I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. I spent several hours with a bunch of women at a Korean spa in Los Angeles. The place is an unassuming building in Koreatown, adjacent to a driveway full of potholes, and valet runners, and homeless men wandering the streets. It’s like many other places in Los Angeles.
Once inside, women of all colors, sizes, and ages mingle in various saunas, hot tubs, cold tubs, and open showers. Some socialize, some are silent. The older (and much wiser) Korean women sit together near a long trough full of warm water, and scrub each other’s backs. They talk without looking at each other, and rub at the same spot on their legs and arms and bellies for forty-five minutes at a time. I wonder if they all know each other or if they just make conversation because they are all here and naked next to each other, and there is not much else to do.
There is protocol. Always shower. After entering a spa, the body sweats, so you have to shower before doing anything else. It keeps the place, and each other, clean and sanitary. When you sit on something, you use a small towel as a barrier. There are women in the corners who call out numbers all day. When your number is called, you get a scrub from head to toe (yes, head to toe and everything in between). I can’t remember ever being this clean – certainly I was not after birth. The whole place reminds me of a tropical river, a constantly flowing stream of warm and cold water, steam and earth smells, and creatures everywhere. The murmur of female voices at first gets lost in the shock of being naked. After settling in, my ears become tuned to all the voices. The voices are all different, like the bodies they inhabit, like the animals along a riverbank. Some are high-pitched and raise at the end of sentences, signaling some mention of playfulness. Some are lower and firmer and stick to the tile and water. Some are hidden voices, requiring many heads to pull in tight, while others sing to the corners of the room without effort. All the sounds, taken together, are like my imagining of a woman’s womb, the place where we are all created and perhaps recreated, where somehow there is enough space to contain the world and especially our own selves.
We all look at each other. We look in curiosity, in fascination, and with no nonsense. We look at each others bodies to see ourselves, perhaps. It is the way a child looks at a grown man and understands that he will one day be just like him, or the way an elder looks at a teenager and remembers when she had crushes on boys. It happens in a moment of humble acceptance – a physical understanding that life is a continuum. In that moment, it's clear that our bodies are stories unfolding, and the imperfections are beautiful. The imperfections are marks of life itself.
It takes me days to process this experience, not because I have to (indeed, it is such a humble and quiet thing that it passes into memory easily and without fanfare), but because it struck something true, and that is worth pursuing. Many have said that we women are uncomfortable with our bodies because society has so sexualized us, and has made us objects. Some say we barely stand to look at ourselves in the mirror because we believe we are not sexy enough, not beautiful enough, not desirable enough. In fact, I don’t think that’s the case, by and large. I don’t believe that every woman wants to be supermodel-beautiful, or wants men to imagine being in bed with her at every glance. Instead, consider this. Do we women believe our bodies are the most fundamental representation of how ‘in control’ we are of ourselves and our lives? We fight to be perfect, to control our calories, to only eat organic, gluten-free, sugar-free, whole-grain, non-gmo foods. We try to starve ourselves to fit an ideal, or we rebel by eating everything we want. When it’s too hard, we give up, then we punish ourselves because we lost control. As our world becomes increasingly chaotic, do we see our bodies as a last bastion of power? If we can shape the details of our bodies, minimize our love handles, and perfectly predict the size of our breasts (and make sure others notice), perhaps we can prove that we are worthy of the goodness in our lives.
Since I’m thirty now, and since I have been naked with women in the spa womb, I can say with confidence that all of that is crazy talk. Controlling every detail of ones body doesn’t mean you have control of your life, and controlling everything doesn’t make anyone worthy of anything except maybe ‘controller of the year’ award. In fact, acceptance – of oneself and others – gets more mileage when it comes to being happy and productive. The fascination of all the flaws in ourselves and others might allow us to see beauty, and give us vision to see what’s important. In the spa the important thing is getting clean. Out here in the world, maybe it is letting go of the distractions, so we are free to take hold of what makes life worth living.
A friend of mine sent me a message wishing me a ‘transformational’ birthday. One thing I can say is this: It was certainly a rite of passage into a new era of embracing the whole story of life, as time moves gloriously forward.
