(Pt.3 of 3) On Missing Genealogies, Or How I Learned I Was Ugly

Part 3: The Mirror


(Please read Part 1 and Part 2 first.)


Like, I suspect, most people with internet access, I learned to interpret real bodies with reference to fake bodies.

The real body I have came from my mom's and my dad's real bodies, and the bodies of their forbears. My general body type is mostly from my mom, I think, although my funny gait is definitely my dad's, and I got my red hair from my dad's side.

Those traits came to me thanks to genes, which are of course tiny little bits of bodies. And as you can tell from the fact that whatever great-aunt I got my red hair from is no longer living, the bodies that gave me the body I have are also bodies that die. Get sick, age, and die.

However: before I ever had any concept of any of that... before I understood that you get your body type from your parents... before I can even remember having a conscious thought about bodies... I had already learned that human bodies were fake bodies.

By which I mean, bodies in entertainment and advertising. Smooth, well-lit bodies with no rough places or saggy bits. Bodies that have been photoshopped, sculpted, rearranged and augmented. Bodies frozen in time. Bodies with no context: those fetching green eyes on the model in the perfume ad do not make you think, "Oh, you can tell she's Daisy's daughter," or "Oh, she always gets that look when she's impatient." They aren't meant to make you think anything but, "I feel inadequate yet vaguely titillated. I think I'll buy some perfume so I can be titillated AND adequate."

Those kind of bodies.

I can't remember a time when I didn't simply think that's what a normal female body was. A human female's body was smooth, lanky, unblemished, unwrinkled, intriguing, lovely. And, it moved product. You were a better person, I thought (still think?), the more your body approximated those fake bodies.

I'm an only child, so the only frankly real female body I saw, as a kid, was my mom's. My mom's body was not perfectly smooth, lanky, or taut. And because I had learned that a human female body was what print ads and television said it was, my mom's body looked monstrous to me. It looked monstrous to her, too, and she feared for me lest I be similarly afflicted. I picked up on that pretty early, her internalized hatred of her own body.

As I've said, I mostly got my body from my mom. But even more - and to connect this to the theme of female genealogies - I also got my visceral hatred of that body from her. That's not to say that it's her fault. Hell's bells, I am so SICK of mothers getting blamed for everything; almost as sick as I am of the beneficiaries of sexism wringing their hands and moaning, "Why do these silly women DO this to each other?"

I just mean that I learned how to be a woman from my mom; specifically I learned how to be a woman with a particular kind of body -- the one that she and I share. And a big part of that education involved getting very, very, very good at thinking of myself as a certain collection of physically-realized shortcomings.

(In fact, let's take it from (ha!) the top: Hair too thick and given to frizz, shamefully unable ever to be long and flowing. Face that is sallow and prone to breakouts. Circles under my eyes; even in high school a teacher would tell me I looked like someone had burned two holes in a sheet. Jaw too square. Smile vaguely reminiscent of the Joker in the 1989 Batman. Unfeminine shoulders. Squishy armpits that hang out of sleeveless shirts like two drunk frat boys yelling obscenities out the two back windows of a car. Saggy boobs. Ridiculously high waist. Long slack torso. Man hands. A belly that, after two kids, looks and feels mangled. Saddlebag thighs. Proportionally short legs. Rough knees. Big bulky calves. Boat feet that turn out funny, giving me a duck walk that I correct for even though doing so gives me hip pain. Ugly toes. And everything just too big. And that's... me. Hi. Pleased to meet you. No, really, I promise I have some beautiful qualities on the insi... oh, you're gone. Okay.)

Looking back, I wonder why my mom gave me some of the lessons she did. Like telling me about how she was the alternate on the cheerleading squad because although the coach said she was one of the most talented people to audition, she was a little chunky. Or the time that they got weighed in gym class, and her teacher was so astounded that she weighed ONE HUNDRED AND ELEVEN pounds that she blurted it out, gobsmacked, to the class. Or the rule that her mother had told her: a woman should weigh 100 pounds at five feet tall and five additional pounds for every inch above that.

I think all of these were said, at least in part, as cautionary tales for me lest I turn out as bad as she thought she was... but I wonder if, too, she was trying to clue me in about the kind of cruelty I could expect from the world?

Of course, like my mother, I have my collection of plain-girl autobiographical vignettes: dieting in the primary grades, enduring private-school-mean-girl torment in middle school, entering high school and then college and not believing that any boy could like me who wasn't a loser and so letting myself be treated unkindly by boys who most certainly were losers; discovering I was an incredibly talented actress but also discovering that it didn't matter because I wasn't pretty enough to make use of my talent... blah blah blah, if you've ever been the ugly weird kid you know exactly what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then you won't understand anyway although you will probably imagine that you do.)

