It's Love Thursday again! Wow, that happened so quickly! But it's nice to see you here again.
I spent the last several days mostly writhing and/or balling up fetally in intense gastrointestinal distress, dead certain this would be the week I would succumb to cancer at last but, without insurance or savings, unwilling to run off to a doctor to find out for sure when I had such a nice bed surrounded by unread books in which to expire privately (that is, if Louise Erdrich, Sarah Vowell, and Reginald Hill couldn't distract me from that purpose after all). Then, over the course of a couple of days, I consumed most of a small bottle of curiously pink Milk of Magnesia in some noxious chemical flavor maliciously attributed to cherries as well as several vigorously bubbling Alka Seltzer potions, got off my resplendent rump and walked around a little bit, and then farted and burped so much as to pose a Hindenburg-level
threat to anyone who might have approached me with a lit match. (Astonishing that I didn't blow up our stove making myself a cup of bouillon.) Though I still felt the tiniest residual pelvic pang upon retiring late last night, I awoke this afternoon relaxed, refreshed, and pain-free.
What cured me? Medicine? Walking? Laying off the wholegrain raisin toast with stilton for a little while? Or thinking about love preparatory to writing this little essay? I dare not hazard a guess. If I ever experience these symptoms again, though, I will not hesitate to try them all.
Ironically enough after all that fear and physical misery, this week's post is about how much I love my body, let me count the ways (at least to five). Gassily but commentlessly visiting some of my favorite blogs this week (see "Good Reads" list in left sidebar), I found myself particularly charmed by the responses of Goldfish, Blue, and Madame Lymphopo to a post by Zuzu at Feministe entitled "Wonderful, Glorious Me." In this post, Zuzu challenges her guests to, well, be the change we want to see in our world, to stop harping, just for a moment, on all the things we hate about our bodies and all our quite justifiable resentment of the eight zillion contrary ways we hear society telling us it wants to see our bodies if at all, and instead rattle off a few things we love about ourselves, at least five, including things we love about our bodies.
You know what? I do love my body. I do, no kidding! So I'm here today to take that challenge. And because it is most likely to shock people since I'm a chubby, middle-aged cancer patient with one leg, and yet also a woman -- and one who goes out in public without a burka, too! -- the five things I list will only be about my body.
Look, I have bad hair days like everybody. I also get big zits sometimes, and since I'm pale, they really really show, and I really don't embrace opportunities to go out and face the world on days like this any more readily than anyone else does. Hell, I have bad personality days, too, days when it's not even a matter of whether I consider my body presentable in public, days when I feel I really might chop off the first head I see, ugly or pretty, perky or grumpy, Democrat, Republican, Green or Libertarian, just give me an axe, or hey, that windshield wiper will do, so maybe I'd better just stay home, with the door shut. And by my saying so, you must understand that I am not doing as Zuzu warns against, "self-deprecation ... [or] ... offsetting a compliment with a dig." I consider these natural human phases and form negative judgments because of them upon neither myself nor anyone else who experiences them. I'm just listing them so you will understand when I tell you how much I love and cherish my body, and imply in the process but separately how well I respect myself, that I have -- somehow -- found it possible to do both without being whatever the hell anyone else might call "perfect." I have been overall quite comfortable in my skin for a very long time.
In fact, I think the one thing I want to say most of all on this topic is how much I love the fact that not one thing on my body is likely ever to be described as "perfect," even by me. I even love the fact that no physical part of me can ever be perceived as "perfect-looking" without material assistance (makeup, shaving, girdle, trick lighting, etc.). Suits me! While I will readily admit to being a bit obsessive-compulsive -- an obsessive completist, really, meaning I always strive to do everything very, very thoroughly or not at all -- I am, as I have ranted at length elsewhere, not a fan of visual perfection. Visual perfection is stupid and empty! The pursuit of visual "perfection," especially when it means conformance to a set of standards devised by other people, is highly questionable and potentially life-sucking! Or so say I. (So say I over and over again.)
And even if it's not, visual "perfection" is boring as hell! And that automatically makes it imperfect, doesn't it? Ha ha!
I find myself looking for flaws everywhere. I don't think of them as flaws, though; I think of them as interest. Perfection is the difference between art and artifice. Artifice is uninteresting except to game players.
Regard this lovely sculpture. (Hand detail I photographed myself can be seen at right.)
Does this represent a "perfect" female form? Sure. Yet also, no. Eve here is thin and long in some places, thick in others -- maybe disproportionately thick if you think that way -- a gangly adolescent or an adult who might have been malnourished at some time, maybe still is, not a gym member at any rate, probably not Caucasian. That last possibility alone would render her looks "imperfect" to half the world, I daresay, as ridiculous as that sounds.
I could stare at her for hours. I will return to look at her again and again. She is beautiful.
Think of your own body as a sculpture. Art, not really in need of artifice because it is perfect being imperfect. It's something you can live in.
In that spirit, here are five gloriously imperfect things I love about my body, five things that help me openly relish my life in it:
1. It's wicked strong. Oh, sure, you might be able to run faster and farther than I, or benchpress more metal, but I have the gift of physical endurance. I also have the gift of recovery. I have a very low pain threshold; I feel everything very intensely (and loudly). But I am able to suffer great physical duress, sometimes for a very long time, and then get over it, really get over it. This is an amazing gift. I don't count on always having it, but it has made my life possible.
