Imperfect Me

It happened one of those early times when I made love to my partner, the only man I’d been with after the demise of my decades-long marriage: his initial comments about my belly.

This man had reached out to my tentative dating ad the day I posted it. Impressed with his academic and artistic credentials—I am an artist and professor myself—I responded to his thoughtful, articulate message. He was older than me, in his fifties, good-looking, clearly experienced. It had shocked me how suddenly, how fluidly my blouse and bra came off under his hand the first time we made out.

It wasn’t until months later that I let myself think about how he’d entered me that December night on his old sofa, without me expecting it, until I cried out in pain. Then, he stopped and hugged me, telling me we’d have plenty of time to do more of that later.

I’d only been with one man in my life—my ex-husband, whom I’d known since high school, and had met when I was younger than my teenaged children were now. I hadn’t intended this sudden nakedness beneath the eyes of this stranger. “You’re beautiful,” my new lover said, his Christmas tree twinkling with lights behind him as he hovered over me, his broad body pressed to mine.

“No one ever called me that,” I said softly, as he kissed lower down my neck, took my dark breasts into his pink mouth.

He confessed that he'd paid a matchmaker $4000 to find him someone--she made suggestions on his profile, hired a photographer to take his portraits, and set him up with matches. Though she hadn't found me, her changes to his online narrative are what had intrigued me. "If I'd met you long ago, we would have been married still, and for decades," he said. "And what about all the other women you've been with?" I asked. He looked at me seriously, his eyes lingering on my mouth. "No one has come close to you," he said. "You're the one I've been waiting for. My jackpot. And the smartest woman I've ever dated." He kissed me, commenting on how much he loved the shape of my full lips.

During one of those early times, in his crisp, white bed, I caught him briefly eyeing my belly. I put my hand over it, feeling it’s rounded softness, the tissue-thin wrinkles of stretchmarks that streaked up my hips.

“Does it bother you?” I asked, embarrassed. He shook his head, covered in still-thick, shaggy brown-and-gray hair. “It used to be flat,” I sighed. “My friend had surgery done—full lipo. Got rid of her butt, hips, and belly. Said she looked like a fourteen-year-old again when done. She’s wealthy. Must be nice.” My lover made no comment.

It wasn’t until October that he complained, for no reason I could figure out, about the way I'd kissed him earlier that afternoon. “It was like you were doodling in my mouth,” he said. “Like you were making squares and patterns against my teeth and tongue.” I was taken aback. I thought my kissing was passionate as always. When I asked what he meant, he said, “It’s nothing. Just felt like you were using my mouth to play with,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

I did worry about it, brought it up to him later, but he told me to drop it, that it was nothing to get upset about.

By March, I sensed him pulling away. I felt most alive, most passionate at night, after getting in bed, but he preferred to make love in the first light of dawn, awakening me by his arm sliding around me, his large hand curving over my breast. In the early months, we’d made love night and morning. “I’ve never been naked for this many hours,” I’d told him back then. “Probably not even as a baby.” He kissed me in the hollow space beneath my throat. Lifted me high in the air to make love. Spread my brown body over his white sheets. Cracked the blinds to better see me. “Just how I like you,” he said, teasingly, before kissing me again. “Naked.” I had no idea that such desire could explode out of my body. I felt drugged with him, his scent, his flesh, every time I came near.

We arranged our days around our respective teens’ fifty-percent custody schedules, so I spent alternate weekends with him. For months, he began falling asleep at night and only wanted sex in the morning. “Do you think we could do a night at least once in the weekend?” I asked. “I just don’t feel it as strongly at dawn.” I knew dawn was when he watched porn daily when I wasn’t with him. It disturbed me. The thought of him desiring those young, perfect bodies felt as if I wore a tiny sharp cloak made of pins against my bare skin. “It’s the only way I can get anything done later,” he explained. “They’re pixels. Not like its real. I only do it so that I can get release and be productive. I don’t do well when I can’t get release.” I nodded, trying to accept, knowing his body and his time were his. Anyway, he told me more than once, it wouldn’t interfere with our love life. I once suggested we try watching it together; he had emphatically refused.

Later, he would confess that the porn wasn’t nearly as bad as the real women he saw in his beach town daily. “What does that mean?” I asked. But I knew. It meant he lusted after other women, though he had learned to hide his gaze well.

When he would only come onto me at dawn, though, I sometimes felt like I was a doll, something that he needed to use to get the job done. Not that he wasn’t attentive—he was, most times, and tried to make me climax. I did my best to let him believe I did even when I didn’t. “I feel like you’re only turned on in the mornings because you’re used to it then,” I said after a few weekends. “I’d love intimacy at night sometimes also.” He agreed, promised to try. And he did.

But the sporadic feeling of him pulling back haunted me. In August, when my worries about his waning desire had reached too great a peak for me to ignore, he finally addressed it. Before, if I’d brought it up, he insisted I “ruminated too much,” needed to stop "focusing on the negatives," needed to "let things go." To be mindful, to stay in the present moment. “It’s normal for desire to ebb and flow in a relationship,” he said, though mine had only steadily increased. This time, as I rested my head against his broad chest and listened to the steady beat of his heart, he haltingly confessed that sometimes my belly bothered him.

“I can pay for you to get it fixed,” he said. “Remember how you’d mentioned your friend, and said you wished you had the money to do what she did?”

