So hot, right?
Another game we could play is “I want to murder you when you imply your time is more important than mine.” What? It’s just a game. You could say something like, “I have to cancel our dinner tonight even though you’ve already been prepping and cooking basically all day because I ran into some dude I know from college and we’re going to go grab a beer or seven.” Remember when you did that last week? Just like Law & Order, we could pull scenarios from real life and build on them. Our sex life could be all THIS SHIT IS RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES except the headlines are our life and nothing ever gets resolved in under an hour.
Maybe we could even play that chunk chunk sound in between role-playing and getting a glass of water?
Now back to the murder scenario I was talking about. So you’ll say that thing I just said about the dinner and the beer and all that, and then what I’ll do is place both my hands around your neck like so and I will try to shake you back and forth just to be overly dramatic.
No, this really has nothing to do with the other night. I’m just using it as a jumping-off point. Jeez, don’t take it so seriously! Why are you looking at me like that? Is it because I’m somewhat trying to choke you right now? Hello, I’m role-playing. I’m demonstrating how something like this might work. This is what role-playing actually is.
Another example could be that time you told my hot friend Jenny—who just made partner at her law firm—that she should’ve focused on “fulfilling her biological destiny instead, it would’ve been hella easier” and “Let me know if you need any help with that.” Didn’t think I’d find out about that, did you? That’s because Jenny isn’t a disloyal skank, like some people I know and role-play with.
So, to review, the role I was playing just now was Girlfriend-Who-Knows-Everything-You-Say-to-My-Friends-When-I’m-Not-Around and yours was The-Only-Level-of-Drunk-That-Makes-That-Behavior-Acceptable-Is-Dead-From-Alcohol-Poisoning.
Why are you yelling “ANDY! ANDY!” Oh right! Safe word. My bad. Obviously a lot of kinks to work out here. Ahhhhhh kinks! Get it?
Do you want to try coming up with your own safe word or maybe some role-playing scenarios? Just freestyling here, right off the top of my head without giving this any forethought whatsoever, but other scenarios could include: A male boss who’s coincidentally called Jim just like my first boss and is a sexually harassing pig and I’ll play his assistant just like I was Jim’s assistant in real life. And this assistant is earning so little money that I’m, I mean she’s, in no position to file a complaint with HR. Or you could play the Republican-led Congress and I’ll play all the women in this country and you just fuck me up the ass over and over again while shouting out the rights you’re taking away from us.
So dirty, so . . . fucked up.
Oh! Another one is I could be a new mom but since I work for a company with fewer than fifty employees I could get fired while I’m on maternity leave and will have no legal recourse whatsoever. You can play the male head of HR who calls me at home and explains it to me as if I’m a child. Mostly in this scenario I just cry.
The more I think about it, HR is a really rich territory to play around with in general.
Where are you going? We could also just get takeout. Let’s get takeout!
What do you have against Anne-Marie Slaughter?
Bodies
Who Does That?
I saw it out of the corner of my eye as we approached the newsstand next to our gate. The Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The cover where the model is pulling her bikini bottoms down so low, you can almost see London and France. The cover that made previous covers look like Amish Vogue.
When interviewed, the model said her cover was actually not so naughty and it just must be the Year of the Torso. Unless penises go in torsos and babies come out, someone needs a refresher on anatomy.
I had heard about the manufactured controversy and brushed it off before ever seeing the cover. Just another “scandal” in a lifetime of conversations and accusations focused on the female body. But, seeing that cover, my eight-year-old daughter stopped in her tracks, put her hands on her hips, and pointed. She looked up at me, as a combination of incredulity and genuine curiosity flickered across her face, and asked, “Who does that?”
When I told my husband about it, we both laughed. That knowing, superior laugh that parents so often have. That laugh of “We know everything; she/he/they know(s) nothing.” That “Oh, so cute, she’ll learn one day how things really are.” We acted as if she was the one who was in the wrong, that one day she would understand that this was just how the world worked.
And the way the world works is like this: if you have a female body you will be existing in a body that invites catcalls, “invites” rape, “invites” assault, invites looks, invites admiration, invites ownership by others, invites jealousy, actively shuns attention, is too covered up, too prudish, too fat, too flabby, too thin (which, admittedly, must be a range that only a dog can hear), too wide-hipped, too small-breasted, too veiny in the legs area, too hairy in all the areas, too dark, too athletic, too masculine, too strong, too old, too invisible, too pregnant, too ewwww postpartum, too breastfeed-y, too momish, too functional.
Too human.
When my daughter was two or three, I soaked up the utter delight and pride she felt in her body. Fuck cord blood; this is what we should be banking. I wanted to save it for her for later. I wanted to save it for both of us.
Her body worked like it should, and that’s all a body needed to do. Her belly stuck out because that’s what bellies do. Her arms and legs swung back and forth, pumping the swing, reaching for things she needed to reach, running to wherever she needed to run. Because that’s what legs and arms and bodies do.
