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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
My tummy is a misshapen battlefield, but I'm not ready to tuck it away.
Mar 23, 2000 | I always believed in self-improvement.
At 17, I had my hook nose bobbed. In my 30s, I colored away all my gray. I've always done the sit-ups I loathe just so my belly could hold its own in a skintight dress. I scrupulously covered what I couldn't correct -- makeup over dark circles, long sleeves over ungainly arms, long pants or skirts over bowed legs. I had all my beauty bases covered.
And then, three years ago, three days after giving birth, I became critically ill from a rare blood disease, and for over a year, my whole appearance changed in a way I could do nothing about, a way I can only describe as horrifying. My hair fell out in clumps. My skin turned gray. Steroids puffed me from swizzle-straw thinness into near obesity.
Five emergency operations gave my belly a weird new geography; it formed a hard triangle on one side and cleaved down the center, and my bellybutton moved far right.
It took me more than a year to get back to normal -- or as normal as I'm going to get. I'm thin again, my hair is back, my skin is rosy. Only my belly remains, still so misshapen I've given up form-fitting clothes, still so large that sometimes on the subway, people smile and ask pleasantly, "What do you want, a boy or girl?" The doctors tell me I can have a tuck done and fix this last vestige of my illness. But I, Ms. Physical Insecurity, the onetime queen of self-improvement, now choose, deliberately, defiantly, to keep it.
Before I got sick, I had a lot of ideas about what body perfection meant. I wasn't going to let myself go as a new mother. I was going to exercise myself back into my form-fitting clothes, keep my hair long, wear makeup.
But the reality was different.
Sick, I could hardly get out of bed, let alone wear sexy dresses, and even if I could, because of my new odd shape, I couldn't fit into them. "Oh, that's the meds," my hematologist told me. "But it goes away eventually."
Eventually, I told myself. But I kept increasing, going up one size, then two. My eyes began disappearing into pin dots in my fleshy face. My chin doubled and then moved into triplicate. And then, as I bent over my son to tickle him, a long, thick, fistful of hair slid down my shoulder and onto my baby and I burst into terrified tears.
In a desperate act of self-preservation, I began to avoid mirrors, to hide in the house. When people called, wanting to visit, I feigned exhaustion. When people dropped by, I pretended to be asleep, the covers over my head. The only place I would go was to our thrice-weekly visits to doctors and to a friend's deserted house in the country, and even then I stayed inside.
Jeff, my husband, put his arms around me. "You know I think you are beautiful," he said quietly.
"That's just because you love me," I said hopelessly. He sighed, shaking his head.
I probably would have stayed inside for the duration of my illness, but our bills began to pile up. Our insurance company began balking, refusing payments, and disability refused to cover my staying home anymore. Jeff's job as a freelance writer wouldn't begin to cover our mounting expenses. To my horror, I had to go back to work, and even worse, it was in style-conscious Manhattan.
