flats that day. And of course, when I got home, those ankles were swollen to high heaven again, and the little ankles I used to know were again obscured by the new puffier ones. But I went to sleep that night with a strange feeling--contentment with the ankles that I have. Happy that they were swollen, because had they not been, I would not have had that moment in which I realized how lovely my ankles are. And through that, I realized that my body is just that: a body. It's not my spirit, it's not my soul, it's not my intelligence and it's not my heart. Those things have remained constant even though my body has not. And while realizing that my ankles weren't half bad was a big deal for me, realizing that who I am is pretty fantastic despite how I look was even more important. Lord help me to hang on to that.
I admit that I've wavered between being angry and being resigned to the fact that my body is changing during the past few months. At the same time, though, I've been in awe of my body, realizing that it's capable of so much more than I've given it credit for in the past. I used to chastise this body of mine, I would look at it with contempt and think that I had to control every little thing in order for it to be even remotely close to being "ok." But I guess that's another story. For now, saying I'm thankful for my swollen ankles is enough. The puffiness reminds me of the truth, and the truth is that my body is just one aspect of who I am, and though it may change one way or another during different seasons of my life, the truth of who I am won't change. And I got all that from a pair of swollen ankles.
