On Intergenerational Strength and Women’s Bodies in the World / Monika, Artist and Educator

So my grandmother was Swiss German. She was born and raised in Basel, in the German part of Basel. And she, in her body and in her spirit, were both very much German and very much Swiss. And there’s a really specific distinction.
So the German in her is sort the very strong, she was the equivalent of maybe five feet nine. So she was a tall woman, swam, she was active, very, very sport — whenever I speak about my grandmother, my mind goes to want to speak in Swiss German.So you know, there’s a connection where my brain just glitches immediately .. sporty, that’s a bad word. Sport. She liked sports. She did a lot of sports and she was very healthy in that way. And she was, at the time of her being a young woman and then getting married, she was very unusual. And that was, I think, partly the Swiss in her and partly her personality and how her body spoke to her.

In the Swiss, just to sort of describe that, there is a more joyful activity than the Germans traditionally have. And I don’t mean to be essentialist, but I can immediately tell if someone’s Swiss or if they’re German, and not just because of the way that they might be pronouncing, but in their bodies, they’re held differently. There’s a different sense of, in a very generalized way, of how the body speaks or how the body is held.

And for her, what I learned through her was the strength part of the body, non-gendered in ways that don’t deny gender but aren’t trapped in gender the way that, for instance, my mother was, so my mother is very trapped in gender and very trapped in her body, seeing it in a particular way through a lens of misogyny, et cetera. But my grandmother was not.

Part of that, I believe, is she was a part of a large family and she had three sisters and one brother and many, many cousins. But of the siblings, she was always kind of left alone to do her own thing because the older daughter was expected to get married first. And this daughter was expected to do that and the son was expected. And she sort of lived in this area where there weren’t as many expectations on her.

Where this started to change, and I find it really interesting that it didn’t… My experience of her body, however this might have changed over the course of her life, seems less affected by her marriage than I see other peoples. And for instance, than I see my mothers.

And she continued to be active and continued to be an individualist in thinking and in everyday life. And she was the sort of woman that was… She wasn’t mothering. She was affectionate and she gave hugs, but it wasn’t in this sort of smothering, mothering way. There was a stateliness to her in the way that she carried herself.
And I remember from a very young age that her emphasis in talking with me about bodies in general or if she made a comment about me, had almost only ever to do with strength. So I remember that from swimming and skiing and all of these activities that she was involved with and taught me that there was no comment on, “You look good,” or something about weight or something.

There was only ever commentary on, “Your calves Look really strong right now,” which is an amazing thing to grow up with, even if I didn’t see her very often. And what I brought from that, what actually sunk in for me, was a trust in the strength of my body. And to the point where early in my adulthood, people thought I was nuts because I would carry things that didn’t seem likely. And I was very much smaller then.

So I was 110 pounds, I was very slim, but I trusted my body to be able to do things. And I pushed my body in sometimes bad ways, but also in good ways and relied on myself. It was when I started to get older, there was an incident that shaped how I later then felt negatively about my body and started to come in conflict with this other nurturing.
And I will say that part of the conflict already started earlier because my mother, as I said, is very much tied into thinness, very much tied into ageism, these things that are normalized for women in ways that, again, I didn’t see in my grandmother. At least She wasn’t displaying that to me and she wasn’t putting that on me as a granddaughter.
And this incident actually, it happened when I was about 18 years old and I had left high school a year early. I finished high school and then I traveled for that year through Europe and met up with various people, some I knew in advance and some I didn’t.

This was a time that… What am I trying to say? I think I was starting to come into a sexuality that certainly there was a sensuality and I had experimented with sex before this, but not a lot. This summer was really kind of this burgeoning sexuality that was coming out in very clear ways.

So this, I’ll describe in more detail, but this incident I think really, really created a riff between that, the start to that and being able to carry that forward in a healthy way and starting to feel shame about my body. And the incident that occurred, I was in Spain.

My grandparents had a small apartment on the Costa Brava, North of Barcelona. And, as I said, I was about 18 and my grandfather at some point started to make me feel very uncomfortable. And I tried to position myself to spend less and less time with him.

And one day I was up on, our apartment was on the top floor, the eighth floor. And so we had access to the roof and on the roof we would, as children we would make tents, but that was also where the laundry was. And so when we hung up laundry to dry. And I was up there, I can’t remember what I was doing because what happened took that away from, sort of cut off whatever other memories of that day in particular.

And basically he asked me if I would pose for a photograph for him. And I said, “I’m not sure. Why do you want this?” And he said, “Don’t worry, I won’t show anyone else.” And I’m like, “Ooh, no, if you’re not going to show anyone else, there’s definitely something creepy.” And he said, “I want you to pose in your bathing suit for me for this picture, and I’ll just keep it to myself.”

I’m like, “I’m not comfortable with any of this,” but I didn’t have the language to say any of this of course. So I just sort of extricated myself from that situation. And then I think I left a couple days later to go onto my next destination.
What that did was create, as I said, sort of a rift in the way that I was starting to feel about my body and some of the difficulty and challenges that I had as a Brown person in an almost all white community that we grew up in. And I was starting to sort of come out of that because there was, again, for better or worse, this other kind of attention that was responding to my becoming very sexually active or I don’t know, active, active, but sexually inclined or my sexuality becoming very apparent, was helping me overcome some of these other things in terms of what beauty standards were, et cetera.

And this really stopped that whole process from becoming a healthy one for me. And was the start… I didn’t see it clearly at the time, of course, this is all in hindsight that I understand what happened and when it happened, but it became a battle that I had with my perception of myself and the ideas of beauty, the ideas of value as a woman, safety issues, psychologically safe issues, emotionally safe issues.

