View from the North 40: It's an ugly attitude, really

Lacking most signs of those qualities commonly referred to as feminine, I have been content to go through life as I started it, as a tomboy. Life would be a jean-clad and dirty finger-nailed slice of heaven if this were the end of the story.

However, my constant companion, Irony, not being one to leave well-enough alone, did give me a few feminine traits, and chief among those is body image issues that plague primarily females. This problem is also called “imagined ugliness,” though I and everyone else with the problem would insist it isn’t imagined.

I do my part to keep America beautiful by keeping as much of me covered with loose fitting clothes as I possibly can without actually adopting the burkqa fashion statement so popular among the Islamic faithful. Even I can recognize that voyage too far into crazy town when I think it.

All that said, imagine my reaction the first time I naively limped, sore of muscle and tired of spirit from pain and lack of sleep, into my appointment for a massage, and the masseuse said, “Just remove all your clothes and climb up on this bed, face down under the sheet.”

“All?” I managed to say?

“Yes, socks, too,” she said.

Right, like that’s the clothing I wanted to keep on, because her seeing my bare feet was my biggest worry.

But I suddenly realized that nakedness was what I’d signed on for with the massage, and desperate times call for desperate measures, so I stripped and I exposed my hideous body.

Oddly, I’d be lying if I said I agonized for a long time about her having to bear the sight of my very real ugliness — because about 30 seconds into the massage I was lost.

I’d be lying, too, if I said I was lost in the euphoria of the release of muscle tension because ... nope. Nope. No, not really. I was lost in a world of trying to remember to breathe through a whole new level of pain as her magic fingers worked some kind of hoodoo in a battle against the evil knots that had invaded my muscles.

In the end, it was a beautiful piece of earth-mother magic she worked on me, and I felt worth every square inch of nakedness I had to endure.

I tipped her for having to endure that sight, though. Remember, I know this is not an imagined ugliness.

I’ve been back over the years and most recently a few weeks ago when I went in battered and knotted, middle age having taken its toll on my body’s ability to recover from the abuses I heap on it through sitting too much between bouts of playing or working too physically — and through my knack for extreme and ridiculous accidents.

Middle age has also taken a toll through expansion of some parts, like my girth, and sagging of other parts, which don't need to be named. I look back on my former ugliness with yearning for the good times.

Unfortunately for the earth-mother with the magic hands, I have become quite comfortable torturing her eyes with the sight of my hideousness. As I snuggled under that sheet, naked as the day I was born so many decades ago, I briefly pitied her having to see this sight.

I considered warning her to avert her eyes and just feel out the knots. Poor woman.

Hot on the heels of that there was only me trying to breathe through that strange combination of pain and relief as she attacked the knots in my wretched body.

She found muscle knots I hadn’t even realized I’d been enduring. Afterward, I commented about all those knots, and she said, “Honey, you didn’t have a lot of knots, you were one big knot.”

I, of course, thought that I must’ve looked even worse than I had imagined, she probably wanted to avert her gaze on her own, just to save her eyes the pain of looking at me.

The next morning, as happens when your body has been the site of a struggle between good and evil forces, I felt like someone had worked me over with a baseball bat, a flour sack full of rocks and a Taser.

I knew I’d feel better in the long run. And I did.

But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t hoping just a little bit, that morning after, that her eyes were equally sore from the sight of me — an ugly, but fitting, payback.

(I’m not very nice either. Nope. Nope. No, not really at [email protected].)