I won't rehash those memories, but there are a few observations I'd like to make, in no particular order:

1) Part of my lessons in ugliness included instruction in how I was a class traitor. It was never stated that clearly, obviously. But my parents had come into a lot of money in their lifetimes, and I was a smart kid attending a super-fancy school in a super-fancy neighborhood. SO WHY (I somehow learned to scream at myself) DIDN'T I HAVE A NICE LANKY WASPY BODY THAT LOOKED GOOD IN UPPER-CLASS DESIGNER CLOTHES? Why did my body have to be the dead giveaway, the proof that my family was secretly vulgar, not beautiful or refined?

2) Learning to hate my body was the first kind of self-hatred I got really good at. And it made other kinds of self-hatred come much more naturally. For instance, I have a clear memory of being in third grade and really, really overreacting to another classmate doing something obnoxious to a box turtle I had found and brought in to show the class. I remember thinking, "Other kids don't react to things as intensely as I do. Other kids don't think so hard about things as I do. What's wrong with me? Why can't I be normal?" That's the first (of countless) times that I remember wishing away my intensity. And yet, by third grade I was already putting myself on diets without a thought. I was already looking in the mirror and spending ten minutes hating everything I saw.

3) I never felt as though I looked like myself. I felt, in other words, like my body and my personality didn't match up. Suppose you were casting a role in a play. Suppose the character was female, intense, intelligent, emotional, startlingly honest, and unceasingly creative. You would NOT cast someone who looked like me. You would cast someone -- and how well I have this image in my mind, having thought for years that it was who I really should have been and that my real body was some kind of horrible mistake! -- who had long flowing dark hair, clear pale skin, burning green eyes, and a willowy lanky body. (And I flag again, here, the fact that prettiness - as defined by the dominant culture - is terribly intertwined with racism; with whiteness serving to put prettiness more "within reach," even if it isn't sufficient to bring it about.) I could not play myself in a play, because nobody would believe I was that person. Functionally, as far as I could see, this meant that I was not, in fact, that person.

----------

So what now?

For the first time in my life I'm dealing with this by plowing straight through it, for the whole Big Dark Barn of the internet to see.

I'm realizing that I will not, in this lifetime, ever achieve Pretty. That is one ideal I simply will never meet. I almost came close once, but that's in the past, on the other side of motherhood, and I'm only going to get further and further from Pretty.

I have not quite come to terms with my experience of pregnancy and birth as profoundly disfiguring. It scares me to see my own body following the pattern of my mom's body. She, too, was at her Prettiest before she had a child; she, too, found having a child disfiguring and has spent decades hating herself for getting uglier.

I am so thankful that I'm not raising daughters.

I wish I could be Pretty. I desperately wish I could be Pretty. I wish I could have a fake body that would better match the real me.

I'm angry at the cultural forces which taught me that "the real me" doesn't include my far-from-perfect real body. I'm angry at the cultural forces which ensure that self-hatred is part of my legacy from my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers. No name, no marker of our connection; but instead a certain body type, and a way of hating it that has been honed for generations.

I wonder whether, if I were Pretty, other people would see someone intriguing, fetching, worth loving.

I'm frankly terrified that nobody will ever again look at me with a face full of love, interest, delight, acceptance, and recognition. I imagine decades stretching out ahead of me, and never being looked at that way again.

(Pt. 2 of 3) On Missing Genealogies, Or How I Learned I Was Ugly

Part Two: My Belly Button

(Please read part one first.)

Last week I found myself looking at before and after pictures of tummy tucks, wondering whether I might want to get one.

This, despite the fact that in the past year I’ve discovered, and embraced, the fat acceptance movement. The central concepts of fat acceptance have shed light on so many lies I’d uncritically accepted, among them: that fat necessarily equals unhealthy and thin necessarily equals healthy; that most fat people can become thin if they just try; that fatness and thinness tell you something meaningful about that person’s diet and behavior; that fatness is intrinsically aesthetically inferior to thinness; that fatness is intrinsically morally inferior to thinness; that fat people eat very differently than thin people; that fat people are far less active than thin people; that it’s innocent to impress upon women that their beauty consists in their being small; etc. etc. etc.

It now makes intellectual sense to me – in the light of evidence – that all of those things are false. And yet, it’s very threatening to actually live as though I believe it. Because, before, there was always the hope that someday I’d actually look pretty, as “prettiness” is commonly defined. Oh, sure, that hope came with one hell of a stinger: namely, I believed that the things keeping me from looking nice were reprehensible character traits on my part. Clearly, since I wasn’t thin, I was a BAD BAD BAD eater of BAD BAD BAD foods and had BAD BAD BAD character and a YUCKY BODY EW EW EWWWW.

