I’ve been thinking about my body a lot lately.
I suppose that makes sense, as I have turned the corner past 50 and am screaming down the highway of Middle Age, where apparently my hormones have mounted a mutiny and thrown my metabolism out the window like my dad used to throw his apple cores out the window of the car while hurtling down back roads.
But I realized something: I have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about my physical body over my lifetime.
As a high school and college athlete, this wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, thinking about–and taking care of–my physicality was often the point. My body was my instrument, my tool, my performance vehicle. I practiced, worked out, strengthened, rested, recovered, and fueled it. I pushed my physical body because I wanted to perform well.
There was purpose behind the obsession.
Then I graduated college, used up my eligibility, and entered the chaos known as Real Life. Suddenly, there was no team with which to train or compete. There was no coach telling me what to do. There weren’t any teammates beside me, pushing me to run harder, lift heavier, or squeeze out one more rep when every cell in my body was screaming, “Absolutely not!”
I miss those days. I miss the accountability, the camaraderie, having a designated time and place to work on my physical self. I miss feeling like my body had a job, a goal, a destination.
As bodies tend to do, mine started changing as I moved through my 20s. In my mid-20s, I began noticing the normal shifts that come with leaving adolescence behind. My body was no longer the body I had as an athlete. My exercise routine changed. My priorities changed. My life changed.
I got married, and when I reached 30, my spouse and I decided to start a family. When that didn’t go the way we hoped or planned, my relationship with my body changed again. Suddenly, my body became a project to monitor.
This Body Project included taking my temperature every morning as soon as I awoke. Charting my menstrual cycle. Tracking my physical symptoms. I learned more about cervical mucus than any human being should reasonably be expected to know. There were tests, appointments, doctors. There were so many doctors. I have often joked that every physician within a 50-mile radius has seen me without pants. It’s sort of like having the mechanic looking under your hood every 5,000 miles, but only if you drive 5,000 every 2 weeks. Honestly, I should have been able to earn loyalty points. Or at least earned a 10th visit free. Monitoring my body was more a science experiment than a love story.
This Body Project changed directions in my mid-30s as I birthed one baby, had another round of fertility drugs–more doctors!–and then birthed a second baby just after I turned 40. While my 30s felt like a science experiment, my 40s were filled with nursing, changing diapers, chasing toddlers, and launching young children into elementary school. It was a decade of sleepless nights and the extraordinary physical demands of nurturing another human being.
And now?
Now, in my 50s, I’m in perimenopause, staring down the on-ramp of menopause where chaos reigns supreme because there are no driving instructions. There isn’t even an owner’s manual to help you know how to take care of your vehicle. Meanwhile, I have two daughters in puberty.
So yes, I’ve been thinking a lot about my physical body.
Puberty. Periods. Hormones. Acne. Body hair. Bras. Breast development. Weight. Food. Exercise. Sex. Birth control. Self-image. Bodies, bodies, bodies.
Along the way, as I navigated how I view and care for my body while also helping my daughters navigate their own similar journey, I started wondering: Who actually gets to have a say over my body? Who gets to make decisions about it? Who gets to be the expert on how I feel, what I’m experiencing, what I need, and what choices I should make? And perhaps most importantly, what happens when my body isn’t functioning “like it’s supposed to”?
Because women spend an extraordinary amount of time being told that our bodies are somehow both incredibly important and deeply inconvenient. Our bodies are celebrated when they are young, thin, fertile, beautiful, athletic, sexual, productive, and appropriately maternal. Yet, our bodies are not our own. Our bodies are owned and controlled by men, whether those men are family members, classmates, work colleagues, or politicians. Men need women’s bodies to create life, but we are also blamed for tempting men beyond their control and being punished for those times when men can’t control themselves. (For more on this, read anything by Kristin Kobes Du Mez or Jen Hatmaker.)
I’m tired of it.
I’m tired of constantly monitoring my own physicality while at the same time remaining hypervigilant about my daughters’ physicality. I’m trying hard not to shrink myself–to take up space where my voice is needed–while teaching my daughters to do the same.
And all the while, we are expected to be grateful for what our bodies can do while simultaneously apologizing for what our bodies can do.
I’m done apologizing.
My body has carried me through sports, marriage, infertility, IVF, pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood, sleepless nights, aging, and approximately seven billion hormonal plot twists and direction changes. It has done some pretty remarkable things.
And now it is changing again. That doesn’t mean it is broken. It doesn’t mean it has failed. It doesn’t mean I need to surrender ownership of it to every doctor, cultural expectation, advertisement, stranger, politician, or well-meaning person with an opinion. It also doesn’t mean that I’m constantly, continually in love with my body.
It does mean that I am learning to listen to it. Really listen.
I’m learning that my body isn’t a problem to solve, but is something to be cherished, nourished, and respected.
So, I’m going to stop apologizing for my body. I’m going to stop letting my body be a scientific experiment or a medical mystery to be solved. I’m going to stop allowing others to treat my body like it’s a problem because it’s a female body.
And I’m going to keep teaching my daughters how to do the same.
26 Responses
Love this, Kathy! Thank you for naming what so many of us feel and struggle to put into words. A beautiful embrace of our female experience and the whole, messy and at time humorous complexity of being an embodied human.
Thank you!
I’m with Kerin – this encapsulates the experience of a female in a body…especially at middle age. Thank you for putting the experience into words, as usual, with honesty and grace. You have a gift!
Thank you, Kate!
Wait! Your dad threw apple cores out the window? And further than anyone else I’d bet. Miss that guy! And love your writing, by the way. He’d be proud.
