“Aunt Cathrin, I feel uncomfortable when you body-shame.”
My niece Keogh was washing local lettuces for dinner at our rented ranch house on Hornby Island, a three-ferry trip into the Pacific Ocean, off the coast of British Columbia. Outside the kitchen window, the sea slowly came in for the second time that day, cooling the flat rocks that had basked in the sun all afternoon, and us along with them.
I have two sisters. Laura is eight years older than me, Ann eight years younger, a full generation spread from top to bottom. Laura and I had flown from Toronto to Vancouver to join Ann and her two daughters on their annual summer trip to Hornby. Ann had loaded her small orange Suzuki with two sisters, two daughters, and two bikes and then driven us to this beautiful house that she had found for our holiday.
I’d had some difficulty relaxing into the mellow vibe of the remote hippie island. Earlier that day, I’d thrown my complex mini lounger across the rocks (opening complicated beach chairs is a competitive sport on the Canadian West Coast). But by dinner, soothed by the lapping waves and my brimming glass of Sancerre, I was so calm I felt I’d missed my calling as a potter. Until this comment from Keogh. One of the grabby things about being older is witnessing Ann’s daughters (and my own) develop personalities and wisdom to contend with. I was not about to dismiss anything that came from Keogh’s mouth.
But body-shame? I couldn’t think what I might have said to make my niece feel that way. I’d spent a lot of time not just thinking about women’s bodies and the freedom with which we commented on them but shutting down any such comment that came from my own mouth. I’d never have said anything negative about Keogh’s body, I was sure of that. The beautiful young splendour of her, for one thing. But I wouldn’t have said that out loud either.
When I was thirty years younger, a low whistle, a wink, and buckled knees were hallway hellos at the newspapers where I worked. I had no complaints about being casually sexualized; it was fun and lusty and a little dangerous. Being admired for your body, and dressing to be admired for your body, was validating, I thought, before the male gaze became taboo.
Worse things went on, things that were demeaning to have been complicit in, because women carried the false shame that we had brought it on ourselves. One woman was asked to spin around in a job interview so the boss could see her from all sides, another to try on a tight T-shirt to help him decide whether to feature it in a magazine, another to lift her red boot onto the boardroom table in a news meeting for everyone’s comment. “Don’t tug that skirt down on my account,” a boss said to me when I noticed it had ridden up. I blushed and didn’t.
“A colleague asked me if I could move my hair so he could admire my necklace.” Jumping ahead thirty years, the person speaking held out a delicate gold necklace from her chest.
“Good of him to ask,” I said, and meant it. “What’d you say?”
“I told him to fuck off.”
“Straight to ‘Fuck off’?”
“It was gross. And completely inappropriate.”
She also told me, not unkindly, that women her age didn’t appreciate the way women my age continually commented on their youth and looks, bodies and beauty. That we were sexualizing and objectifying them the same way men had us (and still did them). My first thought was: You’re going to miss the hubba-hubba days when you’re seventy. My second, that I’d become the old witch in “Hansel and Gretel.” “Give me your finger so I can tell if you’re fat enough to cook!” I immediately self-corrected. Now I mostly wouldn’t compliment another woman’s looks. Instead, the compliment might be about the pleasure of her company and, maybe, “That’s a cool bag.” It’s not just that I’d modified my behaviour. I’d seen the good sense in modifying it. So this body-shaming thing brought me up short.
“I certainly didn’t intend to do that to you, Keogh.”
“Not my body, Aunt Cathrin. Yours.”
My hand, on its way to my mouth with a cracker full of brie, paused in mid-air. We sisters and Keogh were scarfing dips and cheese and wine while hungrily preparing a dinner of fresh fish and salads for ourselves and Ann’s other daughter, Claire, who was about to arrive with her two best friends from the tiny inland cabin they were sharing.
“Oh. Huh. My body. Right.” I swallowed my cracker and did a quick mental survey of the things that had come out of my mouth in the past forty-eight hours: “When did my elbows start to sag?” “It’s like my brown spots are propagating in the sun.” “Do these flip-flops make my stomach look thick?” As the comments were about me, I felt I had a right to them. But if I was constantly assessing myself, it would follow that I was doing the same with everyone else. Putting down my body slammed my niece back into hers. As if she didn’t have enough pressure to spend every moment assessing that body—skin, belly, thighs—in the social media–advertising capitalist stream in which we swam, undefended, like the fish in the ocean outside this kitchen window. The body scrutiny is merciless for the young and perfect, let alone the old and soft.
