Things that smile didn't say

With your belly full of milk, the smiles are easy to coax out. I propped you up in my lap, tickling your chin and pulling silly faces until your grin lifted the weight of your round cheeks and crinkled your eyes. 

You didn't glance at the roundness of my hips, wishing them smaller. Your simple joy was not tempered by silent contempt for the softness of my stomach and fullness of my face.

That smile said things, but it didn't say this:  Hurry, Mama. I will love you more when you are smaller, so hurry and get that way and don't be happy until you are.

Here is what I have been thinking but unsure how to say because I believe in being honest and, to be honest, I'm not quite there yet. My smiling baby asks much of me, but he didn't ask me to stand on that scale every morning and base my happiness on the numbers that appear, and while I'm thinking about it, neither did my daughter or my husband. So maybe, just maybe, it's time to reevaluate that.

The thought of my beautiful daughter believing that she will be more lovely if the number on that scale is a smaller one nauseates me. (But she will believe it if I believe it.) I will not raise my son to believe that women are and should be focused on a tiny number printed on the tag of their jeans. (He will believe it if I am.)

They are numbers, for heavens sake. Three pathetic little digits that pop up on a tiny screen between my toes and then disappear. Numbers that hide just below my waist or between my shoulder blades on a faded little tag and know nothing about the way I snuggle my babies or kiss my husband goodnight.

I don't quite know exactly how to get There yet, where There is that place where numbers don't make me happy or sad or anything at all because they are nothing but numbers, but I promise I'm going to keep working on it until I do. I have a feeling that spending a little more time teasing out those baby smiles is a decent start.