In the navel

Last Friday I got my belly button pierced.

I wrote about deciding to get it done back in December but wanted to wait until the summer to get it done as I thought it would be easier to get it to heal when I wasn’t wearing winter clothes, which considering the current weather in the UK is a bit of a laugh but it sounded like a good plan when I first had it. Then came our trip to Greece. I seriously thought about doing it beforehand thinking that all that fresh air and salty sea water would be marvelous for healing but talked myself out of it as if I was wrong about that the thought of being stuck in Greece with an infected belly button piercing didn’t sound like fun.

So post holiday I am looking in the mirror at my tummy, which I HATE, but it looks OK, it is all tanned and I suddenly realise that if I don’t do it now then I will forever be putting it off for some reason or another and I head downstairs and tell Michael I want to finally get it done. He is delighted and off to the piercing place we go.

I am not particularly nervous, apart from the bit where I have to show the guy my stomach because I think it is ugly, and then I am laying on the bed, Michael is holding my hand, there is a sharp pinch followed by another and it is done. Michael is grinning at me

“You are going to love it” he says

I stand up and look in the mirror, my first thought is that it is wonky and I do mutter something about that but the guy is already talking to the next person waiting and the mirror is small and tucked in the corner and so we leave.

Out on the street I pull up my dress and inspect it. I really want to look properly in a mirror but there isn’t one and so I drop my dress and we go into the shop and pick up some groceries, including some sea salt which I will need to keep my new piercing clean

When we get home I disappear upstairs, strip off my dress and look into the mirror. There it is, sitting snuggling in my belly button. I turn from side to side; I even lay down and take pictures of it in an attempt to see it properly and the more I look the more I hate it. By the time he comes up stairs I am sitting on bed sobbing.

“You are going to hate me” I say “It looks awful” I confess through giant sobs. (You see he paid for it and so I felt terrible for not loving it.

Anyway, this bit went on for quite a while with me mainly crying and him being patient and loving whilst I verbally tore my tummy apart.

So something about my tummy; it is saggy and wrinkled, the result of being very overweight at one point in my life as well as carrying 2 babies in there, I also have a large scar that runs from my belly button right round to my side on the left of my stomach. It is 20cm (nearly 8inches) in length and is the result of surgery to remove my spleen when I was 6 to cure a blood condition. (A long and complex medical story that I will not bore you with) As a result of all this my belly button has basically collapsed and falls away towards the scar.

I have for most of my life just ignored it/lived with it but I have never in all my days worn a crop top although I will totally rock a bikini. My love of sunshine overrules all the horrible feels I have about my stomach. When we go to Clothed Male Naked Female the hardest part for me is that people will see my stomach up close in all its horrible ugliness’. I am not bothered about people seeing my tits or cunt and have often said to Michael I wish I could wear a scarf round my belly to cover it up. I know what you are thinking, that I take tons of naked self portraits and I do but rarely will you see one of my tummy flat on the camera. There is the odd one that I have posted where I have liked what I see but mainly I tend to turn the left side of my body away from the camera to hide the scar.

I have over the years slowly learned to accept how I look, but that one area still gives me complex and often very negative feels. The piercing was an attempt to reclaim that part of my body from some of those feelings. Don’t get me wrong, at no point did I think it was going to miraculously make my tummy button straight/round again nor did I think it was going to give me flat stomach but I did I had always wanted one, even when I was a teen, but I just never had the balls to get it done, until now and in the spirit of growing old disgracefully I did it.

And then I my horror I hate the fucking thing. Actually that is not true it just draws my eye to part of my body that I have struggled to ever be OK with and resulting emotions are overwhelming. He holds me while I cry and when I say I want to take it out he says OK but then I hesitate.

“I feel so silly” I say

“Why”

“I don’t know, like I should have known better, what was I expecting was going to happen?”

“I want to like it” I whimper

And then he does that thing where he holds my face and makes me look at him and he tells me that he loves it, he thinks it looks sexy and that I am sexy and that he has decided that for now I am going to keep it until it heals and then if I still want to remove it I can.

“I don’t know” I mumble

“I do, and your choice is accept my word or use your (safe)word.”

That was Friday and I still have my belly button piercing. Every day I give it a little look, sometimes I still hate it but now and then I catch a view of it and I think it is OK.

Only time will tell if I keep it or not but right now I am damn glad he pulled rank.