I stacked up another cracker—everything was so much more delicious after hours on the salty Pacific—and pulled myself back from saying I’d gained five pounds on this trip. Maybe it wasn’t Keogh’s body image I needed to think about. Maybe I was missing something important in the old-body putdowns. “Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur,” wrote Muriel Spark in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1961. Maybe, for me, that time was right now, and my body, for all its decrepitude, was part of that prime.
“Okay,” I said to my niece. “I get what you’re saying.” I filled my glass, ready to hunker down into this particular conversation, but Keogh had already moved on, with the galloping speed of twenty-two. “Lemon or vinegar for the dressing?” she smiled winningly.
When my daughter, Mary, was thirteen, I’d often find her staring at herself in the bathroom mirror. Not with mirror face, testing out pretty, but open and intent, like she was receiving something. She was the reflection of Mary and the receptacle of Mary, both at once. This could go on for an hour, maybe more.
“What are you doing?” I would have been sucked into the unquenchable fire of hell if I’d tried something similar at her age (after being bludgeoned to death by the six other family members trying to use the bathroom). But Mary wasn’t vain, merely gathering evidence.
“I’m trying to figure out who I am.”
“A child’s body is very easy to live in.” Ursula K. Le Guin started a blog when she was eighty-one; this is from one of her posts. “An adult body isn’t. The change is hard. And it’s such a tremendous change that it’s no wonder a lot of adolescents don’t know who they are. They look in the mirror—that is me? Who’s me?
“And then it happens again, when you’re sixty or seventy.”
After the Hornby trip, called up short on my body-shaming, I decided to do my own mirror study. To take a tally of my body as it was at sixty-eight. That is me. Who is me? I would become rememberable to myself as I was now, without censure, transitioning to old age as Mary had to teen age.
I undressed quickly and stared at myself in my full-length bedroom mirror, pen and paper in hand to do my tally, until I realized I’d gotten to know mirror me a little too well. She aimed to please. She attracted me to me. Even now, old and stripped, she smiled wryly at me. Could be worse, she said. Nice shoulders.
I wanted something more antagonistic, or at least less pliable, than the way the mirror let me shift and dodge and adjust to how I looked. I thought about Lucien Freud’s naked painting of himself at seventy-one. “I seldom got so fed up with a model,” he said, and he does look impatient and combative, his head thrust forward for battle, as he stands and faces us, literally cocky. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote that, with his naked paintings, Freud wanted “fully realized art of dense contemplation and diligent inspection that did not wince or pause at a single human fold, wrinkle, or pelvic peculiarity.”
I quickly took several pictures in my bedroom mirror of the front and the back of me. I was no Lucien Freud, but these photos would do for my purposes. I got dressed, sat on the bed with my pen and paper close at hand, and flipped through my phone. I winced so hard my face cramped, and without pause, I deleted them. “Christ,” I said out loud.
I texted Ann to call me.
I’m in a weird small airport lounge no privacy, she texted back. She was on her way to New Orleans. Want to talk via text? Ann did study her body, she told me, and obsessed over changes for the worse. That soft skin near my armpit. The slight sagging beginning at the tip of my inner thighs. As she got older, she shared the regret of every woman in the Milky Way that she’d never embraced the beauty of her younger body. Mom was pivotal in passing on our body insecurity. She had it horribly as did her mom and the whole f ’in chain of oppression that keeps women in this cycle of body-shaming because of unattainable standards of beauty. I’ve had to learn to not do that to my girls because it runs deep. We’re gonna board. Send questions.
I asked her if she still looked at her vagina regularly, a bit off topic, but a minor obsession of mine after my doctor told me women under sixty were checking out their vaginas in mirrors at least once a week. (My own research bore this out. Every woman under sixty answered, unvaryingly, “Of course.” Women sixty and up tended not to appreciate the question. Which was odd, because a lot of those women were part of the original consciousness-raising, hold-a-mirror-to-the-vagina 1960s.)
I do, not just my VJ but the whole area. PS: I’m not going to take naked photos. The front cameras on phones are hideous if you’re taking a selfie. A regular camera should be more forgiving.
