I have been oogled, touched, used, discarded. I have shaved, plucked, and dieted myself into distraction. Bruises, cellulite, bug-bites, scars, I have them all. This is my skin. These are my bones. I am beautiful.

Henri Matisse once said, about his own use of color in painting, “When I paint green, it is not the grass. When I paint blue, it is not the sky.” When I tell you I want you to see me naked, I am asking you to interpret.

In 1905, Matisse submitted 15 paintings to the Salon d’ Automne. His work was described as an “orgy of color.” One critic, so taken by the explosion on the canvas, dubbed Matisse “Fauve,” a wild-beast. The room his pictures were hung in, room 7, became known as the cage. It could not contain him.

Every day I turn on my Internet and read all the ways that women hate their bodies. It makes me as sad as Cezanne. He painted the Three Bathers, big, beautiful, female bodies, but he made a mistake. Cezanne believed that women were temptresses, carries of evil. Matisse, although inspired by Cezanne, took his own paint brush and transformed this out-dated notion of womanhood by contorting the female form.

I am Fauve. I smash patriarchy. There will be no cages that contain me.

When I was 18, I first saw Matisse’s paintings in a museum. His paintings took my breath away. The moment was terrifying. I recognized myself in his art. It frightened me to think that any man might know the female body more intimately then I allowed myself to at the time. Back then, I was still at war with my body, a passive aggressive war that took the form of repression and denial. Those were the years I avoided mirrors and always got dressed in the dark.

I turned 35 this year. My body is no longer as tight as that 18 year-old girl. My breasts don’t have as much perk. My stomach muscles are soft where they use to be taut. I curve generously in my hips and my thighs, which bear stretch marks. But, I am every bit as lovely if not more so. And, I wish someone would sketch me nude. I think about volunteering to pose as the model in one of the local college art classes. I think the initial embarrassment would be worth it to see myself in charcoal and oil. What could be more empowering than to acknowledge the slope of my breast,  the meat of my thighs on canvas?

I would like to give my body as a gift to some young hopeful artist with eyes like stars. I imagine he or she would take one look at my body and channel Matisse. Paint me as the stunning woman that I am, post-impressionism, avant-garde, art.

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.

I have stomped my angry feet and, like a petulant child, pounded my fists against the table. Damn, woman!

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to rock your sleeping children in the night, and whisper lullabies that you will never leave them. Tell them that no harm will come, even though you know that the madman is busy busting down the door, charging forth in the form of your own damn heart that beats impostor when you lie between familiar sheets and dream of foreign hands.  

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop telling stories that only have heroines with smoky-eyes and size two clothing. No one wants to know about your bruised back from the same mistake you keep making furious against the floorboards. I know that you can be more than Eat. Fuck. Shit. Overly-medicated memories of the rough contours of your father’s hands are nothing short of terrible tragic, but this does not provide adequate excuse for why your own child’s eyes can sometimes appear so hollow. It is not an excuse for why you lie, and lie, and keep on lying.

I want you to be better than you are. I want you to stop spreading your gossip like disease passed from one unwashed hand to another. You need to stop feigning victimization. I want you to have the courage to step outside of the carefully manufactured photo-shopped persona that you have created, and admit that what you really were then, still might be now, is just a scared girl masquerading inside her own womanly skin.

I want you to be. Better? No.  

I want you to be who you are. Even though, I am struggling with what I have come to discover about you, what I have come to discover about myself in relation to you. That I, the women who claims herself to be feminist, is the most judgemental, hypocrite, fucker of them all.

I want you all to be. You. And, I want to be better.

My children made me a mother, but they did not transform me from little girl to woman. 

When I lay spread-eagle in metal stirrups, house lights dim, and stage lights blasting womb deep, there was no mythical transformation from youth to seasoned age. I was already wizened. I fucked and fed and laughed and lived my womanhood long before my babies clung to my pant leg every early morning begging for bottles and toasted bread. To claim any different would be an affront to women everywhere who can’t, or don’t, who are not going to have children.