A body was a vehicle, a means to an end. It was a tool, for getting things and going places. It was something she looked out from and thought, “Where can this take me today? Could it ride a bike with training wheels? Could it jump from the edge of the pool and take me under the water? Could it wiggle and giggle, trying to squirm away from Dad when he tries to tickle me? Could it hop and jump and sleep and eat and move me through this world?”
There is a sadness, a feeling of dread really, that most mothers feel in knowing that this self-assurance and trust our young daughters feel in their bodies is ultimately fleeting. That soon enough they will start to look at their bodies as others do, as something to judge. As something to punish. As something that is no longer theirs. As something separate from themselves. And as something that belongs to the world in a way their brothers’ bodies never will.
* * *
I am seven. I want to be a fashion designer. I drape myself in my grandmother’s blankets and fabrics. My friends and I pin a sheet onto her clothesline, using it as a stage curtain, and we put on fashion shows in her backyard. Bodies are beautiful and fun. They’re where clothes go.
Bodies take you to the beach down the street and take you into the salt water, wearing beat-up sneakers so the crabs don’t pinch your callused feet. Those tough feet have spent all summer naked, hot stepping it down sizzling asphalt and baking sand, scrambling over rocks and broken shells. Bodies that wade into the water and feel seaweed brush past, like a school of green ribbonfish. Bodies that absorb sun and are dead tired by the end of the day. Bodies in motion, bodies at rest.
* * *
I am ten. I scramble up the hill in my backyard, digging for arrowheads with my bare hands. I sit on a moss-covered rock that I call the Whale, its big flat head and horizontal crack of a mouth carrying me through an ocean of pine needles and foxes, blue jays and dark woods. I flip rotten logs over to find salamanders and pick pebble-size wild blueberries from scrubby bushes. I swing on our rope swing in the front yard, my feet flying over the tops of trees, my hair brushing the ground I’m leaning so far back. I lie on our hammock, sun flickering on my face as I pass underneath the leaves. One of our cats snoozes on my flat, smooth tummy.
I am a child in this world. My bo
dy is an antenna, tuning everything in.
* * *
I am fourteen. I’m very thin, so thin I can still wear clothes from the kids’ section.
I have a flat bum and flat chest and haven’t gotten my period yet. I’m a late bloomer—that much is obvious.
A boy in my class remarks, “Whatever there is of Kim Harrington you’d have to eat out.” Not only do I still not know what the fuck that’s supposed to mean, I feel fairly confident that he didn’t know what it meant either.
I just knew it was Not Good.
* * *
I am nineteen and home from college. I have gained at least thirty, if not forty, pounds. I have frosted and permed and bleached the absolute bejesus out of my hair in some sort of desperate attempt to distract from this.
I am driving to a soccer game in my hometown and as I drive by, a few boys turn their heads. They see my blond hair. I have potential. I get out of the car and slam the door behind me.
As I walk, I overhear one of the boys say to the other, “Told you she’d be fat.”
I pray I get cancer so I will be reduced to the weight of a skeleton. Cancer.
* * *
I am twenty. I am twenty-five. I am thirty. I can count on one hand the number of times I am happy with my body in those ten years. My weight has gone down, but it doesn’t matter, there is always something to not like.
My body is still an antenna, but now it’s tuning out. Distorted.
I am thirty-five. And thirty-seven. I had expected the worst from pregnancy. For it to blow apart and ruin my body in ways even my freshman year of college couldn’t accomplish. To gain one hundred pounds and never lose it.
Instead, both times that I’m pregnant, I’m in love with the way my body is taking shape. I have the pure thrill of walking into a room, belly first. Realizing for the first time in decades that I’m not trying to suck my stomach in. Because not only would it be impossible, I wouldn’t want to if I could. My belly is hard and round and a laser beam focus for smiles. This is what it must feel like to actually like your body. To always have liked your body.
I have regained a childlike sense of at-home-ness in my body. With a miscarriage before my first child and a miscarriage between my first and second, these pregnancies are holding on. I am rooting for my body. You can do it, body!
These pregnancies will result in whole, healthy children. My body did that.
My skin is clear and creamy, my hair the thickest it’s ever been. My breasts are as full and firm as they will ever be, for the rest of my life. My belly—my enormous belly—makes the rest of me look small.
I am still breastfeeding my second child, my daughter. She was a big baby when she was born—eleven pounds, nine ounces—and ravenous. I gained sixty pounds during my pregnancy, my waist measuring forty-seven inches a week before she was born. Two weeks later, my waist measures thirty-three inches.
I had bought a pile of Levi’s in ever-increasing sizes to wear during my pregnancy; I now make quick work of them on the way back down. My arms are defined from carrying this chunk of a baby as well as hauling around her brother, now two years old and only recently starting to walk. My body is getting taken to the cleaners, no doubt, but it’s strong and has purpose. It’s no longer about me.
It’s a relief for it to no longer be about me.
For the first time since I was prepubescent I need to wear a belt to keep my smallest jeans from falling off my body. I decide this is how models must feel all the time.
It’s glorious.
I am forty-seven. My body is changing. It feels like my life was one long chug up a roller coaster to having children. To avoiding pregnancy like the plague, then pursuing it with not-so-quiet desperation. To navigating those pregnancies and post-pregnancies like a cork in a storm. To recovering from it all. For years.