Ann was right. I needed better-quality naked photographs, and the solution was near at hand. Mary’s degree was in photography. She often made photo studies of herself, and sometimes of me, for a story I’d written for a newspaper or magazine. Clothed, of course. She was an excellent photographer, with an unerring eye for the right light to show her subjects at their best.
“Hey, Mary, I wonder if you could do something for me?”
We were at the Toronto Eaton Centre on a Saturday night, looking for a dress for a wedding Mary was attending. It had to be pink and it had to be full length, the bride said. Mary and I were both fed up from too many failures in airless fitting rooms and had paused for Diet Coke and end-of-day 30-percent-off sushi in the food court of the downtown mall. This was our second expedition on the same quest.
“I’m so tired of this hunt.” Mary was despondent.
“We’ll find the dress,” I said. We had two months before the wedding. “Don’t despair.”
“I’m definitely despairing. But I appreciate your confidence.”
“I wonder,” I said on the bench at the bottom of the down escalator in the basement of the mall, “if you could take some photographs of me naked?”
Mary’s head snapped up.
“NO!! MOM!!! ” She took one gasping breath. “Do I have to? I mean, what’s it for? Is it for a doctor? I mean, if it’s for a doctor and there’s some horrible growth or something you need a picture of, I could do that. But just your naked body? Mom!”
I explained that I was trying to do a tally of my old body and was upset by how much worse I looked in my photos than in the mirror.
“That’s the same for everybody,” Mary said. “When you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself as you are seen. It has nothing to do with age.” She looked worried. “God. Mom!!”
“So that’s a no?”
“Hard no.” Mary calmed herself and pointed her chopsticks down to the bench. “Are you going to eat that last piece of sushi?”
I called Laura, who’d joined those consciousness-raising, vagina-inspecting groups in the 1960s. I’d never forgotten what she told me. Laura said that one of the women told the group that she had orgasms if a man merely touched her breasts. Setting off thirty years of my own panic. “I think those vagina sessions came out of the book Our Bodies, Ourselves, from the Boston Women’s Health Collective,” Laura told me on our call.
“Do you look at yourself naked in the mirror anymore?” I asked her.
“Absolutely not. I’m considering taking down the mirror in my hallway so I don’t have to see myself under any circumstances,” she laughed. “Seventy-five is not the new forty-five. My body didn’t get the memo on that one.”
Laura remembered a visit to our Aunt Helen when she was ninety and we were at either end of our fifties and already feeling ancient. “She liked to have an anecdote ready for us,” Laura said. “A little stand-up routine she’d perfect before we arrived.”
On this early spring visit, Helen told us she’d just done a checkup on her body after the long winter, to see how things were trending. “I took off every stitch and stood stark naked in front of the full-length mirror.” Every stitch, stark naked—old turns of phrase that suggested nakedness was a rare occurrence for my aunt. Not to be confused with a lack of interest in her appearance, which Helen took great care of until she died, at ninety-seven. She skillfully thrift-shopped and kept up with trends. On this visit, she had on a pair of laced brogues, ribbed tights, a kilt-ish wool skirt to the knee, and a fitted heather sweater. Her hair done, as always. When I worried my daughter was vain, I was only fifty. I thought vanity—self-love, self-regard, self-admiration—was something to keep secret. Especially when you had a reason for it, being as beautiful as Mary. And then let go of when you no longer had a reason for it. I didn’t understand the enduring importance of vanity, no matter how old you got. Do we stop dressing pleasingly at seventy because we’ve been liberated from the male gaze? Of course not.
“What’s this doing way down here, and why is that over there!” Laura and I loved the memory of Helen’s body tally. The legs were the last to go, she had said. And: “No man wants to look at an old woman’s flat ass in a pair of pants.” She’d been shopping with a young friend who still looked terrific in jeans, she told us, and bought two pairs at Helen’s urging. “How old is she?” I’d asked. “Seventy-six,” Helen told us.
“You two are so young.” I remembered the grip of my aunt’s knobby hand on my arm as she held tight to Laura and me, ancient in our fifties, when we said goodbye at her side door. Not witchy hands but strong hands from a lifetime of work. “You glorious girls. Enjoy youth while you have it.”
The front door of the Hornby Island beach house swung open, and Claire and her two friends, Zoë and Jane, arrived for dinner. They had been best friends in high school and now lived together in Montreal while attending Concordia University. Ann and I had visited them there, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Jane was studying to be a filmmaker, Zoë a painter, and Claire a writer, and I loved how unafraid they were to see themselves as they wanted to become, to imagine their best and most hopeful dreams of their future. I was certain they would not falter.