Come on! Wouldn’t I activate your gag reflex if I said,

Oh, you silly little girls, childless wretches. Don’t you know you are not woman until you’ve changed shit in the dark of 3 a.m. with your breasts dripping milk and your partner sonorously snoring at your side?

Preposterous!

I can tell you exactly the moment I became a mother. It was the minute my son burst into this world from another women’s body. Oh yes! I was a mother then, even though the law would deny me that right until 45 days after. I became a mother for the second time when I pushed my daughter out from between my own vaginal folds.

Woman becomes a Mother. The first can and does exist without the other.

I know when I became a mother. I wonder about the serpentine timeline that bred my womanhood.

Was it at 13, when I started menstruation and placed a chunky pad between my legs still thick with adolescent fat? Was it at 19, when I bent my back against a baseball diamond and gave myself away under the stars? I had breasts by the age of 11, did they grant me permission into the club we call womanhood? What about all those chicks who are still flat-chested?

I can not pinpoint the exact minute I turned from girl to woman.  I do know that I did not have to depend on the birth of my children for this to happen. The only birth necessary for this becoming was my own.  

Don’t believe me? Well, go read her or her, woman who tell it  far better than I tell it myself.

We do not hold hands. We do not press our tongues together as the house lights dim. Our bodies keep their boundaries in these side by side seats. Your side popcorn and Diet Coke. My side Junior mints and water. When you ask for me to share, I do it begrudgingly. I like my candy all my own.

During the film, you lean over into my territory and you whisper,

Hey, why don’t you squeeze me some fresh juice in the mornings like this here Kate?

I am all straight-faced when I reply,

Be happy to, dear, just as soon as you look as hot as Leo.

I do not have to check your profile to know that you are laughing.

Later on in the car we analyze the characters’ motivations. Who was more sympathetic? Her need for something other than babies and tin-can trash in straight as narrow lines, against his need to believe the lie she mimes as he draws her a sketch on the cloth linen napkin of their morning after, this is all heavily debated.  

We both agree that it is a draw. Both heroes and villains.

Your hand shakes itself across the console. It finds the waiting warmth of mine. 

We are driving another road. Now, the kids are tucked tight in their car seats, asleep.

If we never achieved anything more than this, would it be enough? 

You have seen me struggle the past few weeks with my voice. I beg you day after day to take the kids out into the yard while I try to find the thread of this story. I am desparate to claim ownership of this slice of past and it makes me frustrated and short with the present. 

I need to write it down. I need someone to hear it. I need this to truly matter.

This is the mantra I repeat, even in my sleep.

There is not always room for you in this dreaming. But, there you always are.

 Even when I push you off to the periphery you are always at its core.

Would this be enough for me?  Daughter. Wife. Mother. Sister. Lover. Your Best Friend.  

My answer to your question is simple.

Everything that has ever mattered to me is right here in this car.

You smile and shake your head.

When we get home, you better get that fine ass of yours up to that computer and write it down.

This is me becoming. This is a testament to what we are, not a revolution baby, an evolution, quiet and more powerful by far.  

Today, on a day of syrupy-sweet, commercialized affection, I am sending out a valentine of the more organic kind.

On this day of declarations, I would like to thank…My Armpit Hair…for all that it has done to allow me to fit in with radical feminists world-wide.

Can I get a Wut! Wut! 

Happy Valentines Day Lovers!

How do you know that you are a lapsed catholic?

Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!

He moans, his voice saturated with the pleasure before the fall. I roll over, off, dismounting to find my underwear. I crawl across the room , pull to release their cotton white from the crevice of the armchair, far-flung in the zipper-fly fumbling crush of our foreplay.

I am tugging on the elastic band, up over the soft fold of my flesh, flesh that bore babies, flesh he grabbed with eager hands. Sins of the flesh.

