When the Body Breaks
Torn ACLs and the broken promise (that was never made)
First up, I had the pleasure of getting to talk to the Washington Post’s Megan McArdle about The Dignity of Dependence. Megan and I are very temperamentally similar, while, politically, she’s far more libertarian than I am. You can check it out as an audio podcast or as video below. (Uh, sorry about the thumbnail).
Second, I want to point back at the comments to Débora Luciano’s longer response to where she and I agree and differ (interesting throughout!) which begins as follows:
Our starting point seems to be the same: the inescapable reality of the body and the knowledge of its suffering.
The female body confronts us with asymmetry, limitation, vulnerability, and, as you put it way better than me, dependence. For women in particular, these realities are difficult to ignore, because they are inscribed so visibly in fertility, pregnancy, and in the long history of expectations that have surrounded them.
Some time ago, we had a lively conversation on the limits of the body sparked by a NYT feature on ACL injuries in girls sports. As the article pointed out: Girls are 3-6x more likely than boys to tear their ACLs in youth sports. Girls committed to year-round soccer schedules have a 1 in 6 chance of tearing their ACL before getting their high school diploma.
Part of this is the result of not offering girls warm up exercises that are tailored to their particular bodies, and respond to the real asymmetries between men and women. Part of it is a frustration (that men are vulnerable to, too) that you need to take time away from the real sports work to do the extraneous-feeling stretches. Shouldn’t the body just work without so much maintenance?
I asked Other Feminisms readers to respond to a few questions, including:
Where do you find it hardest to see the body as cross and gift?
Where do you spot temptations toward “a gnostic refusal of… suffering, of incarnation, and ultimately of creation itself” outside the domain of sexed asymmetries?
Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?
I appreciated Bethany’s firm response to “When is it alleviation of suffering and when is it refusal of suffering?”
Every example I can think of can go either way, yet it would be an even more cruel and unjust world if culture prioritized acceptance of suffering over alleviation. Am I refusing my createdness if I seek hormone therapy to ease my perimenopause symptoms? Brain fog, fatigue, depression, and anxiety already threaten to consume my waking hours, and it’s only been a few months (I have other tell-tale symptoms as well, but these are the burdensome ones). Do laboring mothers reject frailty when they use epidurals?
I appreciate the idea of accepting one’s own givenness, I even advocate for it at times. And I know that it is often pro-life to alleviate suffering. So perhaps it’s the brain fog, but I’m having trouble seeing how these values are balanced here.
I replied in thread, but, in brief, I think there are times when it is all attitude, and you could have two women receiving the same treatment (say, an epidural) in different spirits, one of which represented a rejection of the body, one of which did not.
A good friend of mine suggested, before my first delivery, that if I was ever going to have an epidural, I should do it for my first labor. The first labor is usually the longest, she said, and the one where you most want to get relief, take a little rest, and reserve your strength for pushing.
She framed her recommendation through what best served my body as it was. Someone else could have framed it as a response to the injustice of labor being hard / described a desire to absent herself, which wouldn’t have been compelling for me at all. (I did not have an epidural—I did have an emergency C section when my baby was in distress after an hour of pushing). I appreciated the section on epidurals in Emily Oster’s Expecting Better where she and a friend go through the pros and cons and make opposite choices based on how they weight the pluses and minuses.
Overall, I think about whether I’m trying to restore wholeness/integrated function or whether I feel like I’m rejecting the body as encumbrance. And I have a little bit of an attraction to the playfulness of some transhumanist ideas (like sticking a magnet in your hand). But 1) I haven’t done it and 2) if I did, I hope I’d do it in the spirit of an architect designing an arch in playful collaboration with gravity, rather than in the spirit of seeing my body as what Mary Harrington has so memorably termed “a meat Lego.”
Elizabeth took a crack at “Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?”
