Manicured Spirit

Today I went to have a mani pedi. I am not usually the type of girl who gets mani pedis; I'm usually the one climbing the tree in front of the salon. My cuticles are never trimmed, unless you count chewing them until they bleed as trimming. My nails are usually fairly clean and clipped, but they are rarely what would would call "manicured".

Sometimes I try to paint my toe nails, but usually I make such a mess of them that I let the paint dry and then take a bath so that I can scrub the excess paint off of my cuticles, my toe knuckles, my elbow, the counter top..

Anyway, I have reached the stage of my pregnancy where I can no longer bend down and clip my toenails. I've also reached the stage where my my feet do not fit in my shoes due to the edema. That means that I am wearing flip flops with my dress pants, and sometimes house shoes. Classy. Especially since my feet look like they belong in the Shire. That's why I decided to get a pedicure and then thought, "why not get the manicure, too?"

And that's what I did.

I went to the little hole-in-the-wall nail salon in my community. Oddly, you know the one I'm talking about; we all have ones that are fairly identical. The ladies were so adorable, and I could tell that they were related. They hardly spoke any English but we were able to converse enough to exchange the basics: that I would like to have the mani-pedi special with the Brisbane Bronze polish; that the baby is due in June; that it is a boy; that they have one boy, almost a year old, born a month early; and yes, they could sell me the bottle of bronze nail polish for touch-ups (not that I can actually bend over to touch-up).

While they worked on me, I glanced around the room: Barbara Walters was on the Oprah show which was on a tiny TV in the background. I listened to the Korean being spoken barely above a whisper back and forth across the room, and I wondered how it is that women, no matter what culture they hail from or what circumstance they are in, tend to make community with each other. Not only do we ask questions out of genuine concern or share our own experiences, especially when talking about babies, but it occurred to me today that we can be especially vulnerable with each other. One of the women was clipping and tending to my abused, tom-boyish hands while her mother was giving my swollen hobbit feet an extra long massage before she tried to make them presentable.

They were both extremely concerned about my comfort level, not because I was a patron or because they were hoping for a tip, but because they know what it is like to be 35 weeks pregnant. When it was difficult for me to lift my feet out of the water onto the work station, the mother grinned empathetically at me. I looked over at her daughter, the one who has a one year old son, who also was grinning. Then I grinned. In that moment, I became their sister which is part of that elusive connection with "the goddess" that I really had hoped to experience with this pregnancy.

I think the connection among women is a special type of connection that men perhaps only experience peripherally, if at all. Or maybe in our culture it isn't OK for them to acknowledge their connections. But for women, these ties are tribal and certainly go against the idea that Americans are too autonomous for communitas (the spirit of community).

It was nice to be vulnerable with these women. It was nice to be pampered. Maybe I'll try this whole mani pedi thing again someday.