Exodus 20: 4-6 says,

You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them.

I know I am going to hell.

I want to be worshipped. I want to stand stark still in front of the man that I love, all naked, visionary, empowered cunt. All I can think is how unfair it all is. 

God should not be getting the credit for what this woman’s body has done.

What makes a woman sexy?

I think about this as I hang my plain white granny panties on the christmas tree next to the lacy pink thongs, diamond studded black and crotchless underwear I’m suppose to guess who they belong to. It’s a game we are playing at a Christmas party, seven women and a coffee table filled with food. Mine are easy to guess at, I’ve written Badass in permanent blue maker across the large expanse of cheeks. The game culminates in the winner picking the pair she most wants to own, gets to take them home, keep.

I’m not really trying as I play, pawing mini quiche and silently wishing we were playing for books. I’m mentally discarding literary characters, in an attempt to decide which would best define me, when the game ends and I’m one up from the loser. I’m offered a choice, a pair of silky black thongs or my own white grannies, seems no one thinks themselves as badass but me.

I see the real loser’s face sinking into the dismay that those white billowing balloons are going home with her. I surprise her by hooking them around my own finger and giving them a spin. I’ll take these, I say with confidence. Those other panties are way too small, wouldn’t even cover the bush I let grow wild in the winter. The laughter in the room is a nervous kind formed from the one too many brazilians.

Does lingerie make you sexy? I shrug my shoulders. To me, lingerie is the equivalent of sex in the jacuzzi tub on your honeymoon. It seems like just the sort of thing you are suppose to do as newlyweds, so you grit your teeth and bear down as you jam your chin into the faucet and things that shouldn’t keep slipping do. No thanks. Not today.

I’m 33 years old, sexy has a whole new definition. Sexy isn’t pushing my tits skyward or the crotch slit in my skirt. It doesn’t require botox or even for a person to wear a size two, hell if I do. But, my size 10 ass is often the most beautiful thing in the room because of who and what it belongs to. I am beautiful because I own it.

I’m beautiful because I am the sit with you for hours and talk Dostoevsky and Neruda kind of smart. I am beautiful because when I laugh I do not care that my neck doubles into my multiple chins. I am beautiful because my babies climb my body in early morning hours for the prize of wrapping themselves into my hair. I am beautiful because in the summer my freckles are a road map you can travel with your finger from the one next to my belly buttton to the millions that surmount my chin. I am beautiful because I am not afraid to dance in the fluorescent glare of the supermarket aisle to Huey Lewis and The News. I am beautiful because of the women who grace my life with friendship. I am beautiful because I say I am, believe I am, know that I am.

Confidence is beautiful. Don’t you think? And, being honest. And, planting flowers with your children. And, snuggling on the couch with your husband who doesn’t care that you so rarely shave your legs. And, hand knit sweaters your grandmother sends for your child are beautiful. And, Christmas trees that piss pine needles all across your living room floor. And, letting him have the last brownie. And, the way she squeals when she slides her sled across the winter floor. And, this blog. This blog is beautiful, isn’t it? You are all beautiful, aren’t you? Not so sure. Take a second look. 

 I slid my Irish ass decorated in a pair of plain white granny panties with the word badass across the cheeks into the soft blue of sheets tangled around his body. His hands moved to take off the old and tattered Grateful Dead tee-shirt I like to sleep in. My skin exposed to the lights of passing cars reflecting off of pale yellow walls, the color of daffodils muted and soft. Hands, legs, skin, lips, sexy. Sure, that love is the most beautiful thing of all.

It was this hunger than brought us together.

You did not love me. You loved the way my finger traced itself across your collarbone in search of a place for lips to linger, lust to land. I convinced myself that because my body was your familiar, and I was not ashamed to invite you over even when I had not taken the time to shave my legs, that we were something more than bodies crushed together in early morning hours while roommates slept.

I did not love you.