2. I have an awesome face! Oh, yeah, one of the best things about it is how when we go out to dinner together, you won't have to watch my teeth masticating my burritos or get distracted analyzing how congested my sinuses might be. Yes, it's wonderfully opaque! It's lined and freckled and scarred, too, a glorious collection of souvenirs from my own private wars plus all my laughter, every sunny day I've squinted into, all my thoughts. It looks like both my parents' faces, too, round like my father's, sharp-boned and deep-eyed like my mother's, so it's also a memento of them. Finally, it's just so fabulously expressive. As many words as I spew here, there's a lot I can tell you in person with it without ever saying a word. I especially like how skilled it is at making people laugh.
3. My skin is amazing. Does it surprise you to hear me say this when you consider that the kind of cancer I have is metastatic malignant melanoma, a cancer of the skin which has now invaded my lymph system? So what? I do not blame my skin for this. (I don't even blame my gene pool, even though that's probably where we could find the source code for my cancer if we were ever to look. Whatever. Stuff happens.) I'm just glad I have skin, and you should be too; see the whole thing about my face being opaque to understand why. It's ice-pale without being spotless. It usually scabs fast and callouses brilliantly, which helps out a lot with the whole endurance thing. It tends toward hirsuteness, and the hairs come in many colors -- flame, silver, auburn. Sometimes I shave and pluck them. Sometimes I stroke them. Grooming my skin, fingering it, or just staring at different parts of it, like the wrinkles on the backs of my hands, has provided me with hours of entertainment, something fascinating to pore over (pun intended) while I think, maybe while I think about how things are put together in bodies so I can paint or draw or electronically render them.
4. I love my feet.
I have always loved my feet, no matter how many or which ones I had at any given moment, and as you know if you are a regular reader, being able to use them however I wish is something for which I thank feminism.
They're fantastic. They've taken me everywhere.
5. Okay, my ass has taken me some places, too, helping me get places by firmly situating me in traveling cars and buses, on bikes, motorbikes, and planes. In fact, there it is, at right, doing what it does best, sitting and working. Isn't it glorious? It's a little lopsided now, because some muscles in the right cheek have atrophied since my amputation changed forever the way I use that set, and meanwhile the muscles in the left cheek have built up as my left leg has taken over much of the original right leg's workload. Nevertheless, both sides still work equally well when I dance.
Okay, your turn. Happy Love Thursday. In its honor, I pass along Zuzu's invitation that you give yourself a present and tell yourself at least five things you love about your body and/or yourself. You can do this. And remember, you don't have to stop at five.
The winter when I started this afghan was particularly harsh, our first snow having started falling on the morning of October 23 right as I was being wheeled down a glass-walled hospital corridor to have my leg cut off, and the catalogs started trickling in as early as December, as if the gardening companies knew how badly we needed those colors, how much more urgently than ever. I fingered the thin pages filled with flower images, visions of bright colors, petals both silky and succulent, descriptions of fragrances both sharp and languorous. I didn't know how I could wait 'til spring.
It would be a garden that ignored seasons, and zones. In my garden, sunflowers and forget-me-nots would bloom at the same time. Tulips of every color, even the deep violet Queen of the Night, would bloom simultaneously with red roses and hot pink peonies, even in August, even in December. Primula and delphinia alike would stay bright and vigorous, whether planted in shade or full sun, and though some petals might be allowed to brown artistically, for naturalistic interest, no stalks would ever wither. No stakes would be required to keep any flowers facing up. Night or day, winter or summer, the flowers would stay open.
As I crocheted my fantasy garden abstraction, the three cats I still had each came and slept in my lap or on the piles of squares I had completed. They chased the yarn while I worked it. They shed into the yarn. I looked forward to a day when my crocheted garden would cover our bed and they would snuggle into it cozily while they napped, with and without me. It won't happen, of course, except as a fancy in my head. They are all gone now, but bits of them, the fur and whiskers they shed as they liived and played with me and in the yarn, have gotten themselves worked into the fiber of this afghan. It couldn't be helped, and I didn't particularly try.
Hairs shed by my true love and I, his vibrant sable and silver, my thin pale gold, tangled themselves into the wool from time to time as the months passed. They have been worked into the fiber of this afghan, too. Probably a piece of everyone who came and visited us and shed a hair in our living room while I made these squares has been worked into this afghan. It couldn't be helped, as I said.
Of course it was my mother who taught me how to do stuff like this. I got really good at needlepoint, latchhook, and embroidery of every kind. See, I liked them, at least in small doses and with no deadlines attached. Apply the slightest bit of pressure to finish something, and off it would disappear into a box, maybe for a decade or more, maybe forever. Though my mother also taught me to knit and crochet, I found these more tedious and never took them further until now.
My mother the artist, writer and craftswoman was always busy. Her little brown hands gracefully, and nervously, as I now realize, darted in and out of constant projects, even when arthritis was biting at every joint nearly all the time. She made enormous, gaudy poppies out of tissue paper and wire. She tole-painted milk cans and other western artifacts found in the dirt outside ghost towns and dusty corners of antique shops alike. She made bean bags filled with real beans out of her own colorful, hand-knit squares into which she'd worked bright, simple graphics or from scraps of calico she bought in strange, out-of-the-way western towns, and also at places like tourist-trap general stores and Knott's Berry Farm. She could find something authentic anywhere and make it into something else that might be silly or kitschy but was always authentically her.
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