Wednesday, December 6, 2017

Looking Again at Venus

"It's Pahbo' s hair! " I lamented to my sister.  Pahbo was our grandfather--the first of what turned out to be three Robert Leslie Pettigrews in our family ; a man who had spent much of his life growing sisal plants in Haiti.  "Pahbo" was the Haitian word for "bad", and he said it to my sister so much when she was a toddler she assumed it was his name and it stuck. He was Pahbo to his three Pennsylvania born grandchildren throughout our childhoods.  I have inherited his thick head of hair.  It is one of the few visible connections I still  have to a man I adored, and one of the few things I like about my body. 


"I don't want to look sick! " I told a friend later.  I had spent more than enough time fighting the perception that using a wheelchair meant I was sick.  Now I would have to fight it all over again.


Some years ago when I began this blog,
 I wrote about my favorite goddess.  I wanted a statue of Venus of Willendorf, I said, because she was the only deity who was obese and I needed her reminder that my clearly overweight body  was sacred.  So I bought myself a small figurine of her which sits on one of my bookshelves.  The other day I sat staring blankly for several minutes in front of that shelf.  At some point I noticed she wears what looks like a hat on her bald head.   " Maybe she's been through chemotherapy, " I thought.   "And maybe bodies that have been through chemo are sacred too."