The Navel Diaries: How I Lost My Belly Button and Found Myself

By Diann Logan

The Navel Diaries is Diann Logan’s humorous and poignant observations about getting older. The stunning in-ey navel has morphed into a despicable out-ey and that’s just the start. Creaking joints and whiskers, drooping bustline and sagging sense of purpose—it’s all here and then some. Join her as she picks her way through the prickly landscape of maturity, determined to maintain high hopes and forward momentum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9780986381232

Book preview

2016

Where It All Begins

Once again today, I am gazing at my navel. Not contemplating it, just gazing at it morosely— no, just staring at it with hostility, mourning lost youth. On some occasions, the intensity of this reverie moves me to tears. I practice this reverse down-lifting meditation to lower my self-esteem at least once a day. If I really start counting, I guess it’s a lot more often than that—obsessive even—after every bath, sometimes while sitting on the toilet, almost every time I change clothes. I don’t get a chance to do it if I’m in a rush to get dressed because I hear my beloved husband coming up the stairs. He hasn’t seen my navel more than three times in the past four years, and he’s not allowed to touch it. That’s because it’s ugly.

Coughing my way through the first bout of pneumonia produced a cracked rib and a teensy little tear in the ring of muscle that surrounds the navel. The second round of pneumonia two years later irritated that rib something awful and finished the job on the navel. I gave myself an umbilical hernia. I have an out-ey now, and I despise it, loath it with every fiber of the rest of my … too flowery. Let’s just say it looks like a damn elephant trunk, and I can’t stand the sight of it; and I can’t stop looking at it.

I’m disappointed in myself. I thought I’d be one of those women who grow old gracefully. Of course, I was younger when I thought that thought. As the decades passed, I began to waver a bit, walking the line between grudging acceptance and almost tolerance. For the last decade, more pronounced evidence of how long I’ve been on the planet has surfaced and I’ve been getting a little irked. Losing my navel was the last straw. Now I’m really pissed.

I have an ugly navel. It’s the ugliest thing about me.

It wasn’t always so. I was blessed with a stunning flat belly and an absolutely gorgeous navel—an in-ey—not a deep trench but a perfectly shaped little circlet of tissue nestled in a lusciously sexy tight ring of muscle, perched in exactly the right locale on that magnificent belly.

I actually didn’t know I had all that till the boys told me. I thought I had a belly button … till the boys told me. Teenage boys, what do they know? Well, they go to movies with Sophia Loren in them, and they pay homage to posters on their bedroom walls. The boys told me, You’re built just like Sophia Loren, and You have the tiniest waist, and Your navel is even sexier than Raquel Welch’s. I lapped it up. If you’re old enough to recognize those names, you also realize how I developed an unreasonable admiration for my own navel.

It was the one thing I had. Every girl/woman gets at least one thing, you know. That’s my theory, that we all get at least one thing that matches the ideal. That thing points us in the direction of pretty, brings us one small step closer to acceptable, or keeps us from being totally without any hope of ever feeling more than two percent okay when we look in the mirror. Yes, we all get at least one thing that makes all the others envy us and wish they had a whatever-it-is like ours. It could be a crowning glory of hair, preferably at least shoulder length and blond. It could be a peaches-and-cream complexion that doesn’t know the meaning of zit. It could be wide baby-blue eyes fringed with long curly lashes. It could be a cute nose, a pert turned-up nose, dusting of freckles optional. It could be luscious or perky breasts attached to rosy nipples. It could be long shapely legs. It could be a darling little giggle or any of dozens of other beauty essentials. Of course, some girls got more than one thing, and then they got to be cheerleaders and student council reps. So there it is. I got my navel, the belly that became the talk of the town, the tiny little waist that made my girlfriends jealous and hateful.

As we slogged through junior high school, the maillot gave way to the two-piece swimsuit, followed by hip hugger bell bottoms with gypsy blouses tied under the bustline, bikini underwear to go under those bell bottoms, and then smaller and smaller bikinis for frolicking in the sun. Lots of navels and bellies were on display, and mine always won the competition. Decades passed, and I was still in the race, won ’em all, even competing against younger age brackets.

I cannot sing the praises loudly enough for that persistently fabulous navel, recognizing all the assaults against its perfection. The pregnancy that redefined the meaning of baby bump around the eighth month was alarming, but my daughter was compliant, born only days after the protrusion began, leaving the navel intact. Tubal pregnancy, hysterectomy, surgery, laproscopic invasion, all were taken in stride by cells and tissue that simply elasticized and snapped back to their former stunning navel position.

No identity crisis here: I am my navel.

And now it’s ruined, taken down by a malicious microscopic pneumococcus.

Some part of my soul whispers to me that this story is not important at all. I’ve always known the folly of chasing beauty since the beauty culture makes it impossible for any of us to actually catch it or be it. The standards are completely arbitrary and unconnected to real Woman. My mother’s voice forever echoes in my heart: Pretty is as pretty does, and I know she was right. This is why I’m so disappointed in myself, astonished that I’ve spent even one nanosecond noticing my navel or considering how awful I feel about its demise. Surely there are better questions and more important concerns for me at this stage of my life. I would be posing those important questions to myself if I knew what they were. What should I be thinking? What should I be feeling? How should I be? What is my place at this age?

