Aesthetic Sensibilities and Living With What Is

I was always fairly modest about my body, truthfully because I was just not very comfortable in my own form for a very long time. You'd never find me in a wet T-shirt competition or a bare-chested Mardi Gras video, even in my twenties when I looked really awesome and didn't know it. (Maybe that's a testament to my good sense rather than a poor body image?) The progress of years and gravity are rarely kind to any of us, but they give us perspective on how we didn't appreciate what we had when we had it. My bad body image was an illusion, I know that now. Do any of us see ourselves objectively? Or are we always too fat, too short, too top-heavy, too flawed in our own minds, comparing ourselves to some mental ideal that can never be attained?

I got better as I got older, and despite getting fatter and flabbier. The body didn't seem to matter so much, so long as it functioned efficiently, was strong enough to do what I wanted and didn't hurt too much when I got up in the morning. My husband seemed to like the way I looked, whether I was svelte or pudgy. My kids didn't care what I looked like. My girlfriends were all battling sags and pounds too. Looks don't last, even in the most ideal of us.

But because we are women, we still want to feel attractive, no matter what our shape, age or circumstance. It's a mild shock, inevitable but still sad, when you discover sometime in your forties that no one is checking you out anymore. As a middle-aged woman, you no longer appear on the radar of random men. As annoying as it was in your twenties, when the construction workers stop whistling in your forties, there's a twinge of visceral regret. That time is over.

Now, I'm relatively okay with my physical shell of fifty-five. I find I am relatively comfortable with who I am and how I look, even with the surgical horrors that were visited upon me last year. That is, as long as I don't have to be reflected in someone else's eyes. On one level I can take it, this scarred up version of me in the mirror. As long as I'm by myself (and I don't linger in front of that mirror). But add a subjective viewer to the picture, and I become shy and embarrassed about the way it looks. Almost as if I am to blame for the fact that I am so "damaged" now. Even as I try to rationalize that it doesn't look that bad.

On an objective scale, this is not even close to the female form in an artist's vision. This is not a picture of the aesthetic beauty of the human body. This is downright gruesome, if I'm telling a factual truth. But this is what I've got, and this is what was necessary, to save my life. Whatever mental-clenching I'm doing when I view this vessel, I have to remember to be grateful that I'm alive, and hopefully will be for years to come.

But there is also truth in realizing that we don't see objectively when we look at the people we love. Bill thinks his beard is "terribly gray," and he is "bald" on the top of his head. The fact is that after 25 years, he is just as attractive to me as he was in his twenties. I don't see "gray" or "bald" when I look at him--I see Bill, the man I love. The flaws are out of focus, dismissed in the light of love of the total package.

So why would it be so incomprehensible to me to think that when he looks at me, he sees me through a lens clouded with his own subjectivity? Not the scars or the outrages that surgeries have inflicted or the embarrassment I feel under his gaze. Just me. Alive.

It is scary to be this vulnerable, this unsure about my attractiveness to my husband. There is a temptation to become overly sensitive and project my own insecurities onto him, making him responsible for making me feel better about how I look on a constant basis. But I instinctively recoil from this--knowing him as I do, I think he would find this extremely annoying.

Better to become militantly defiant: This is how it is now, and everybody is just going to have to get over the boo-hoos about it. Especially me, since I seem to be the only one around here obsessing over it.