I said in my last post that I’m working on learning to love my body. I find myself thinking a lot about that today. About what it looks like as a woman, as a catholic woman, to love my body now that I don’t have a reproductive system.
Today is Mother’s Day in North America. It’s a complex day for all kinds of women, because we are not all mothers in the way we’d like to be, or children of people who were mothers in the way we’d have liked them to be, or so many variations that I’ve seen in post after post on my social media, acknowledging those for whom mother’s day might be hard.
I’ve never found this day particularly hard before. Motherhood, especially biological motherhood, was always still on the list. It was something I hoped for and dreamed about. Something I knew I’d probably enjoy and be good at.
But today, this year, the day hits differently.
I don’t have a reproductive system. It was sliced out of my abdomen last year by necessity. I’m still healing in so many ways from those events. And I find myself thinking about what it looks like to love my body now that it bears both internal and prominent external scars. I find myself caressing my still at times swollen abdomen, the way my pregnant friends caress their growing bellies. Their caresses speak of hope and new life, while mine speak of grief and attempts at comfort.
I’m part of a religious culture where the epitome of womanhood is virginal mother, both chaste and fruitful. As a newcomer to that Catholic culture, I watched as the womanly ideal that is touted has one of two offshoots – the religious sister, or the mother of many. I don’t think the culture means to shame those of us who don’t fit those norms, but it is shame that I’ve felt. The language around openness to life as essential to marriage seems to most to mean a rush to reproduce prolifically. This messaging is so strong that last year, before surgery, I found myself tearfully sitting across from a trusted priest, asking if I could still be married in the church someday, should a hysterectomy become necessary.
Do you hear that? Eight years of study and formation as a catholic and I believed there was a good possibility that the church wouldn’t accept me as a bride if I couldn’t biologically reproduce. I’m thankful for the priest who heard my fears and gently corrected my impressions, but I remain deeply concerned that those impressions were what my years in the church had formed in me.
I worried then, and worry still at times, whether a man will even want me, with my internal and external scars. I perceive my body’s beauty as marred, slashed down the middle, from well above my navel to my pubic bone with the scar from my surgeries.
And so, this year, on Mother’s Day, I find myself asking what it looks like to live in, and to love this body – the one that has been marked by physical suffering for close to three years now; the one waiting for still more surgery and scarring. What does it look like to love this body that will never follow the scriptural command to “be fruitful and multiply”.
I think it looks like this: it looks like caressing the belly that will never carry a child, and naming it good. It looks like rubbing lotion into my calves, and thanking them for holding me up during these years of illness, for getting me out of bed, for carrying me to the places I found hope and help. It looks like staring in the mirror at my unruly hair, badly in need of a cut, and loving the curls that I see. It looks like reading the quote jotted on a whiteboard on my fridge – the quote that reminds me that while the Old Testament saw children as a sign of God’s favor, the New Testament sees the making of Disciples in the same way. It looks like trusting the God who made me in his likeness, believing he spoke truth when he called this body beloved.
Lisa From Canada 