Where support is not immediately available--a widespread problem w/o a singular clear solution. It’s all very well to say and believe that I personally have physical limits or needs--but what about the effects on people who also depend on me? Like, if I need to stay in bed all day, my young children are going to be negatively affected, b/c my husband’s job is not set up for flexibility and, while we do have supportive friends, we don’t currently have grownups who could drop everything to help on a moment’s notice. It sometimes feels more “realistic” to just try to muscle through, even though that’s ultimately less truthful (not to mention more harmful)!
Her answer parallels a question I’ve gotten repeatedly throughout the Dignity of Dependence book tour: Aren’t there some good things about stigmatizing dependence? Doesn’t the desire to not be dependent impel people to push harder, to overcome things they can overcome, rather than lie back and give up / mooch off of others?
I usually answer by saying that I think lots of the good things that come out of yearning for independence can be better sought through the language of stewardship.
How can I do right by what’s been entrusted to me?
How can being entrusted change my view of myself and how I want to grow to be worthy of that trust?
When does doing right by what I steward mean asking for someone else to step in when my strength fails?
I think we can be called to be faithful stewards of our wounds and weaknesses, as well as of our strengths and talents. Each is entrusted to us for today, with no promise made of what will come tomorrow. How can I act rightly now, based on what I have had placed in my hands?
I just think you have to hold all these things (including strengths) lightly, expecting some day you will have to set them down.
As Emily wrote in response to “Where do you find it hardest to accept that frailty is not a passing interruption of a natural state of strength?”
Increasing age. All of the brain synapses still know how to direct performance of dozens of tasks that the rest of the body just can’t carry out. The disconnect between what your brain can direct and what your body can carry out can be simply maddening. Or... it can just be a flat lesson that you are not the boss of you.
A full anthropology needs a way to articulate what a good life looks like during periods of illness and aging, not just seasons of high agency.
In the last 2 years I have suffered through: ovarian cysts, endometriosis surgery, fertility treatments, an HG pregnancy, preeclampsia, an emergency c-section, c-section incision dehiscence and evisceration, and now caring for my newborn has been complicated by her own medical issues. Feeling like my body is out of sync with my intellect and desires is something I’m very familiar with. I also wrestle with knowing where my limits are and how to work with what I have to do what I strictly need to do in terms of duty/obligation and the things I want to do to make me feel like myself (creative outlets or reading or time with friends). I don’t have any answers for me or for anyone else, but at some point figuring out that it’s unreasonable to be perpetually operating at peak performance was spiritually helpful because it made it clear to me that spending the times when I am sick fretting about all the things I think I should be doing is a temptation to resent suffering that is inevitable and unavoidable anyway (and consequently to be MORE miserable). And I think about the Agony in the Garden and Jesus’ human frailty and desire to escape suffering a lot.
I've really been mulling on this one as I've contemplated breast cancer treatment. I wrote a long piece about it here: https://slowprocessing.substack.com/p/what-is-freedom-for
I've gone through a couple of prophylactic drugs and they haven't gone well. I headed to the oncologist last week with these ponderings:
If I were my mother, diagnosed with leukemia at age 50, or Ben Sasse, given the awful news of stage 4 cancer, would I choose a different course? Probably. If the murky horizon offered only death or painful, constantly medicated life, perhaps I’d take the pain for some number of months to say goodbye and get my affairs in order. Honestly, I don’t know.
I’m with Catholicism on assisted suicide, but what of choosing less suffering and less longevity, not actively choosing death, but intentionally choosing a shorter, un-medicated life? I’ve consulted around to my personal circle of religious ethicists and it seems I’m under no obligation to endure daily suffering for possible better cancer outcomes but, of course, I try not to deal in rights and obligations, but rather gifts and sacrifices.
What I know clearly is that my life is not my own. By virtue of many choices my body and the implications of my health are shared with my husband Ben and the kids and my co-worker Meridith, to a lesser degree with the families we support at Lydia’s House, and at a mystical level with Christ and the Church. I no longer have such a thing as bodily autonomy, despite what the oncologist said. I’ve talked to Ben and Meridith. They agreed with me not to have the full mastectomy, not to continue tamoxifen or exemestene. But the worry is present; it’s not light when I bring up these questions.