My body would like a word

1.

I wasn’t a perfect wife. Just so we’re clear.

I came with plenty of baggage, all neatly arranged at my feet. And a lot of what I came with, he had no experience with. I was upfront about all of it from the very beginning: the mental illness, an arsenal of meds. A psych ward stay, after a half-hearted attempt at unaliving myself in a freezing November river. Broke-ass years, government cheese and checks. Crumbling little house in New England. A tendency to write pretty boldly with a heart cracked wide open about the things that hurt. Plus: curves.

I’d sent him a couple pictures of me when we first started dating long-distance. Nothing too risqué. In one, I was reclining, looking fairly cute in a crop top, if I do say so myself.

Later, he told me that he’d thought it was brave of me, to send a photo that revealed my belly wasn’t flat.

I’d also sent a photo of myself sitting on my bathroom floor, wearing a towel on my body and a towel on my head, holding up a box of lice treatment, which I thought had been the more bold choice as far as selfies went.

I remember wondering if he’d really never dated anyone with a soft midsection, if everyone he’d dated had been spiky and angular, or plated like armadillos.

2.

My relationship with my body hasn’t been too rocky. Not that I haven’t wished parts of it were different at times (nose, less; boobs, less; hair, more). Generally speaking, though, my body and I have been on historically good terms. It’s a forgiving relationship, where there’s room for both mind and body to get out of whack occasionally. No harm, no foul. Whichever one’s fallen off the wagon gets hauled back into it by the other, and we go about our way.

I know it’s not like this for many women. It’s awfully easy to hate how you look. I have often attributed my relatively okay take on my body to my having a mama who never spoke unkindly about her body or mine—despite the low-fat Thighmaster culture of the 80s. She got sucked into diet culture at times, but to me it never seemed like an all-encompassing life goal. My grandmothers were good that way too. Growing up, no one ever made me feel like anything was particularly wrong or right with my body. It was just the package all the good stuff came in.

I never had any complaints about the package from any gentleman callers, though. Most of the time, when it mattered, I seemed to be just the right amount of appealing, so I didn’t worry about it much.

3.

But menopause sure threw a wrench.

I’ve been struggling with my appearance the past few years, trying to make peace with the sag, the droop, the crinkly bits of early cronehood. Everybody wants to be the one who ages gracefully, though nobody can quite agree on what that looks like and how to do that.

I’d told him about it a couple times. That it’s hard to find yourself becoming invisible as a woman, even if you’d never been a stunner. I’d told him men had it easy, all the talk about silver foxes and sexy bald men. Female foxes are vixens, a word exclusively reserved for a new bombshell has entered the villa 20-something babes. Menopausal women have no cool animal nickname to reassure us. Cougar is no compliment. It fails the Bechdel test: only referring to a woman in relationship to a man.

I told him I felt vulnerable, that I was holding my breath to see what I was becoming. I told him I felt vulnerable telling him I felt vulnerable in my skin.

He told me I should exercise more. I didn’t take it well. He didn’t take my not taking it well very well. It got added to his mental tally sheet, I found out later. A man should be able to tell his wife that and not get a reaction like that.

It wasn’t something he could understand, because his body was where he was safest.

4.

As I sit here in the bloody roadkill that was my life, I keep trying to stitch the chunks of mangled flesh and memory back together, into something I can understand. I’ve been trying to remember what he liked about me. I’m realizing there’s not a lot of solid evidence that he liked very much.

He did like my posterior iliac crest (the back of my pelvis) and the dimples there.

You’d be a great candidate for a bone marrow biopsy. Easy.

I remember feeling quite proud of that. It was something tangible that he perceived as good and helpful about my body. Good luck trying to find another girl with posterior iliac crest indentations as hot as mine.

I think all along I thought he thought I was lovely as I was, not in spite of what I was. But now I think I was wrong about that.

5.

When he went silent on me after Messi died, I thought I could stick it out. I thought he’d eventually take pity on me and right the ship. When that didn’t happen, I started thinking of all the other things that would never happen again.

One at a time, they announced themselves to me. They haven’t stopped. There’s new horrible impossible never again every day, sometimes every hour. Each thing that would never happen again, taking a slice of heart with it, like a peeling from a bar of soap.

I will never hold his hand again, I thought one day in February and died from it. He will never take my hand in a car again and do that little absentminded fiddly thing with my thumb joint that he never knew he was doing.

The total and complete loss of physical connection has fucking floored me. How can he not miss me, at least that way? How could he walk away from someone who loved him, loved to touch him, loved to go to sleep beside him?

This is my favorite time of day, he’d say sometimes in a satisfied voice, not even that long ago. I love going to bed with you.

Why say something like that if you are thinking of leaving?

I will never touch the small of his back again. I will never lie next to him in a bed again. I will never rub his neck after a shitty day again. I will never touch his scruffy beard again. I will never put my head on his shoulder again. I will never have sex again? I will never be touched again? I will maybe disappear altogether?

6.

I catch myself petting my own arm lightly, trying to remember the exact last moment he touched me. What did he see in me that was so easy to leave? I try to remember anything he said about my body, anything he liked besides my posterior iliac crest dimples. He liked that I was low on body hair, and the boobs, well, they’re a pretty spectacular three-ring circus if you’ve only dated armadillos.

He tended to notice the things I didn’t want him to notice, which I always chalked up to his life in the medical profession. The slight curve of my upper back—not a hump, but I felt like Quasimodo when he pointed it out. My slightly droopy eyelid. Ptosis, with a silent p. It applies to boobs too—anything that droops that shouldn’t, really.

I didn’t know it was a thing, and then I did. Now it’s all I can see when I look in the mirror, or at pictures of me.

It’s probably better I don’t know what else he saw. Because then that’s all I’d see, too.