[2020-10-10] My lumpy, bumpy belly

It's now been six weeks since my hysterectomy. I'm feeling better than I have since my surgery, and even before that.

Gone are my uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries, omentum ("a curtain of fatty tissue that hangs down from our stomach and liver and wraps around the intestines") along with numerous tumours.

But also gone is the pressure on my internal organs from the tumours and, with it, the need to pee every few hours. Gone is the sensation that I developed a few weeks after surgery that my remaining innards wanted to drop out of my body. (Hurray for Kegels!) Gone is the feeling that my stomach was the size of a clementine, leaving me feeling stuffed after a few bites. Gone is the need for Dilaudid, Advil and anything more than one or two Tylenols per day.

What remains is what I affectionately call my lumpy, bumpy belly. It's not perfect, but its scars and misshapen form are beautiful.

I learned a lot about accepting my body when I read Making Peace with Food by Susan Kano many years ago. One passage has always stayed with me:

One question I love to ask people who complain that they're too fat is "Too fat for what?" This question is usually considered absurd; hence, people usually respond by laughing or glaring at me. "Too fat to walk?" No. "Too fat to make love?" No. "Too fat to be fit?" No. "Too fat to swim or play tennis or run or cycle or hike or dance...?" No, only rarely. This can go on for quite a while, but in the end the truth emerges: "Too fat to be 'attractive.'" It's an aesthetic judgment. The most common reason why people want to be thinner is that they think they will look better."

When I think about my body, and my belly in particular, the same thought process holds. So my body is imperfect, but too imperfect for what? Not too imperfect to:
  • jump out of bed
  • go for walks (I reached more than 9,000 steps yesterday and I'm at 6,600 steps today, as of this post, with more to come)
  • bake (I made scones yesterday plus squares and cookies in a jar today to share with friends and family)
  • do dishes
  • write
  • get up for my aged dog in the middle of the night
The only thing I'm not yet back to doing is heavy lifting (I asked my son to wrestle a 20-lb bag of flour yesterday). I'm still healing but have made so much progress in the last month and a half. My body is once again able to do almost everything I ask of it, and that's beautiful.

Another passage from Making Peace with Food can—with a little adjustment—apply to any assessment of beauty:

Just as we can develop a broader appreciation of art or music, we can develop a broader appreciation of the human body. The cost of our aesthetically thin minds is very high, in terms of both the hell we suffer and the damage we do to others. Why accept such a narrow and harmful viewpoint when we can learn to appreciate and enjoy the beauty of larger, fatter bodies in addition to the beauty of thin and lean bodies?

By the same token, we can learn to appreciate all bodies, both the scarred and unblemished.

The reality, of course, is that the first person we need to convince of our beauty is ourselves—not others. Kano says, "Anyone we see with love, we see as beautiful." If we love ourselves, we can't help but see all of us—including a lumpy, bumpy belly—as beautiful.

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