They swooped through our roomy wooden beach house like swallows, exclaiming over the floor and the local island art on the walls. Jane, alert and dark-haired, stood over the old upright piano and began a delicate composition she was working on. Zoë, tall and freckled, joined her, and they switched to a Philip Glass piece. They were nineteen and twenty, worried about turning twenty-one, and I tried to remember what that particular concern felt like. It was a passage, I dimly recalled. Not unlike my own at the other end of life.
I was so absorbed by their energy and joy, by the way everything in the simple beach house took on a shine as they glanced off it, I said, “I don’t know, you’re all just so glorious.” Maybe getting in the way of their unconsciously free and easy selves. Free to be as they are now and to become whoever they might be in their long lives ahead. Maybe it was time to channel my twenty-year-old self. Maybe she would help me give birth to my old age. I know she had her own fears and worries, like my niece and her friends. But also like them, she was brave and strode into her life, for whatever came next.
What is age but becoming who you are? Like Mary looking for herself in the mirror at thirteen. Like Helen doing the same at ninety, and me at sixty-eight. I never did write down my tally of the old me, but I carry her. The crone “must become pregnant with herself, at last.” That’s Le Guin’s blog again. “She must bear herself, her third self, her old age, with travail and alone.
“Not many will help her with that birth.”
Seven women went down to the sea before dinner as the incoming tide began to create tiny pools of life in the hollows of the rock. Laura and Ann and I mostly stood still and watched the girls—we tried not to call them girls to their faces—as they explored the tide pools like little kids, ebullient, their high voices singing over the rocks. Zoë, the youngest at nineteen, crunched on the barnacles in bare feet “to toughen them up.” (I bought a portrait of a woman from her on this trip, Zoë’s first sale as a painter. “I will remember this my whole life,” she said when I handed her the cheque.) Claire fell in love with a tiny rock-coloured crab. Jane took pictures.
The glasses of white wine we each held were goblets of fire in the setting sun, we the flame bearers.
“Tell us your story as sisters,” Jane said to Laura, Ann, and me after dinner as we sat and talked at an upstairs window with a cinematic view of the wilding sea. But we got onto first kisses instead. Laura kissed her first boyfriend, Mickey, on the footbridge over the tumultuous spring creek in Grimsby. Ann won the longest-kisser contest in eighth grade. She couldn’t remember the boy, but the song was “Stairway to Heaven.” My first kiss, at Expo 67, was with a handsome French Canadian boy, dancing to “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” Claire looked up both songs on her phone: “Seven minutes and four minutes long.” We never got to our story as sisters except to say we were three of five siblings. “All from the same parents?” asked Jane. Which I thought was a very modern question.
The young women told us that older men, in their thirties, had started to harass them on the beach. This had never happened to them on Hornby before, and they were interested in why it was happening now. They’d decided it was because it was the first time they’d been to the island without parents. They didn’t worry that it was their own slenderly clad bodies that had brought on the unwanted attention. They’d laid down that particular burden, long carried by their mothers and aunts, that they were responsible for men’s behaviour toward them.
By now, the waves were crashing loudly and the rocks were completely submerged. We watched out the window as two little boys from next door came screaming down the path and jumped into the foam, crazy with happiness. Jane stood up suddenly, as if shaken awake by the shouts.
“We have to go.”
“Ten more minutes,” said Ann. We couldn’t bear for them to leave, like Helen with Laura and me.
“No. Now.” Jane was unconquerable. “Or we’ll miss the sunset on Grassy Point.”
All three girls raced out the door, as excited as the boys in the surf. Maybe to catch themselves on Jane’s camera in the best ocean light, we didn’t know. A year later, I’d be back on the Pacific Ocean, with the same women and at the same tenuous time of night, for Jane’s memorial. She died from a sudden and unstoppable sickness a few months after she turned twenty-one. We sat on a blanket by the shore to make small candlelit boats bearing messages for Jane and then launched them into the water with dozens more. The lanterns of Jane’s parents and younger sister were the first out, leading all the other lanterns into the bay, until just one was going ahead of the rest, with travail and alone.
Excerpted from This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead by Cathrin Bradbury. Copyright © 2025 Cathrin Bradbury. Published by Viking Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