Soon, in the next few years, in the next decade anyway, my period will stop. I have a hard time accepting this. It feels like the end of possibility.
My body is an antenna, and it’s trying to tune in to those faraway stations. The ones that only sound like fuzz. The ones that will tell me what is coming, what to expect. I don’t yet understand the language.
I decided to finally answer my daughter’s question. Although I couldn’t answer it to her satisfaction nor mine. Sure, the model “did” that. But so did the photographer. And the crew. And the retoucher. And the magazine. The subscribers and the buyers. The advertisers and the newsstands. The culture. The men. The world.
“Who does that,” I said, “is a really good question. It’s more than just the woman you see on the cover.”
She just gave me a weird look.
When she was nine, she pointed out the girls in bikinis on the beach. She said, “I don’t understand why girls’ bottoms stick out of their bathing suits but boys’ butts don’t. That’s not fair.”
I thought, That’s just how the world works. Again. But instead I caught myself and said, “You’re right. It isn’t fair.”
She is not a child who is modest. She spends almost all her time in our house in nothing but underpants, even in the winter. But she understands public versus private. And in public, she wants her body covered. It’s her body, hers. And she wants to determine who will see the curve of her bottom where it meets her legs. She decides.
She asked if I would get her board shorts next summer.
I said what I should’ve said all along, what I need to keep saying, to her, to myself, with pride, “Of course. It’s your body.”
If You Can Touch It
“He’s pretty enough to be a girl.”
That’s what a nurse said when you were one day old. And unlike my don’t-call-my-daughter-beautiful-call-her-smart and don’t-call-my-son-smart-call-him-kind Vermont neighbors, I took this compliment to heart. I knew what she meant. I was on her side.
In the almond-shaped eye of the storm, I held you. You with your bent ear from being stuffed up against my rib cage, facing the wrong direction, but closer to my soft, wild heart. A position you continue to hold as you grow older, ear now unfolded, and yet sometimes you’re still facing the wrong way, according to other people anyway. But you are always, always closer to the core of me.
Your foot also bent, we thought a consequence of your odd position too, only to discover later—through my newfound motherly suspicion and not the young pediatrician who kept telling us it would work itself out—this is not going away. Something is wrong. I knew this.
If only I always had that insight, that confidence, to throw off the world around us.
If only I could always know there’s a fix for whatever might hobble you.
If only.
I held you in the hospital over those first few days, the days when you didn’t know how to nurse and I didn’t know how to nurse you and I had a postpartum exhaustion breakdown. “How could I be failing already?” and then, realizing it was Father’s Day, I looked up through my tear-stained face and said, “Happy first Father’s Day” to your dad in the most “What a fucking shit show this is already, huh?” tone of voice I could muster.
Even during those days, as I watched you sleep, your chest and belly alternating with deep, puffy baby breaths like a seesaw built on clouds, I thought, How could anyone ever get mad at their kid?
It didn’t take long before I could answer, “Quite easily actually.”
We are alike, you and I. Sometimes it’s like fighting with a mirror. We blow up and swirl away from each other, sometimes screeching and other times a sweeping cold front of silent anger and frustration. When you are seething with anger and don’t want anyone to even think of touching you, boy do I know how you feel.
But you are still the age when you want me to sit with you at night, before you fall asleep, to talk about everything except what we were fighting about. You still want me near, though I feel you pulling your own way. And I want to be near, to you, always.
I tell you, “There is nothing you can do that would make me not love you. I don�
��t care how angry we get at each other. I will always love you. You know that, don’t you?”
I say it, often, because when you’re angry you accuse me of not loving you—worse, of not even caring about you at all—of loving your sister more, your perfect sister. I know how deep that hurt must go for you to spit those words at me when you’re at your most open.
I’m not sure there is a worse accusation, to not even care, when I have turned myself inside out for you. Have I done enough? No mother in history ever has.
But an accusation like this at age eleven is very different than a stomping accusation at age four. At four there is time. At four, it’s cute. Now I feel the whoosh of time, of time wanting to take you away from me. And will you be ready? Will I be ready? Have I done right by you?
I now understand the phrase leaps and bounds. It started two years ago, you wanting to jump and tap every doorjamb with your fingertips. Everything just above your head, and just out of reach. Run, jump, stretch, tap! Or miss. So close.
You are measuring yourself against the world. You know you take up more space, but you still feel small. You stretch out in your bed and say, “Look how long I am!” and I say, “It’s easy to see that in this bed, you’ve had this bed since you were maybe three or four!” It’s a measuring stick you sleep on, how your feet have grown closer to the footboard and now you can easily touch both the headboard and footboard at the same time, without even trying.
And then you say, “But when I’m at school, I don’t feel as long.”
“As tall, you mean.”
“As tall.”
I tell you that’s because you’re in a bigger world there. There are grown-ups to compare yourself to and that’s not a fair comparison. But in your class? You’re one of the tallest.
Amateur Hour Page 15