In theory, though, I could change that, right? I just had to stop being such a loathsome person with no impulse control. Whereas now I’m realizing: crap, this is just how I actually look. I’m simply not a slender person. I’m fairly active, I eat a wide variety of foods I like in reasonable amounts, and this is how I look. Not thin. And even if I were thin, I still wouldn’t be pretty. I mean, I could lose 30 pounds, but my body structure would still be kind of dense and lumpy; I’d still have thick and stumpy legs, uncooperative hair, a square jaw, and breakout-prone skin. (And, oh, the post-two-kids belly. There are no words for my feelings about that.)

Not only that, but I’ve recently realized: I’ve probably already been the conventionally-prettiest I’ll ever be (it was in summer 2001, if you’re interested) and I will never again come that close to the ideal. For instance, I'm beginning to notice the early signs of middle age: already my weight is settling at a higher number than it did before kids, and increased activity no longer brings about weight loss. (Good thing I exercise because I like to, in other words, because the scale sure isn't providing any motivation.)

So I've been struggling deeply with this in the last few months. Oddly, though, I think my recent sense of urgency surrounding this struggle represents a step toward – rather than away from – self-acceptance. Frankly, for much of my life, the issue of prettiness has been so painful that I simply refused to think about it. I Just. Would. Not. Go. There. Over the last few months, by contrast, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, going into the shameful and secret places where before I would not go. And indeed, it’s painful as hell; when the pain gets to be too much, I find myself in the midst of an intense inner backlash. “NO!” a crazy mean-girl voice inside me screams. “No, it’s not TRUE! Prettiness IS within reach. Okay, so it can’t be combined with a healthy and happy life in your case, but it’s still possible. You could eat only 300 calories a day. You could get surgery.”

Hence, the before-and-after pictures of tummy tucks.

Aside from the cost, it seemed just possible that I'd be able to justify getting a tummy tuck. After all, I reasoned, it’s not just cosmetic. They actually go in and stitch together the muscles that become separated – permanently, for some genetically-unlucky women (raises hand) – after pregnancy. With a tummy tuck, I would regain the muscle strength I’d lost in my abdomen; why, then I could jog without wearing some form of back support. It’s a quality of life issue, right?

But then I read this: “Your surgeon will cut a new opening for your umbilicus (belly button).”

And I started to cry. I mean, I just started sobbing.

My belly button is where I was connected to...

(dang it, I'm sobbing now)

...connected to my mom. Absent any name to signify my connection to her (and her mother, and her mother, and her mother), what I’ve got is a belly button.

A belly button I was considering letting a surgeon re-do, because I didn’t like how my belly looked after I’d become a mother. And because I didn’t like the body I’d gotten from my mother.

This is fast becoming too difficult to write, and too long. Part 3 will come later tonight or tomorrow.

(Pt. 1 of 3) On Missing Genealogies, Or How I Learned I Was Ugly

Part One: My Name

Genealogies and lineages are among the casualties of sexism. (And, even more devastatingly, racism: just consider how African families were chewed up and spit out by the American white slave-owning economy. But that deserves its own treatment, and right now there’s something I need to write/think through, for myself, about sexism and female genealogies in my family.)

Most anyone with half a clue about feminism knows about missing female lineages. Thanks to ideas about male authority in the family, they have disappeared, been made invisible. There is no last name connecting me to my maternal grandmother Dorothy, for example; no signifier that I carry on something of her in the world. The last name she was born with, was baptized with, was not part of what she gave to any of her three children – neither the one whom she adopted, nor the two whom she bore. Her husband’s last name was what got passed on to them, marked them as belonging to a family – his family.

That last name became my mother’s last name at birth; and with that name she was baptized. It did not become part of her legacy to me. Although it did not vanish when she was married, it got relegated to a middle name, a polite “C.” that appears atop her resume and in her publications.

The last name I was born and baptized with – my father’s family name; or rather, the name of my father’s father’s father’s father’s etc. – is somewhat ironically the only name I've ever shared with my mother. It's one I have tried to cling to, but in an awkward and ham-fisted fashion. Actually, when I was first married, I took my husband’s last name; I thought it the unselfish Christian thing to do. I insisted that the issuance of my new married name be part of our wedding ceremony. If marriage was going to supplant baptism in such a concrete way, then by golly I wanted the supplanting to happen in church! I also made it clear to all and sundry that I at NO point wanted to be referred to as “Mr. and Mrs. Husband’s Full Name.” Our marriage was an hour and a half old before this wish was violated for the first time, and in a very public way.

