My Body

This is one I've got years to go in my personal growth. (And multiple blogs to write to break the silence.)

When my maternal grandmother was dying, she lost an enormous amount of weight. She had been a round and soft woman my whole life. Her hugs were a safe place. She joked to me (from her hospital bed): "I've wanted my whole life to be thin, and here I am." I wanted her round again more than anything else in the world.

I never had an eating disorder, but I never felt satisfied with my body. I always thought something could be improved. Even when a brief obsession with healthy eating coincided with a growth spurt and I was a tall and very thin girl, I thought I could have better hair or clearer complexion. Always imperfections.

My whole life I dressed in a way that would make me blend in. I didn't want to stand out or have any parts of me stand out. That was for people who wanted all the wrong kind of attention. Jeans and a t-shirt were my uniform as a teenager. A ponytail or bun was my hair style of choice.

When I was in college, I sat in a packed auditorium full of college students while a campus minister spoke about boys and girls. He told the women that if their bra strap was showing, they were inviting the men to lust. That men couldn't help but automatically think about what that bra was supporting. And God forbid boys imagine that we have boobs. I watched as some girls with tank tops nervously adjusted themselves, hoping to God that their bra straps were safely hidden under the slightly wider sleeve. I remember thinking: "This is bullshit." But I didn't say a word. I sat and listened to it, like I was part of a social experiment, observing the customs of a foreign tribe. I soon drifted away from that campus ministry, finding a group that was less "cool" but more open. My new campus minister, a woman, never told me I was responsible for the lust of other men. Thank God for Ruth, and my mentor Alica, who showed me that women could be strong and in ministry.

But I have female friends who stayed in that religious group. They debated heavily whether it was OK to kiss their boyfriends before marriage. Kiss. Not have sex. Kiss. A friend who had become a Christian more recently and had been sexually active before wondered if she would ever find a husband who would accept her "damaged goods." That same campus minister asked us to think to ourselves how we will feel on our wedding night when the memories of all the other men would join us on our wedding bed. That by having any sexual relationship before marriage was somehow equivalent to having an orgy by memory with our husband.

It is hard for me to talk about my body without the story turning immediately to sex, because the female body is framed in sexuality. Our culture has seen to that. That theme of sexuality in our culture is not a healthy and natural outgrowth of the body, but a strange fixation on the female body being only a function for the sexual pleasure of a man.

Years ago I told my little sister her shoes were too sexy because I was terrified she would have some boy treat her like a sex object. I wanted to protect her somehow. I was scared of shoes. We are taught that our autonomy of our bodies is best accomplished by hiding them.

The brand of Christianity that I grew up with was dead set on teaching me to separate myself from my body. Ignore my body and certainly to cover it up and "save it" (since "it"/my vagina, is the only part of me worth saving- and saving it for a man). My body was a black hole of temptation, and the best way to avoid the temptation was to shut the whole body down. To hide it and then to shed it completely. My body was merely a temporary temple for my spirit, and it was important for me to keep it "pure."

I mostly followed those instructions. I became so separated out from my body, so shut off, that I only thought of myself in intellectual and spiritual terms. My body was a shell that I was doomed to carry for this lifetime, happily to shed in the next. This separation was freeing in many ways. It was better to separate from my body than to obsess about how to dress it in order to attract the opposite sex. It was better to forget my body so that I didn't need to spend too much money on clothes, hair cuts, and other extravagant frivolities. These were my two choices: Hide or Sexy. I chose hide because it was safer.

That distinction between my body and soul was bolstered when I had spinal surgery, twice as a teenager (and now a third time as an adult). My body was not good to me. I could not depend on it, and it was a shell that wasn't even fully functional. I couldn't hear (I wear hearing aids), my spinal condition left portions of my body numb, and my scars left me feeling a bit like Frankenstein. But who cares? It was just my body. It wasn't me. Thank God. I never depended on it to satisfy me or bring me joy anyway.

Then I had my first son. My body proved to be more powerful than I knew. I carried a child and gave birth to it. My body was surprisingly good at that, even though I had done nothing to make it so. Then I nursed that child for over a year with breastmilk. My body was surprisingly good at that, also with very little work on my part. That power frightened me. I didn't know what to do with a fully functional and necessary body.

What frightened me more was that another human being depended on my body. To have someone need me so primally, so physically, was a shock to my system. I was supposed to only be needed for my mind and heart. My physical body was just a carrier, a suitcase, and a disappointing one at that. But my son's life and survival came from my body. My body was not a total disappointment, and that confused me.

Despite my body's "success" at nurturing a human being into existence, I couldn't wait to have my body back, so I could hide it again. Having it be so useful and important was incredibly vulnerable.

My body is more than a sex toy, more than a suitcase, and I am still learning how to embrace it. I am in my thirties and without trauma, and I still have years to go before I truly am comfortable in my own skin.