What’s Jimmy Choo Got to Do With It?

After a day spent with doctors trying to find solutions to ongoing pain, I realized that in addition to the back pain and the foot pain, I am angry.  I am angry that my body is betraying me.

I’m that person who eats well, who exercised well until pain took that away from her, who is relatively thin and looks fit and healthy, and who was stopped in her tracks at a trade show this week in such searing pain that it took my breath away and reduced me to tears for a bit.  How can this be?  Sure, I’m ageing, but this?  Really?

I recognize I have little to complain about.  I have great health care, and I know that I will get to the root of this and solve it in time.  None of this is life-threatening and for that I am extremely grateful.  But it is debilitating, and gives me a bit of a preview of what life might be like in the decades to come.

So perhaps that’s the source of the anger: betrayal at this ageing of my body, a reality check with my own immortality.  I don’t think of myself as older, but these feet and that back just can’t do what they used to do.  No sexy high heels.  No fancy Pilates moves right now or Zumba.  No favorite sleeping position. 

Of course, I have managed to find a little consolation.  It turns out that Jimmy Choo makes a mighty fine motorcycle boot which works pretty well for these ageing feet and feels pretty sassy.  Smile.

About Breasts

I’ve been thinking a lot about breasts lately.  It all started after seeing “American Hustle”, in which it seemed to me that one of the cast members should have been listed as “Amy Adams’ Breasts”.

Last month I read an article in the New York Times about store mannequins being built to reflect the new “extreme” bodies desired by women in Venezuela.   I was appalled by the following quote from the maker of the mannequins,  “I say that inner beauty doesn’t exist. That’s something that unpretty women invented to justify themselves.”

More importantly, though, this week a friend underwent a double mastectomy. I am hoping this will be a big part of ridding her of cancer, now and forever.  And I also find myself wondering what it might be like to be a woman living without breasts. 

Every woman I know has a mixed relationship with her breasts.  Some think theirs too small, others, too big.  For as long as I have had them, I have resented their appearance on my body.  Men have desired them, ogled them, made lewd comments about them, and adored them.  Sports have challenged them, and clothes?  Don’t get me started.

In a world where it is publicly discussed if Hilary Clinton shows a shadow of cleavage, a world which has grown comfortable with the word “breast”, as in “breast cancer”, yet a world which still glorifies young women willing to bare their breasts for attention, what is a woman supposed to do when faced with losing her breasts?

As Betty Rollin said decades ago, first you cry.  And then you do what makes you comfortable, regardless of the worldview on women’s bodies.  It’s a very personal decision, a decision made while facing one’s own mortality.  I would hope that we would all grow more comfortable with the sight of a beautiful woman, breastless, one-breasted, reconstructed, flat-chested or bosomy and just celebrate who we are rather than our cup size.