In the weeks and months that followed our wedding, it became clear to me that the world had suddenly decided to treat me as (in Carol Tavris’ words) Assistant Person to my spouse’s full and unquestioned Person. Meanwhile, I found out in short order that I was pregnant with our first child, despite our intention and effort not to conceive for at least a year. I felt like I’d been taken over by hostile and alien forces. Where had I gone – me, the person I’d been for as long as I’d had any self-awareness, and believed myself still to be? Who was this wife/mother person that everyone seemed to be talking to instead of talking to me?

And so I began to reconsider the willingness with which I had given up the name that had been mine since birth.

I tried two last names. I tried hyphenating. I retracted the hyphen. My husband took my last name, so that we each had two last names. I tried to go socially by my birth/baptismal name, but at that point the horse was out of the barn.

At this point, what seems to have happened is that most people use both last names in writing, and studiously avoid using my last name in person. It still feels unsettled, unwieldy, and ill-fitting.

What I was wrong about

Dear Spouse and Interested Onlookers,

In reference to yesterday's post (which we had a good and not-very-heated conversation about) here is what I was doing wrong that contributed to the problem. (This is not an exhaustive description; I'm sure there are many other things, but this is what I've got traction on at the moment.)

From what I understand, I sometimes get SO! EXCITED! AND! ANIMATED! about my take on a particular situation -- especially involving church -- that I drown you out, without meaning to. Or maybe I just overwhelm rather than drown out -- because I really am listening intently. I don't know quite how to put it. It's sort of like my dial goes all the way up to eleven, whereas yours has a smaller range from 1 to 2. If your dial goes from 1 to 2, the difference between 1.01 and 1.03 has some importance, far more than on my dial that goes from 1 to 11, kwim? So I miss things. I try hard, but I miss them.

I do get frustrated sometimes because it seems like I have to spend an enormous amount of energy to tease things out of you and take note of these tiny incremental differences in tone and interest, and then on top of that it seems I now have to tone down my reactions so they don't completely overshadow yours. That's a lot of work. It's work that you - by virtue of the very fact that your dial only goes from 1 to 2 - don't do. I kind of feel like, maybe you could put some effort into having bigger facial expressions and working in some vocal inflection to let me know when something's REALLY IMPORTANT versus Pretty Significant versus important versus mildly interesting versus zzzz....boring.

But then I remember several things. First, it's not like this is a new trait in you that only appeared when we got married. I found it attractive, initially, precisely because I *do* overwhelm people sometimes with the sheer vastness and intensity of my reactions to things; and I thought your comparatively smaller range would balance mine. Balance? Or maybe, protect me against rejection, because if you don't even have receptors for all that I feel and experience, you won't reject me on that basis? Anyway, now I blame you for those very traits, and that's stinky. So I'm sorry. I didn't know how wearing I would find it to have to do so much detective work to figure out what you think/feel/wish/fear/love so that we can be close. But still, I'm sorry.

Also, there's the oft-trotted-out fact that boys in general aren't allowed to express emotions. And you in particular are from a religious subculture where Emotion = Immature Lack of Control = opening for SIN SIN SIN!!!! = possibility that you might become one of the Unsatisfactory People whom the Satisfactory People love with humiliatingly virtuous grace. You've come to question that cultural message, to a degree I really admire (when I can step back and gain perspective) and you deserve credit for that, I think.

(For my part, I can't say I was exactly ever encouraged in my intensity -- indeed, it's been implicated in my profoundest spells of loneliness -- but I wasn't discouraged from it in the same way you were, growing up. It was more that it was slightly embarrassing. The message I got was not "If you feel things intensely you might get dangerously out-of-control, and your gender especially is supposed to be IN CONTROL!" Rather, it was more like, "Look, it's all well and good to be an extremely smart kid, but the smartness is supposed to have a point: to make you do well in school, pave the way for future successes, make you a leader that gets things done and that other people want to be around. To just be intensely interested in THE DEEPER MEANINGS OF EVERYTHING, to a degree that you end up NOT doing well on school work and NOT impressing people, is missing the whole point of being smart. Just tone it down, will ya?")

And thirdly: I do, as I said, get worn out from doing all the work of taking everyone's emotional temperature in the family. But, you do A LOT of work for our household too. Not just "a lot of work for a man," but "a lot of work, period." And I know you get worn out too. We're both worn out a lot. I'm not sure what to do about this but wait.

