Hands, by Dina Stander, https://www.dinastander.com/

Pages 59-62 from Housewife Blues: dispatches from the garden of broken things, Dina Stander 2021

The latest round of high tech imaging of my deteriorating spine has had an unexpected side effect. My husband is afraid that I might break if he touches me in some inexplicably wrong way he could not possibly anticipate. This is not a surface fear, it is not overt or even (especially not even) spoken. Instead it is articulated through his finger tips; I cannot earn back their trust of my resilience. After twenty-five years of being touched by one man, this sensory change is more frightening to me than the growing numbness in my legs or the list of other physical changes I can expect to experience as my neurological disease progresses.

What comes through my husband's finger tips is worry. It used to be just the pleasure of feeling my skin.

There are so many things that change, and don't, in a long marriage. This one thing, being touched with confidence, should not change. I still want his hands on me, firmly tracing contours and curves. The same hands that burnished my flank through my twenties and soothed my brow during childbirth, now, in middle age, have gained a hesitation.

I want that hesitation to go. It reminds me that I am flawed under my skin, inside my bones. I cannot fix or cut away these flaws, though we sometimes try to make small corrections. My orthopedic surgeon, when I ask, explains his personal theory about people like me, whose spines degenerate without exacerbating injury, wondering aloud if I may have a genetic something that effects the way the body builds collagen, "maybe when we know more," he sighs. For now he advises me to expect change and make the most of the mobility I have.

I had a body that delighted in the pleasure inherent in itself. A body that could feel all the places a hand might touch. Now there are blank areas where sensation is indistinct, like trying to feel through the sensory equivalent of snow on a TV screen. Now there are repercussions to touch. Quadrants of my skin tingle sharply, the brush of a hand triggering an unpleasant buzz back to the nerve root.

Talking about having a disability sometimes entails casting modesty aside, so I will tell you that after spine surgery a number of years ago I found that at a certain stage of sexual stimulation I crossed a sensational threshold into nothingness. After a little panic and some long thinking, redirecting and practice, I have developed a new cascade of feeling. It almost works if I concentrate and then don't concentrate at just the right moment. 

I am too old to be surprised that sex is such a coyote trickster, and I don't care so much about orgasm any more, but when my partner is worried he could harm me if he moves wrong — well sometimes you just have to give up, lay there, and laugh till it stops hurting.

I am learning to navigate this changing relationship with myself, but the lessons don't come easy. I have no map for exploring the shifting terrain of my physicality. I like to imagine there are wonders I have yet to discover.

Like many middle-aged women I mourn youth and beauty. Not in a vain way-but I hadn't expected my sensual life to fade away like this. I can accept the incremental steps of honoring who I see in the mirror, but when I am most honest with the woman looking back at me, I am haunted by questions that reveal an aching vulnerability. Will my husband unlearn this hesitation in his hand? Or will it spread quietly to his eyes and then his lips? I keep wanting to tell him that only my heart will break, not my bones, if this becomes the status quo. Fear catches the words.

This is the aspect of my condition that I cannot quantify when my doctor asks me to list the five things that hurt the most. This loss hurts the most but there is no medicine for it. I am lonely because being touched no longer feels good; lonely even though my life is rich in friendship. For a time in my teens I was homeless. Lately I feel like pain has put me on the outside of "normal" in a way similar to homelessness. I am made a little bit but perpetually a vagabond because I cannot get comfortable in my own skin.

Recently, walking in the woods I found a sunny spot and curled up on the forest floor. I thought it would be restful for just a while to be a little animal in a big woods. I made a nest of my coat and lay there, letting the forest touch me in a time-lapse dream, connecting me elementally between sky and root, stone and bone, rain and tears. I lay there until this wild need for hands feeling good on my skin had wept itself quiet again and left me empty of the needing.

Sometimes, I wake in the middle of the night and lay listening to my husband snore, keeping rhythm with the tree frogs outside. When I roll him to stop the snoring a hand reaches out to me. While he sleeps this hand remembers only how soft and familiar I feel. His touch is tender, resting an arm across my side and warming my stomach with light fingers. I curl myself around this gift, this hand that remembers my youth and can still feel the pulse of love in me.