Maybe just the way you gave me a rock in the shape of a heart, and I melted crayons in a dish to make a candle holder we would light the first time you told me I was beautiful. I felt beautiful then. I made mixed tapes I inscribed with you name and brought eye shadow in sparkling new colors you never saw, so quick were we to make our way to dark rooms and bury ourselves under covers.

And because you questioned who he was, the boy with the dark hair who lent me his notes on Shakespeare, and laughed with me in the student union while I ran my hand through my hair, and might have licked my lips once or twice, did not mean you loved me. I should have known you when you laid yourself across my body and you asked in a voice that carried such indignant hurt, who he was.

I wish he had been more than just a boy who always watched me shyly from across the class, with his voice that would stutter and break over the hellos he could not fully master when I came into the room, all bent from the way you took my body in your hands, and made belief out of my legs stretched up against your shoulders. I wish he could have been the reason I pulled on my jeans and sweater, laced my shoes, and walked out the door.

Instead, he would be the great big bellying of hope that started my belief that you wanted more. And, I cringe when I think about the way I swelled and blushed to tell you that you were the only one, and thought that maybe I could, did, love you, when all you were really thinking was that you did not want to be sleeping with a whore.

And, I should have known the way your hands tightened across the fistful of my hair at that moment, that all along, I had been nothing but a possession you would grow tired of.

Even now, looking back and knowing that I did not love you, could never, would, I just wish I had been the one to get up and leave, the one who had the memory of being in control of when she was full.

I want to see you for what you are. I want you to see me.

How could I possibly know what your day was like? Maybe you had 82 band-aides to cover the tender blisters of your feet, worn down from where you were forced to stand for too many hours before your pimply-faced manager gave you a break. Then, you could go outside and smoke that cigarette that you keep promising yourself you will quit cold-turkey, because you do not really have the money to spend on your two pack a day habit, working all those hours for minimum wage.

How could you possibly know about the wave of guilt that I ride each morning on my way to the eight hour day I need to work, to get the paycheck that will pay the bills on the house we still do not own, and barely touch the interest on the law school loan that will saddle us for life?

We are both blind.

Still, I wish I knew. It might make it easier to understand your actions when I rolled my cart through your lane. Would it have killed you to smile at my Bug, as he held out the pretend money he had kept in his little boy pocket the whole car ride to the store? Sure it had a picture of a cartoon character on it. It was not worth a thing. But, how hard would it have been to just take it from him and say thank you?

How hard would it have been not to roll your eyes or heave that thunderous sigh? Really. Was your day so painful that you had to stomp on the happiness of my little guy? I am just trying to understand it.

I do not know you. You do not know me, either. Maybe, that is why you did not think it necessary to wait till I was out of earshot before you muttered how you hate rich mommies who spoil their badly behaved trust-fund brats. Maybe, that is why I did not have a problem turning around to mumble about the “trash” that was littering the place as I stalked out the door.

I should have just laughed at your misperception of us as wealthy. Just because Bug was wearing a designer polo does not make us rich. In fact, it was a hand-me down from a friend whose bank account is less blue around the collar than my own. There is a reason I was buying my underwear from you and not some designer salon. And, it is not because I have some weird crush on the Fruit of the Loom characters.

You had me figured all wrong.

What about you?

The truth is I will never know the story you carry in your bones. You will never wear my skin.

So instead, you picture me driving away in some fancy SUV, to a neighborhood where it never rains, with children who are raised by their Nannies, and the dishes are always cleaned by hired hands. I picture you wearing curlers and eating lukewarm soup in front of the television screen, waiting for your boyfriend to get home from boys night out, where you will fight over the cheap flea market perfume that wafts from his polyester button down shirt you embroidered with the saying, King Of The Lanes.

We both get it wrong.

We slap each other with the sharp end of stereotypes. We have eyes but we do not see, blind to all the things that make us similar to each other.

Both of us checked out.