Lack. Loss. Limbs. and Love.

I have been reading 'Minding The Body' a collection of essays by women writers on the body.
I read it years ago, but it strikes something different this time around.
Perhaps it is the subtlety of shared experience that evokes a sense of closeness to my own fleshy body, or maybe it is just a point of entry for discussing something that is lived and very rarely articulated. Words are at once inadequate and yet simultaneously unveil truths that mimic the expansion and contraction of the lungs with every breath. Simple and so necessary.

It seems one of the overarching themes of the book is loss, or coping with a percieved loss.
Loss of youth, body shape, children, facial features, sexuality, wildness. Each writer finds a nugget of truth or wisdom in her loss, but nevertheless her discussion begins with a lack.
Must every discussion of women's bodies begin from lack?

I think about the body and loss, generally.
The body can experience physical loss, and does so every day. The shedding of cells, hair, skin.
The body can lose entire organs, limbs, and yet still compensate, heal and function.
Is the body ever really whole?
We lose partners and its as if our bodies have failed us somehow.
We lose hair, memory, muscle- the process of the bodies slow decline back into the earth is at once growth and loss.

Our bodies are always lacking and so how do we respond? We become obsessed with losing weight. Losing wrinkles. Losing spots. Losing any sign that we are alive and changing.
We expect to gain from that loss. Even as I write this, I have friends over getting ready to go out. I am quick, perhaps too quick in my application of product, so I find myself with a half hour at least to write while they apply makeup, tie straps, spray body splash and body shimmer. Each addition in compensation for a percieved lack.

However, I think in its own twisted way, we like it. We enjoy the process of compensation. We enjoy finding the edges of our lack and the process of defining those boundaries. We enjoy wearing strappy heels because we know the kind of power that extra leg boost creates.

So is lack the same as loss?
If you are born without a limb is it the same as losing it? Clearly we have a different emotional relationship to loss than to lack. Inherently, we spend so much time compensating for a lack, that we lose not only the potential for relationship with these bodies we live in, but also the potential for joy, for pleasure, for intimacy.

And since this is a blog in dialogue with medicine, I have to question women's relationship with their bodies in the context of our overall health.
I think its imperitive that we start examining our own relationships to our bodies and lack. Its ok to lose, but I don't think that loss must be defined in terms of lack. Prepare for a generation of women who define their bodies by what is, not what isn't. What we carry with us now, we pass on to our daughters. Historical memory is a very, very real. Thanks Grandma.