My mother’s generation of  feminists were taught to hold mirrors between their legs to examine the flower of their vulva. I found my womanhood in art, and loss. In the written word.

The first time I saw Georgia O’Keefe’s painting Music Pink and Blue, I realized I was a stranger to myself. Knowing starts with touching, and so I did, in bathtubs and solitary bedrooms. Understanding the dark spaces of your body should never feel illicit. If it does, you are doing something wrong.

I started seeing a therapist after I miscarried a son. When the doctors took him from my body, they discovered a tumor. Inside I was malignant. Suddenly, oncologists replaced gynecologists. Talk centered around chemotherapy instead of baby names and shower dates. It was around this same time that I discovered a shadowy figure creeping in the wild of our backyard. I used to sit for hours on top of the washing machine in our laundry room and stare through binoculars at this imaginary outline in the trees. At night, this dark man stole into my bedroom and took things from me, my favorite pair of socks, the cheese grater, the last remaining tube of toothpaste. Ordinary things that anchored my life went missing from the cupboards and the nightstand. Without these objects, I had no way to moor myself.

Freud coined transference, the redirection of feelings and desires, the reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences. Freud also said that flowers are restful to look at. They have neither emotion nor conflict. I wonder what O’Keefe would have said about Freud if she had written a blog.

Who would you be without your writing? Would you know yourself without your words?

We all need to go places that are silent. Once there, I take off all my clothes. I forget about the mirrors. I need to look without distortion. I use my own fingers to touch myself from big toe to hipbone to earlobe. I recognize myself. I know that I am quite stunning. Even though words and histories may write themselves as fiction, I can always trust my hands to tell the truth.

I had a son I loved but never got to touch. He died inside my body. One day he was kicking and the next his heart had stopped. Just like that. Sometimes we lose the things we most hoped for. Without the memory of Riley bound to the tips of my fingers, it is easy to forget that he was ever real. Even being able to remember the amount of pain that came as a result of the miscarriage can’t always convince me that this child was anything other than longing. That does not mean I was not a good mother to him while he grew. It is just that miscarriage like death is different for every one of us. I loved the possibility of my son. When that possibility was gone, I fiercely mourned it. When J was born and the nurses placed him in my arms, I made a conscience choice to let the grief go. I make a choice everyday to love my body.

In my favorite photograph of Georgia O’Keefe, her hair hangs loose around a robe of white silk. The tip of her thumb is pressed like a secret against her nipple. Her face is bare. She is so striking. Open. I imagine some might see the downturn of her mouth and confuse her pictures with sadness. But, any woman who knows the true art of touching herself can tell you that what you see when you look at a portrait of Georgia O’Keefe is anything but grief. There is nothing even akin to remorse. What Georgia teaches me to see is the tremble of longing. I am like O’Keefe.

Knowing. I touch myself. I feel. To be a woman is the most exquisite of things.

Who are you falling in love with? I asked a friend this after reading something she wrote. Inside her lines there was a longing I could recognize, a love of mountains and parked cars that did not seem that unfamiliar. She replied with the name of a folk singer, and I was left to wonder why I felt such strange relief.


Who are we suppose to be falling in love with? I wish someone would ask me that question, just so I could think about my answer.

When I was 14, I was accosted in a stairway. A boy name Tommy did a drive-by with his hands. Rammed his fingers right up my skirt without asking my permission, or even stopping to say hello. I remember laying in the pink bedroom of my childhood, listening to the radio and staring at the ceiling in confusion. Is this what a love song is suppose to feel like? I wondered.

The next day in school Tommy stated a rumor that I did not shave my legs above my kneecaps. Not in possession of my mouth, I did not know how to contradict him. I just allowed myself to detach a little and let other people take ownership of my body in the passing on of the lie.

You and I. We might be strangers. However close we get sometimes. It’s like we never met. I’ve been playing these lines of a Wilco song on slow repeat. They remind me of you. Me. If we are talking history here, at one point they would have reminded me of my body.

Do you know that when you drink you lose the spatial relationship to your own body? Where did my legs go? Has anyone seen my hands? Who has stolen my heart? I used to crash into other warm bodies just to convince myself that I existed. I’d wake up the next day and be reminded that I was still a ghost.

This body, it belongs to me. I am so fully present in my skin.

I had three miscarriages. I used to expect you to feel sorry for me when I said that. I used to feel sorry for myself. It helped after I got angry. I let myself get fighting Irish mad at the doctor who sat across from me in a sterile white-washed office. Without ever looking up from her chart to meet my watery eyes, she told me I had a defunct uterus. She might as well have gutted me with a spoon, taken my womb and hung it on her wall like a hunter mounts a deer head. The day they ripped my daughter from between my shaking legs, exhausted, I mouthed a silent fuck you at my former OBGYN.

Anger smashes down walls so beautifully, doesn’t it? How else would we ever learn to find the secret places that happiness hides if we were not willing to deconstruct. I have complete ownership of my body now. I am giving you a seductive invitation to detonate your bones against this body of work.

I wish that I could exist in the rooms where you read my words. I like to fantasize that I make you sob. I give my body permission to be a vehicle for your comfort. I trace a sonata against your collarbone. You rest your hand in mine. Sometimes our bodies can be so simply free when we allow them to be led by our words.