i am a mother and a minister, and it struck me yesterday that these are two vocations in which one is often expected to be superhuman. and by “superhuman,” i mean not human at all; above being human; perfect. an interesting facet of this expectation of superhuman-ness is that in both cases, it includes a sort of disembodied existance. the body will get you every time, with its animal ways and love of gravity! my world is marked by clerical robes and nursing covers, both of which i am usually happy to hide behind out of fear that my body might be objectified or labeled as shameful and inappropriate.

meanwhile, young mothers in every profession are experiencing their bodies as the main event. it is difficult to ignore the body when it expands to carry another life, acts as a one-woman-catering-service for a little one, and contracts (usually in all the wrong areas) before it’s time to start the cycle again. perhaps this is why i love the kind of honesty about the body found in ayelet waldman’s bad mother:

“how well i remember [my] rack! those perky breasts that hovered just below my chin. those pert nipples. that swelling cleavage. after four children and a full seventy-two months of breast-feeding, the last six of which were spent with my nipples clamped in the death vise of a breast pump, it is only by dint of foundation garments designed by teams of MIT professors who otherwise spend their days drawing up plans for the world’s longest suspension bridges that my breasts achieve a shape even approximating round. when i undo the clasps, buckles, straps, and hoists of these miraculous feats of engineering, my boobs tumble to the ground like boulders falling off a cliff. i could polish my shoes with my nipples” (28). 

it is my job, as a minister, to talk about miracles. turning water into wine, walking on water, and raising people from the dead are common topics of conversation for me. so why, for the love of god, should i refrain from talking about the miracle-working powers of a good bra?

on the list of things that have transformed my life are things like martin buber’s i and thou, viktor frankl’s man’s search for meaning, marcus borg’s concept of jesus, and now this:

this is the SPANX bra-llelujah full-coverage, front-closureunderwire bra. yes, it is expensive, but is it really possible to put a price on comfort and this carefully-engineered, non-surgical restoration of one’s pre-kid shape?

friends, hear the good news! we do not have to super-human. we simply have to invest in super-human undergarments.

brallelujah!

[the source for this post can be found on the bibligraphy page located on the sidebar to your right.]

Tags: ayelet waldman, bad mother, bodies, boobs, bra, bra-llelujah, breasts, minister, mother, spanx

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at 7:34 am and is filed under embodiment, perfection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.