Anyway, the point is: I see now that sometimes - not always, I think, but sometimes - the reason I don't hear you saying P, Q, and W is that my espousal of A, B, and C is SO VERY LOUD! AND ENTHUSIASTIC! When you later tell a third party that you think differently than I do, you're really just telling them what you'd tried to tell me, except I didn't hear. Which makes yesterday's script not so accurate, in those situations. So although I don't think this invalidates everything I said yesterday about sexism, I'm sorry for being unfair. Please forgive me.

Attention Spouse! (My attempt to live Matthew 18)

Dear spouse,

Please consider the following script:

-----Scene One-----

ME: So if I hear you right, you think A. And I think B and C, right? These aren't contradictory, so together we think that A, B, and C, yes? We agree? A, B, and C?

YOU: Yep, A, B, and C.

ME: So if I communicate to Person X that you and I together think A, B, and C, I'm representing us both accurately?

YOU: Uh-huh.

ME: Great! (goes off to tell Person X and that together we think A, B and C.)


----Scene Two----


YOU: My wife thinks that A, B, and C. I, on the other hand, think that Q, P and W are better options, and/or what we should be focusing our attention on, and/or a more workable solution than what my wife mentioned.

PERSON X: Really? Fascinating.

YOU: Thank you.

----Scene Three----

ME: WHAT THE HELL? I went to a lot of trouble to PRY your friggin' opinions out of you so that I could pass along what we BOTH thought. You said A, B, and C; not Q, P and W.

YOU: I did say Q, P and W. Once, very softly. Or else I thought of Q, P, and W after our conversation. And anyway, why are you angry when Q, P and W are so obviously better than A, B, and C?

ME: (gets stabby-eyed because that is so far from the point.

*********

I'd like to suggest to you that the frequency with which, if I'm correct, this script gets followed in our marriage is a manifestation of your sexism. Even if Q, P, and Z are genuinely better. Even if on some occasions you DO genuinely think of Q, P, and Z after I do the conversational work to pry out of you what you think.

You know how, when white people get called on their racism and they say, "Oh, but in that instance there was this particular extenuating factor that explains it all. And in that other instance there was this other extenuating factor. And in that other instance there was that other extenuating factor. And my, that's a lot of situations that seem to need an explanation, BUT IT'S OKAY because there is ALWAYS an extenuating factor." it doesn't wash?

Yeah.

Look, you're planting turds in my pocket, and I don't like it. And you seem to do it mostly with Christian communities -- churches and small groups. What's the deal? I am seriously considering the possibility that I can't be part of the same Christian communities as you, because you have a pattern of undermining what I say and making me look like the inept fool in our family.

I think of the Mennonite church we used to attend; I thought we had said we would approach the pastors about the sexism that we'd seen at the church, but then in conversation with them it ended up that I was complaining about the sexism (and getting patted on the head over my obviously hurt feelings) while you were bringing up your objections to the liturgy. (Which were indeed valid; again, though - not my point.)

I think of my attempts to talk frankly with our current pastor, about things I believe I had every reason to believe we were agreed on (because, as usual, I'd done the conversational work of getting out of you what you think and feel.) And then you went and talked to her later, and undermined everything I'd said.

And now with this small group that's forming. You've done it again. Now I don't feel like this is a group I can join.

Since we've been married I've noticed - and communicated to you - that my status in Christian groups seems to have plummeted. I chalked this up to the fact that Christians are generally pretty sexist and while they might be able to see a young single woman as a thinking agent they have a lot harder time with affording that respect to a mother of young kids. I also reasoned that our marriage coincided with a move to a conservative state, so that was part of the equation as well.

I now find myself wondering how much of it is just you.

Am I one hundred percent correct in all of these situations? No. I might be lots wronger than you are. I get angry in ways that give me no moral high ground. I don't always pick up on your (frankly, very subtle) cues early on that what you really want to talk about Q, P, and W rather than A, B, and C. When I get angry later I might not remember every tiny little fact correctly or get my timeframe precisely right. I might fume at you in ways that are unhelpful and prompt you to get defensive. I might have a chip on my shoulder. Sometimes I might see this pattern in operation when it's not, really. Those things are mistakes of mine; I don't pretend they're not.

Again, though, please note the presence of the pattern in the first place.

Stop it, please. I've asked you already one-on-one, and it continues. You claim to want accountability. We're not in a church community that knows how to practice mutual accountability, so I am posting this on my blog that at least one person you know reads.

I'm also disabling comments. If you know my spouse, and you want to talk to him about it, feel free to do so. I don't think anyone else need criticize him, though.