“My belly bothers you?” I said, lifting my head to stare at him, my mouth slightly wet with surprise. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

He turned away, lowered his voice. “It’s a thing that happens with me sometimes,” he said. “I wish it didn’t. I sometimes notice flaws in my girlfriends, and I feel badly about it.” Like the ex-girlfriend who had the body of a dancer in her twenties, as he reminded me, but her face was too "severe," and not that pretty. Like his favorite ex-girlfriend from his youth who was thin, but had a "little too much extra something" under her chin. He looked so upset at his flaw-finding radar that I wanted to comfort him, to stroke his hair. I was moved by the rare tears in his eyes.

“Look,” he said. “It’s not like you have to. It’s only if you want, if it’ll make you feel better about yourself. I’m offering to help. But if it’s not what you want, forget it.”

I was confused. I remembered talking about it that one time. But was this something I wanted? It had taken my friend, who’d paid for the surgery with the money she earned as a doctor, months to recover. This was different. This was something my lover offered, but would it make my body his if I went through with it? Surgery and its risks scared me. Risks, like fat embolisms that could kill me fast. I had a job and kids to look out for. When my slender teen once talked about needing a butt lift, I was startled, had discouraged my lovely girl from needing any alternations.

He didn’t mention it again for months. When I asked then why he brought it up again, he said, “I thought it might make it fun for both of us. Plus, it would help your backaches if you lessen the weight in front. I just want you to be healthy. But I’m ok if you don’t want to, so let’s drop it.” Another time, he said, “If you are going to do it, though, what’s the point of waiting? Get it done soon.”

He became more attentive once in a while. I felt better about not always worrying if I’d get a single night to make love, rather than only in the mornings. My desire outweighed his; I would have enjoyed both morning and night, as long as the nights weren’t skipped. It felt so much better to me before falling asleep. My body felt alive, ready, full open. I didn’t know why he ignited my desire this way. I had no experience with this. He, however, had been with many dozens of lovers. All of them in better shape than me. Most were younger; the few older ones were dancers or yoga teachers. I’d seen some around his town. His friends meditated, did yoga, went to group dances outdoors with ethnic music. It secretly irritated me when I heard music from my Indian culture being danced to by white folks who called it “mystical” and “exotic.”

Or when I saw the Ohm tattoo, a symbol sacred in Hinduism, displayed for the purposes of arousal on one of his twenty-something ex-girlfriend’s hip, just above her crotch. She wore low, see-through flowy pants to make sure it showed for all to see it. “Why doesn’t she just get a Mac and Cheese tattoo and stick with being American,” a Mexican friend of mine quipped when I told her about the tattoo. I laughed, picturing a bowl of Mac and Cheese luring a lover to that young dancer’s crotch.

For over two years, most of the times we were together in person, my lover and I were peaceful and relaxed. He calmed my anxious mind. I felt truly present with him in a way I hadn’t felt before. We had fun, never fought. We hiked, took beach walks, watched shows cuddled on the couch. He made sure to please me by consistently asking me what I needed, wanted. He bought me foods I loved, made me coffee in bed, gave me long, frequent massages to relieve pain in my back, my shoulders. He was always thoughtful and kind—unlike my ex-husband who had made his disdain for me openly apparent. I thought, with this new lover, that I could be my authentic self, that he accepted and loved it.

But sometimes, when we were apart, I tried to discuss my sense that at times he wasn’t as happy as he made me, and if I could do anything to help make it better. He said no. I tried to eat healthy, exercise. Some weight came off. He didn’t say he noticed. I hoped he did.

Slowly, he began to comment on my low self-esteem when I told him I noticed his withdrawal and asked if anything was wrong. “Don’t pry into my brain,” he said. “You should work on your self-esteem,” he said. He told me, when he’d first seen my dating ad and reached out, that he’d falsely assumed I was a confident person because of my big smile. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Nothing,” he said.

I started buying weight loss products online, tummy-shrinkers, pills, gadgets. I spent hundreds to be who he wanted me to be. I thought, when he came to my house for Valentine’s weekend and hung his art up on my walls, bought hardware to fix things broken in my house, went hiking with me, made love to me, that things were better. I’m That I was on the way to becoming the flat-bellied woman he wanted.

Days after our blissful Valentine’s weekend, he ended it by email. No warning. Said he considered me a “dear friend” rather than lover. “Don’t contact me for a few months,” he said. “I’m struggling. Need to clear my mind.” He said he couldn’t deal with discussing anything “heavy” for a long while. “My hope is that we’ll be close friends one day,” he wrote. “I care about you deeply. I just don’t think our goals match, despite how great we’d been together.”

I dropped to the floor, curled into a ball, screamed. My fingers pounded out desperate messages to which he didn’t respond. No contact. I learned a new kind of grief. We’d talked about getting a house together. What happened?

Within weeks, he started dating a woman twenty-four years younger.

“Should I have gotten the surgery?” I asked my teenaged daughter one of the times when I couldn’t stop crying.

“If you had, Mamma,” she said, “you would have taught me that I could never be good enough as I am. I am proud of you for not giving in to him.”

In the end, I stayed my authentic self, a self to which I slowly returned after nearly a year of vacillating between mourning and rage. I stayed myself for my daughter, so that she may know that to be one's self is the only thing one should ever be--the only thing a woman should ever be.

* * *

On an evening nearly a year after my breakup, my kids wander separately into my bedroom where I'm reading against my pillows. My daughter crawls onto my bed, rests her head against my belly.

"You're so soft, Mamma," she says.

"I know, right?" my son says as he leaps onto the sheets next to me. He pushes on my belly with his long, shapely finger.

"Would you guys have been pissed if I'd sucked this belly away?" I ask.

They both shout YES! "Never get rid of this," my son commands, his black curls blending with my daughter's wavy brown hair as their warm heads meet atop my soft, ample belly.