external shell

i posted a photo collage of pictures that brooke has taken super up close to me. details that she looks at and observes and feels the need to study. she likes small things and details and she has a strange affinity for lines. she doodles lines and even tries to draw lines on everything with her eyes so that all the world is connected. she's got a very artistic eye and observes things differently than most people do.

when she stares at my parts and then takes a picture so i can see why it's so interesting, i've learned not to be offended. not even when it's a picture of one of my least attractive bits. i've learned that brooke doesn't show interest in very many people. she doesn't look at people very much. she prefers toys and animals, so when she shows an interest in me, i'm pleased. when she sees art in life, even if it's on me, it makes me happy.

i posted those pictures on my blog here because i thought it was interesting. i know that some of them didn't paint me in a very pretty light, but they made me happy and they made me laugh and they made me cringe.

what i didn't expect was the reaction that it got when i posted a link on facebook. some of my close friends and family members commented with things along the lines of how brave i was or how i was crazy and that the images were disturbing.

it sort of caught me off guard. i went back and looked at each picture again, trying to see it through someone else's eyes. i guess i can see it. there's that one by my eye that i was told looks like a nipple or a cat butt.

however, i like that you can't tell exactly what some of them are. that some of the pics seem a little bit questionable and odd. i even like the ones that show my stretch marks. brooke says they look like roots and she traces her finger over them and smiles, knowing that's the one part of my body that she created. they're the physical reminder of when i overcame my fight with infertility.

let's be honest here. most women don't see much of other women's bare bodies as we age. once we're past college age, we're generally no longer getting changed in a room with other women or hanging out in our underwear putting our makeup on before heading out for a late night on the town. even if we are in a situation around other bare women, like a locker room at the gym, we're doing our best to go as fast as we can while averting our eyes so as to keep from making anyone uncomfortable. the only time you make eye contact in a situation like that is to give the stink eye to the little boy across from you who's paying way too much attention while you try to wrangle your wet clothes off and your bra back on.

for most of us married ladies and mommies, the only bare bodies we see are our own and the airbrushed ones on magazine covers. if the truth be told, there are very few women over the age of thirty in the real world, who have magazine cover bodies. so as we age and our skin stretches or sags or wrinkles, we don't think about the fact that the same thing is happening to all our friends. we might make jokes about it, but we don't let even our sisters or girlfriends have a look at what the years and babies have done to certain parts of our bodies. we stop going out without makeup because we don't want anyone to see the dark circles or crows feet around our eyes. our shorts get longer to cover the veins that pop out. we stop wearing bikinis even if we're at a healthy weight because our stomachs are wrecked from pregnancies.

i guess what i'm saying is that maybe the reason people were alarmed or disgusted by my pictures was because they never see body parts in public that look like that. their own might look that way too, but they try not to look because it makes them feel unattractive.

i don't think we all need to go out showing off our ugliest parts, but i think it would be good if more women could feel less self conscious about those things.

we are more than our external shells.