BELLY GOOD

So a couple of weeks ago, I slipped a disc in my back and was laid out for about 5-6 days. For those of you who have never experienced a herniated disc, consider yourselves lucky. It is truly one of the most painful experiences of my life next to childbirth and kidney stones. One evening, as the Vicodin and Flexorall coctail I'd been taking religiously had begun to wear off, I was bemoaning my situation whilst I tried unsuccessfully to find a comfortable way to sit. My husband (God love him), said "You know, when you get better, you really need to start working out....I mean you ARE overweight." Now....I'm no moron! I know that I've packed on the pounds in the last couple o' years. I've also had two children, have a marriage going on 15 years, am completing my second Master's degree, have a job where I am well -respected and liked...and which pays for our housing and utilities. I have published articles, published a children's book (reviewed in the NY Times), have a wealth of good friends and so on and so forth. Not a bad resume, if I say so myself. But one statement about my weight and all of those accomplishments fly out the window. I can't help feeling as though I'm always defined by my body. And this bugs me, you know? I DO need to exercise. I COULD stand to lose a few pounds, but weighing more shouldn't make me less of a person. It shouldn't define who I am. Sure my jean size has gone up in the last 15 years, but so too has my IQ, my salary, AND my list of accomplishments! Recently, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Tyra Banks, Oprah and others have been chastised for the size of their bellies. How often do we judge a man by the size of his belly? We don't! We also don't begrudge a man a small penis, either. Women just don't do that! Until women start standing up for their bodies and demanding equal treatment--until we learn that weight does not define worth...things will never change. America will continue to fixate on the least accomplished of our gender--Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie and the like...and the real role models, who would NEVER make it as fashion models--will be rendered meaningless. I leave you with a poem by my favorite poet, Marge Piercy, entitled BELLY GOOD!

Belly Good

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs

but I've never seen wheat in a pile.

Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots make lumpy stacks,

but you are sleek as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.

I can see you as a great goose egg or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.

You swell like a natural grassy hill.

You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound, with the eye of the navel wide open,

the eye of my apple, the pear's port window. You're not supposed to exist at all this decade. You're to be flat as a kitchen table,

so children with roller skates can speed over you like those sidewalks of my childhood

that each gave a different roar under my wheels.

You're required to show muscle striations like the ocean sand at ebb tide,

but brick hard.

Clothing is not designed for women of whose warm and flagrant bodies

you are a swelling part. Yet I confess

I meditate with my hands folded on you,

a maternal cushion radiating comfort.

Even when I have been at my thinnest,

you have never abandoned me but curled round as a sleeping cat under my skirt.

When I spread out, so do you.

You like to eat, drink and bang on another belly.

In anxiety I clutch you with nervous fingers

as if you were a purse full of calm.

In my grandmother standing in the fierce sun

I see your cauldron that held eleven children shaped under the tent of her summer dress.

I see you in my mother at thirty in her flapper gear,

skinny legs and then you knocking on the tight dress.

We hand you down like a prize feather quilt.

You are our female shame and sunburst strength.