belly

"Love your tree," Eve Ensler said. She told us to go home and love our stomachs, so I took her advice and snapped a picture of my own. What an inpsiration to hear her Q & A conversation after the show...she seems to embody everything I teach in Women's Studies. Who knew the woman who gave voice to the word vagina had body image issues of her own? I guess I should have known, but I suppose I fell into the trap of wanting to believe someone who was doing such critically and globally important work felt good about herself. Surely she would seem to have no reason to be down on herself like nearly everyone else seems to be.

Anyway, I wasn't sure the show would reveal anything new for those already familiar with feminist perspectives on the body, but her level of personal revelation/exposure in the show made it really powerful to watch. She made herself completely vulnerable and when asked what mothers of boy children could do to raise children free of these damaging body issues, she simply said "allow them to cry." She says she often cries for hours at a time and that it is crying that keeps people tender and open to being vulnerable...the kind of vulnerability that ironically opens the door to growth and closeness.

It got me thinking about how rarely I cry anymore and about how my frequency of crying has dropped in direct proportion to the frequency with which I get angry. Seems once all those years of repressed anger started to surface, the tears and the sorrow and the "weakness" that went with them just dried up. Too bad I conflated vulnerability with being treated like shit, somehow I missed the part about how letting folks in could make a bond stronger.

Perhaps it would help to find my way back to some tears again....