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.