A Bionic Ideal
on vanity
And there goes September. For most of my people it was a blur of back-to-school preparation and buzz, but for the first time in forever I was not among them. I spent the last days of summer working alone on a different new start, learning how to sit down, put on socks, sleep on only one side with a pillow between my knees, reconnect a body that broke my heart.
Only the vainest among us would have our heart so easily broken and fall into fall this way. I guess this is a bookend to my last post, ode to all the promise of June and my students’ still incandescent bodies and minds.
I miss not being physically with them for this new season of class. And I also don’t. A public-facing job is fraught for someone who thinks themselves ridiculous as often as I do. I’m in front of (or, if using my body for inclusive good in the classroom, I’m surrounded by) an audience a lot. And it’s not a famously forgiving audience, at least it doesn’t seem to be when class begins. I feel like a graceless form moving through the world, distracted by trying to fashion armor from the right “look”: cool, collected, capable, in-step, spry. I always check the mirror before entering a class. It’s an ironic vanity, though, as what I nearly always see is less than cool, much less than in control. I don’t miss that public reflection this quarter. I’m on medical leave from campus, adapting to a new pair of hips, until January; and my hibernation is haunted by how on earth I will look when I return.
By junior high, I was about done wearing shorts in public unless it was at the beach or part of a costume. My legs were not the ones I wanted. I obliged the mini jeans skirt uniform of the late ‘80’s, but never with poise. In so many pictures of my breezy So Cal girl pack, I’m the only one with long jeans covering my legs, and lousy with envy of all the not-blue legs in the line. Mine do not sculp in at the knees or ankles, do not tan, and thus were dreadful to me. I’ve learned to style gauzy pants and long jersey skirts, and at this point I never wear shorts outside if it’s not pushing 90 degrees.
I was raised by a mom groovy enough to allow adult content, wine coolers, and boyfriend sleepovers under her roof, but she lost it when I came home with a tattoo. She never forgave the boyfriend, whom she otherwise adored, for taking me to get it. “God Damnit,” she wailed, “we kept that body in pristine condition for 19 years, and you’ve spoiled it.”
How we kept it that way was both luck and life choices. No adventuresome pastimes were passed down, and there were no athletics in my life thanks to coordination deficit and excessive fear of injury. I’ve besmirched it with a few more tattoos and pressed the luck with a ton of sugar, cigarettes, and alcohol, but I have never truly tested my body.
And I have never truly trusted my body. So easily spoiled. So much value in the unspoiled. What would it be like to not have fear chipping away at every possibility before you?
When I was a kid I loved to do this pose I called the alligator (which I would now call a reverse boat), where I would prop up from lying face down flat on the carpet into an arched back that brought my pointed toes comfortably to the crown of my head behind me. There was such pride and glee in that little body… the flexibility, the possibilities of curve, the complete circle. Yoga eventually became the physical practice I loved for half my life. I was far from the strongest on the mat, and my legs betrayed me there, too; I could never fold over fully in half or get my knees to the ground in a butterfly. But the satisfaction of the deep stretch, the crisp lines of my triangle or plow, and capitalizing on the gift of my balance made up for it. I understand proper posing because I am hyper-aware of where every cell of my frame is at all times. This turns out not to be a universal way of being alive. Out in the world it must be a side effect of fear, an extension of needing to not take up too much or the wrong space. But in yoga it’s a magic power.
It was on the mat where I first knew something more than vanity was wrong with my legs. Knew my joints had failed, in fact, though I tried and tried to will a different verdict. I couldn’t get my foot into my lap for a lotus, and then I couldn’t even sit cross legged on the floor, or tuck into a child’s pose, without my thighs catching fire. Eventually they sometimes burned through the night.
Of course they would fail in balance. Both hips replaced at 52. Never mind that I haven’t walked straight or wandered more than a block without pain for a year now -- it’s elective surgery. How to opt in for physical sacrifice on a scale I’ve never come near; for an investment, not in a time machine back to any sure thing, but in the potential story of my late middle age? It’s a season of radical readjustment. I swim all day in grief for this huge spoiling, and then in gratitude, because all of us lucky enough to outlive being young will contend with it some way. I am frog-kicking off the stupid, shameful, corporal view imprinted on me.
I was once pregnant for 5 or 6 weeks. A striking glimpse of how the matter takes over the mind, how a body with its own motive can bulldoze you into trusting it. The day before a nurse confirmed, I went to the summer Fiction workshop I was teaching in a flowery blouse, short linen shorts, and cork wedge sandals. Friends, you read that upper thigh right. In 27 years, the only three hours of classroom air my whole legs have been exposed to, and the vivid core of the memory is never doubting it looked awesome. The mystical beauty of a pregnant body shut down all body-shaming brain transmissions. Further proof of the takeover was in my thinking for a minute, despite all practical evidence to the contrary, that I should have a baby. I miscarried the weekend before my scheduled abortion, and it was awful, and it was my body protecting me from something I really wouldn’t mark another person for yet would have carried like the Scarlet-est A in my own skin.
I could say that diminished physical access and needing nonorganic parts to keep me going have given me more empathy for other bodies who aren’t up to the gold standard, who don’t follow all the rules to stay unspoiled. But I don’t think I really had any empathy before; I think I was performing acceptance. I wonder if this tearing to shreds of my vanity is the body again bullying me out of my robe of fear. The alligator is lost, the elasticity of youth is 100% in the rear view; but I have spent enough time with science fiction to be persuaded that hardware-enhanced humans are the most powerful kind. Could these lengths of titanium inside me now be the armor for what remains of my battle against time? Will these bionic joints and big scars finally make the legs I’ve longed for?