All of these things became really fraught and very conflicted. And my experience of the world became mediated through my body in a different way. And that was something that I struggled with for most of my adult life after that. In ways that encompassed eating disorders or drugs, things that would help me regulate moderate my weight or how I looked, struggle with other ways of being unsafe.

So putting myself in dangerous positions, et cetera, et cetera, dangerous situations. And this really carried on for many, many years. This carried on to when I met David. So it’s that long. That from 18 to about 38, 37. So 30 years of struggling with this.

I did discover this moment. My aunt, who is my grandmother’s niece, is someone that does healing therapy and what is called re birthing. So she’s very in tune in a different way with kind of mindfulness and therapy and working with individuals by helping them reexperience things specifically to through this process.
And when my grandmother was dying, which was Sophia, So Sophia was born about a year before she died, before my grandmother died. And I’m also really interested just sort of, I guess, in the sort of universal spiritual, how that circle kind of closed and opened itself.

But in terms of this moment where I was in Switzerland, because she had then passed away, my aunt at the time did a session with me, and that’s when it came out specifically about this incident that happened that I actually had no recollection of until that moment. So it was that deeply shocking to me and harmful to me that I actually had completely closed it off from any memories that I had of my childhood.

And that’s not to say that he was violent or that he touched me in any physical way, but just the shock of discovering that I was an object and not safe in the presence of, in that way, in the psychological, emotional way, in the presence of someone that I trusted was how I functioned in the rest of my adult life.

So then there was this transference, I always think of it, and it’s so bad, I don’t mean to relegate Sophia to something that she’s not, but the death of my grandmother and Sophia had been born about a year and a half before she died and she had met my grandmother once, she doesn’t remember, but my grandmother met her once, helped me rethink myself in the context of raising a daughter and helped bring back the sort of other messaging, the messaging about strength and the messaging about the casting off of the veneer and all of the things that we as women, and men, but speaking from my experience as a woman and my experience in the world, seeing all the marketing and the myth making and the oppressive expectations that women face in regard to their bodies.

And it’s not that I have cast it off. I’ve only in the continued process of trying to actively remember what it felt like and to give only that to my daughter from me. She’s going to get the other staff, there’s nothing I can do, but I’m not ever going to comment in these ways that create the conformity of a particular expectation and particular kind of language around women’s bodies, female’s bodies.

And I was very pleased. There are a couple of incidents where I felt that something may have… I’m always a little bit awkward because I don’t want to take ownership for this. I think that Sophia is her own person also. But I do think that some of what I’m seeing is related to this other way of being in the world.

She’s not body shy at all and she doesn’t have the consciousness. And it’s not just because of her age because she should be extremely uncomfortable with her body right now. This is the worst time in a young girl’s life as she’s 13, 14. She should be feeling really awkward, probably. And she doesn’t. She doesn’t feel awkward about her body. She doesn’t want people to comment on it. She doesn’t like when you say anything about it. And she’ll tell you, she’ll just say, “Why did you say that? I don’t want you to say that.” Or, “Don’t tell me that.”

And she doesn’t have the kind of hangups that I still feel… I was speaking with a friend of mine, Nef, who I actually stay with when I come to New York. And I was telling her this story and we both remarked, and I’ll tell you in a moment, we both remarked, even in my telling the story, I was still a little bit, I don’t know if shame, but just a little uncomfortable telling it. And she remarks that she was as well. She was like, “Yeah.”

It’s amazing how Sophia and other girls in her generation that have this kind of support are able to have a relationship with their bodies that is very different. So a friend of mine and her daughter, and her daughter is about the same age as Sophia, and Sophia and I do a lot of stuff together. And one of the things that is a tradition of ours is to go to the Korean spa. And we do this four or five times a year and have done it since the girls were very little.
So we all grew up with our bodies in this environment where everybody’s naked and everybody’s walking around and doing sort of normal things and we’re not on display in a performative way. And so I think that also helped Sophia’s understanding of herself.

One day the two girls were talking and I had come from the chain, wherever I was, and sort of turned the corner and I overheard them saying, “Well, I don’t know. I’m thinking maybe tampons are easier than pads. I’m not really sure.” And the other one saying, “Yeah, but I heard that tampons might be awkward to use for the first time.” And then the first one saying, “Well, yeah, maybe we can have someone show us how to use a tampon. That might be really helpful.”
And this sort of discussion went on for a while and rolled up in that was just this, and neither of them had menstruated yet, neither of them had their period. They were just sort of in advanced talking about how you might deal with that. And carrying that forward, Sophia was really not… Anytime something happened or was changing in her body, she would come to either David, or myself, which I think is a really big thing to talk about it and be able to ask a question or having to do with puberty and her body changing in very specific ways and that, it’s quite heartwarming.

And at the same time, I’m still stuck with the shame of my not being in that same place, and not that I blame myself, but just the emotional ramifications and the lasting effects of body shaming through being objectified or through an unsafe situation in some way also creates a difficult space for me with my daughter.
I feel sometimes that I’m almost performative because I want to be better than I am in that, right? I don’t want to be ashamed that my body is changing and it’s getting older and now I have a belly and whatever. My breasts are sagging and I don’t want the sort of conditioning that I went through to be carried through to her understanding of an aging body.

That’s not to say that my feelings aren’t real, and that’s not to say that she and I can’t talk about them at some point, but I don’t want to approach my body in her presence as something to be ashamed of because it’s aging.