She Loves Her Healthy (Cancer Free) Body!

We started a Model Rep program specifically to highlight the beauty of women over the age of 35. Shay sent in her photos with her badass pinup style and curves for days! It was an instant HELL YES (really you’ll see a trend here with our model reps, we are madly in love with them!). Like me she believes women of all shapes and sizes, ages and ethnicities have a right to feel beautiful inside and out. Her story about the arrival of where she is today is both inspiring and really motivating…this girl has done some stuff! Here, in her own words, is Shay’s incredible story.

XOXO,
Sara 🙂

Hair and Makeup by: Makenzie Radke
Photography by: Sara James Williams

I said it to myself the autumn I was twelve and a half.

I remember it so very clearly.

I want to be the beautiful one that walks in the room and people stop what they are doing to look at me.

Some piece of me wanted it so badly. The rest of me was all tom-boy.

If I wasn’t kicking ass at basketball, I was swimming, riding my bike, playing my alto sax or simply being the biggest nerd on earth. My elective classes were either spent in the office or the library.

My clothes weren’t stylish. A couple of the boys were starting to catch up to my height, but I’d already had my period for 2 ½ years, I was chubby by most standards, I had hairy armpits and legs, and I had been teacher’s pet for as long as I could remember and stayed on the honor roll.

To be beautiful in my neighborhood, you had long dark hair and heated your black eyeliner with a lighter in the locker room. Or you had deep brown eyes, full lips and booty for days. At least I’d gotten to a point where I wasn’t teased all the time. I had good friends, close friends. I belonged in my neighborhood, even if I didn’t feel beautiful, most days I felt accepted.

We moved away the next year. Life changed in countless ways.

I was an outsider.

My father left.

I had my first son at 17.

I was married to an abusive man at 18.

My second son at 20.

Divorced.

Remarried at 30, third son at 32.

By 37, single again.

At 40, single, unemployed with a nice severance package and feeling fairly lost.

Then my life REALLY changed.

A friend took a transfer to Chicago and I volunteered to drive her moving truck 2000+ miles. Cuz, Hey, I was single and unemployed! The first week I spent there was so jam-packed full of experience I could write a short novel! (Hmmmmm….)

That first week eventually led to almost three years. I love Chicago. My heart is still there and I will return to claim it, but I found out what the twelve and half-year-old were dreaming about.

I was given the chance to walk into a full Blues club and have the musicians know who I am and happy to see me. I got to sit in the back of a packed Jazz club and have the keyboardist of THE Miles Davis, walk straight back to hug me. Everywhere I went I was hugged and asked: “how you feelin’?” I found a belonging I had not experienced since I was 13.

But I also got to feel BEAUTIFUL!

Since then, the universe brought me home. Believe me, I came back kicking and fussing. BUT, my now 15-year-old son needed me more than I ever could have imagined.

I was home with my family when I fought and kicked the ass of colorectal cancer (pun intended), a year and a half ago. I was here to help my mother do the same last year.

I was here to walk my father through his diagnosis and strong but short fight with pancreatic cancer. I am here for my best friend, a woman I have called sister since I was 14, to help in her fight against the ugliness that is called cancer in our lives.

All of this brings me to my opportunity to be a model for this amazing, incredible, outstanding woman, Sara and her photography studio!! Makenzie (her makeup artist) and Sara made me feel like the 12 ½-year-old me could only dream! (Hell! The 47 ½-year-old me usually only gets to dream about feeling as fantastic as I did the day I spent with them!)

Every bad day, every sorrow, every scar, every good and bad decision, every day I’d wondered why I was put on this earth, disappeared as I posed in front of this woman’s lens.

She sees things through that tiny square the 12 ½-year-old me never would have imagined.

She’s been a step in making me feel whole again.

I am forever grateful.