It’s an old joke, a euphemism for wasting time and idleness:

What are you doing?

Nothing, just contemplating my navel and wondering, what is the meaning of life?

The Saga of the Golden Boy

Once upon a time, there was a beautiful golden boy, and I loved him. There were always boys who pretended to court me in hopes of being allowed to interact somehow with the navel. There were boys who pressed themselves against me on the dance floor, having secret one-way conversations with the navel that ended in awkward trembling dance steps and noisy gasping breaths against my ear. I didn’t quite understand what they were up to till I got a little older. There were boys who said risqué things to my face and rude things about me to their buddies in the locker room. No news here—we’ve probably all been there.

The golden boy was different. He actually liked me. Of all the boys I knew, he was, in some ways, the least likely candidate to become a serious love, well beyond the puppy stage. I actually liked him. He was adorable and funny and that was enough for me to be able to look beyond his shy gawky persona that others saw. We met in his late boyhood, after his voice had changed, at least. As a romantic pairing in the school musical, we were great crowd-pleasers. For a short eight-bar eternity, I perched on his lap while we gazed into each other’s eyes and sang to each other. After a two-weekend run as actors, we were smitten and were ready to take the script to real life.

He was tall and blond and muscular with little downy blond hairs on his cheeks and on his legs but not on his chest. He was on the swim team, so I knew all that about him before he showed up with the pink-baby-roses corsage that went with my senior prom dress. There was no other girlfriend in his past; I had the honor of being someone’s first love for the first and only time in my life. He gave me a ring that he made by hollowing out a quarter with a spoon. We were passengers on The Yellow Submarine, then tourists on Positively 4th Street where every street sign read I Want You. By the time we headed off to college, we were pretty sure that All You Need Is Love.

He is the boy that all of us have known: the high school/college sweetheart, the one we almost married, the one who transformed from boy to man before our eyes and under our curious hands. There was the engaged announcement to the family at a Country Club dinner, but then there was a fork in the road, and we couldn’t agree which path to take. He thought it would be fun to drive around the country in his little sports car. I thought it would be fun to set a date and pick out china and silverware before we became characters in the appalling … ooops … pregnant fairy tale.

The story would have ended there if it weren’t for class reunions. We get all spiffed up for these events, glad to get the chance to see those classmates, hoping our first love will be there, wondering if he’s doing all right. By the time we see each other again, we’re living our grown-up lives with mates and children and careers. There is a moment where we share that special glance that former lovers do, knowing so many secrets about each other, wishing each other well in that instant, and then content to move on.

His first wife was a scrawny little thing, mean tempered, and whiney. She hated me on sight. At that reunion, he said, Let’s get in my little car and drive to Canada. Of course we didn’t. I was sorry to see that he wasn’t happy.

At the next reunion, ten years later, he had a second wife. She was delightful, a perfect match for him. He was happy. At that reunion, we all drank good wine, told stories, and laughed and agreed to stay in touch. Of course, we didn’t, but it was all good.

I’ve lost track of which reunion that was—20th? 25th? I don’t think I had thought of him since then. If I did, I don’t remember. Then one of those crazy life events happened to me. A student walked into my classroom, a dead ringer, a carbon copy of the golden boy when he was that age, a student who looked at me like I was part of his past, too, almost flirty— but I’m the age of his grandmother. How totally odd, I thought, but the reminder was enough to bring up the curiosity: I wonder how the golden boy and his family are doing? Maybe I should drop a line and say, Gosh, it’s been ages … and how are you … and how are the kids … and hope the business is successful. Honestly, it was just a brief fancy that was gone before I fancied it, but then technology intervened and I knew my computer could tell me an address and I really could write that note. Wouldn’t that be a kick? But I’m not that kind of person. I don’t go online looking for people … but this was a little different. So I did it.

The magic screen brought me something I was completely unprepared for. It was concrete, un-softened by human interaction: an obituary dated five years ago, a cyberspace marble tombstone. I wept for the boy I loved half a century ago. I called a friend but couldn’t speak. I went outside and howled at the sky. I cried for the man I hadn’t seen in years. I went inside, crawled into bed, pulled the blankets over my head, and wiped at the silent tears while I raged at the unfairness of it all. In my mind, he had been forever young, so I struggled to catch up with reality. He didn’t see 60.

I’m surprised at the intensity of my grief. There have been others near me who died. Both my parents died, and I grieved for them. It was expected, a natural consequence, they were old.

If I could bring my heart-photos of the golden boy to the present moment, he would be aging like the rest of us, getting a little gray, maybe losing his hearing or something annoying like that, figuring out how to get older and still feel great. I can’t form an exact picture of what he’d be doing, but he wouldn’t be dead too soon.

A pox on Google for destroying him for me. If I hadn’t looked him up, he’d still be here, and I wouldn’t be thinking about him. A pox on Google, I say, because now I have an undeniable awareness that none of us can stay forever young, even in each other’s minds.

Tall, Dark, and Handsome

My husband is getting taller. It defies all the known laws of the biology of human development for a post-middle-age man to have a growth spurt, but apparently, some of them do. I will always love him anyway at any height, but this is so cool!

I’m a nondescript height, somewhere under five and a half feet. When I passed the five-foot-two mark, I knew that I wasn’t ever going to be short enough to be