Thank you for remembering him! And thank you for saying that he’d be proud. I’m sure he would have A LOT to say! (;
You have touched a nerve that will reverberate today with many of us. Being in my 70’s with a mind that feels like I’m 50 and a body that constantly tells me I’m not, there is a sense of betrayal as one ages and comes to realize that not even a vast plethera of doctors can change the trajectory of aging. Also, the worm of self-loathing, born of societal visions of the ‘perfect woman’, as if there is such a thing, for not being thin or fit enough follows one. You have arrived at a far better way of intentionality in owning and loving our bodies in all their complexities. Thank you.
Jan:
Thank you! And the “sense of betrayal” is so true! That’s a real feeling.
Thank you Kathryn, for expressing this with such intelligence and vulnerability. Bold and honest. Grateful to you.
Thank you! Been there and done much of it. Having an adopted and a biological child has humbled and blessed me and my husband beyond measure. Let’s also accept genetics and “stir what we got” with the benefits and/or challenges.
It’s a bit far-fetched to blame men for all this. Women are often the greatest critics of how another woman should look and whether she should have a baby or stop having babies. And of your list of politicians, colleagues, etc, I doubt that in this day and age any man would even dare to comment on what a woman should look like or do.
The President of the United States does this constantly.
He doesn’t count. He’s clueless.
Hetty,
While, yes, often women are quick to critique other women (I have a middle school-aged daughter), men continue to not only comment on women’s bodies but also to police them and legislate them. Men continue to get away with sexual assault and rape. That is a fact that we cannot ignore.
I struggled a bit to understand what this piece was about. There were many noble sentiments, and good-sound things. Then I ran across this “policing and legislating” women’s bodies comment. To be clear, this language is generally used to refer to societal norms concerning the behavior, dress, and “reproductive rights” of women. In a first-world context (much less a Christian context), the first two don’t make a lot of sense since as a society we police those things little if at all, the church usually wouldn’t advocate for licentious dress and behavior from men or women, nor is there any particular societal drive to put women in burqas, and piece didn’t seem aimed overseas.
That leaves the last thing on the list–“reproductive rights” or, abortion. If “policing and legislating” women’s bodies doesn’t really mean the abortion issue and you don’t mean to advocate for it, my humblest apologies But, when we start echoing and adopting secular language, even if just in the comments, we really need to be cognizant of just what, exactly, it means, because what you just framed up was abortion-rights language. If that’s a debate we need to have and something you want to advocate for, then fine, let’s have it. But if not, let’s be more careful not to smuggle political advocacy language into our churches without understanding precisely what we’re doing. Perhaps, as many Reformed congregation continue a leftward theological drift, we’ll end up in the same spot as the political left. But, let’s at least do that with eyes wide open about where we’re heading and the language we’re using.
How ironic that you would respond to this article in such a patronizing tone. Perhaps you could learn from her words instead of policing them. Are you a woman who has been through the things that she is describing?
Women’s bodies are policed in so many ways. Women are denied tubal ligations in case a future husband wants children. They are made to wait years for hysterectomies that would provide relief from monthly (or constant) agony—just because they are still in childbearing years. Deaths from ectopic pregnancies have skyrocketed recently due to doctors being afraid to provide this type of health care since laws have tightened. Dress codes disproportionately affect women, ostensibly so men aren’t “tempted” by what they see.
Cal, it’s your turn to learn instead of to presume that you have something to teach the person who is talking about her own experiences. Your preachy tone is both very familiar and very, very tiresome.
I wasn’t minimizing any of the other great points in the article about the difficulties of aging, medical conditions, inappropriateness of boorish conduct, or training children not to cater to what society thinks they ought to be. Condensing that to “good sounding things” wasn’t the best choice of words. What I struggled to understand was a subtext that seemed to be there. There were a few politically charged phrases in the article, and then the author used one that is almost always used in the abortion context in the comments. Men “policing” and “legislating” and “owning” women’s bodies at least in this country almost always refers to abortion, or at least abortion is always in that mix. There are other examples that you mention, but I think those are pretty far down the list of what those words are usually taken to mean.
My point was simply that if there is an unstated abortion subtext, let’s start talking about it in the open instead of in hushed tones and with coded language. I know a lot of Reformed abortion rights supporters, but almost no one wants to say it in the open since it is contrary to most official church positions. But if that’s not what we want to talk about, then for goodness sake let’s stop using politically charged language that can be read that way, implies something that might not have been intended to be there, and risks detracting from other very valid and good points.
And I think if you want to say that women’s opinions about their bodies and the societal and political forces that impact them aren’t important and relevant to the discussion about women’s bodies, you should just state it plainly instead of pretending you actually want to listen, Cal.
This times 1,000. Thank you
I meant to amplify the author’s comments above Carl’s reply and unfolding responses. Oops.
Thank you for this great article Kathryn! I can relate to it and many of the responses. As I moved through the “body stages” you talk about, I remember berating myself many times because my body didn’t “fit” the expected “norms” that I believed were so important. Now, as a “senior” looking back, I realize that most (all?) of my angst and dissatisfaction with my body were displaced and absolutely untrue.
I’m so glad to hear of your dedication to teaching your daughters to love and honour their bodies.
So good and so important! Thank you!
Bravo! Bravely and honestly stated. Early in my career as a therapist who treated eating disorders I was introduced to the term “women of substance” to describe women with big ideas and a powerful presence. May we be them, and may we raise them. Kudos!
I love “women of substance”! Thank you!
Amen! Thank you! Unless you are a woman with a developed body, you don’t know the pressure and self awareness that one can experience. Always, always aware of how you appear to other women who are judgy and what you need to defuse from the messages that are assumed you are sending. Thank you for this healthy redirection of self awareness!
Love the honesty and that you gave voice to this! May all women feel their body is “something to be cherished, nourished, and respected.”