An Elegy to my Hip: A Linear Progression

Rebecca A. Eckland

My left hip throbs as I stand in the middle of hundreds of runners fifteen seconds before the horn that will transform these stationary bodies into a human stampede. Even though I’m in my early forties and my hip is a violent storm—a litany of injuries, the latest a pinched nerve—I nonetheless toe the line. My hip tingles as though both half-alive and half-dead when all I want it to do is to comply: to be silent and singular in its purpose. To launch. To run.

*

The ilium is the part of the hip bone that is shaped like a wing or an open shell, the kind that carries the mysterious sound of the ocean as air caresses its white surface.

*

When I am a child-athlete, a gymnast whose strength on the vault makes me a contender, my mom tells me, “Your hips are so tiny.” In my adult years, waylaid on the sidelines with some injury, I will wonder if I was simply made with weak hips, and the majority of my life will be spent building strength where biology left its gaping omission. Yet as a child-athlete all I feel in that moment is my funny straw-colored chopped hair with thick, uneven bangs over my eyes and how the other girls—who are at least five years older than me—laugh because I am not allowed to listen to Madonna, nor wear make-up or paint my nails.

My stepfather took a picture of holiday wrapping paper stuck to my left hip on Christmas morning, the year after I quit gymnastics, the year after I learned what it was like to be stabbed by silent, mean stares of other girls. It was the first Christmas when I was not practicing or competing, when I was learning to exist in the world with the empty hours left when you are not doing those things. I didn’t know he pointed the camera and clicked the shutter as I reached beneath the tree to grab a present for someone else, my hip high in the air. Weeks later when the developed picture came back, he held it up to me to see. He laughed so hard that tears fell from his eyes. “Look at your big, fat, lazy butt,” he said. I was ten years old.

*

Hips are compound structures: mechanism, bone, and joint. In women, they are the part of the body that ends athletic careers early. Once the hips widen and rotate for childbearing, a woman’s gait loses its linearity, no longer as the crow flies. Hips round, the legs point out, and for most women, the efficiency of a straight line is no longer possible.

*

It is the first year they allow high school girls in Nevada to compete in the pole vault. The coaches tell me I will be good at this sport, and I will win. I spend an entire afternoon watching training videos of professional pole vaulters with the coaches. They tell me how I will have to run with my knees high, jump on one leg, and maneuver my body in the air, turning and twisting over the standard. I listen, I try to imagine what this new sport will feel like, ignoring my terror. It never occurred to me that I could have told them no.

*

The first day of practice, it rains. I lose my grip midair and land on the concrete runaway, on my left hip and elbow. My bones crack like thunder. Too stunned to feel anything, I lie on the concrete. The runners on the track cross my vision. The air smells of the rising desert dust in the rain. The deep indigo oceans that will develop across my hip and elbow match my prom dress a few months later that year when I go with the senior boy who asked me.

*

A new rule is put into play my sophomore year: If you want to compete, you have to weigh in on a scale placed in front of the grandstands to make sure you’re using a pole that’s rated at least ten pounds above your body weight. The pole I had used all season was broken in half by a drunken bunch of high school senior boys who stole it from the trailer where our equipment was stored one night. So I had to lose ten pounds before the state championship. The coaches speak of violent ways to dismember me to make me weigh less, to use a smaller pole we could borrow from another team. “We could pull all your teeth out or shave your head,” one laughs, pointing to my long blonde hair. I enlist the wrestling coach for help, since he knows everything about cutting weight. Don’t eat, run. Make your life a living hell of pain. I do. At age sixteen and ten pounds under my healthy weight, I use the smaller pole, and I win.

*

When I’m an exchange student in France at seventeen, I can only think that I am a physical embodiment of my country. The Clinton scandal and Columbine shooting have just happened. With no words—with no mother tongue—every picture of me is too large. Too loud. My hip, a solid size 6 while actress Courteney Cox, who is popular in France that year, is reported to wear a size 2. I walk and walk and walk and run and walk more, obsessed with turning the 6 to a 4 to 2 to 0, until my pants fall from my hips the way they do from a hanger. That kind of smallness aches, I learn. The ache of sleeping in a bed as a pile of bones. Le squelette qui danse! The other students call me a dancing skeleton as I struggle to solve a calculus proof on the chalkboard in my second language. It is that old song my bones learned in elementary school, strung out by all my poor decisions, sung in that singsong anglophone way: one bone is connected to another, and that one to another, on and on— a geography of association, where the only distinction from one to the next is its name.

*

Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” is the song that plays the year after I graduate from college, the year I’m so far from my athletic life I can hardly see it or remember it. The year I put on a size 12, a pair of jeans in the dressing room of Old Navy, and they split seismically down my legs. My left hip is solidly padded in shame, buying a pair of pants I destroyed in a dressing room. No boys ask for my number, and they don’t call me back if I call them.

*

I have always found it odd that theology and mythology in the Western world claim that women come from ribs, and not from hips. We’re only given one of the many bones tasked to hold the human heart, notably distant from the hips, the sacral center, and what is understood in non-Christian theologies as the seat of all creation. Yet it’s undeniable that a woman’s hips are where creation occurs, where a fetus grows, where a newborn issues forth from—the hips in this way are a steeple, a house and hearth, a sanctuary, sacred. A bone structure that changes in one’s life, and if it does not, malformed hips can spell the end of the possibility of motherhood. Studies note that a particular mathematical ratio between the diameter of the hips and waist predicts one’s (likely) capacity to be fertile; it’s no coincidence that the ratio aligns with what is defined as the shape that constitutes an attractive woman’s body.

For most of my adult life—from my late twenties through my early forties—I am a woman who pursued that mathematical ratio for an abstract end: not because I wanted to have children, but because I wanted to be loved. Even if that love came from a coach who would pat me on the back after a race well run, or from “society”— those little red hearts on social media when I post a race result on my feed, and a handful of contacts I may or may not know touch a screen in support of what I’ve done.

*

In my late twenties I watch as white geese glide low over a frozen pond in the middle of a city park in Reno, Nevada. The silence of snow falling renders my steps undetectable. Tentative steps. Slow steps. Running steps. Adventures out into the world I take for no one else other than me. The gorgeous violence of an oncoming storm. I stride into the wind. I never want to stop. For over a decade, I don’t.

*

The ilium’s malfunction causes a series of injuries in my adult life as a competitive long-distance runner. Bursitis of the hip, which feels like a vice has attached itself to the wing-shaped bone, the sensation I feel as I win my first marathon. In turn, this injury inspires iliotibial band syndrome, which manifests as a stabbing knee pain, my companion in the Boston Marathon, where I limp for 26.2 miles to finish my fastest marathon to date.

Boston earned me a coach, the one who would get me to run a marathon in well under three hours. Early morning practices. A regimented life schedule that allowed me to say, “I’m training to qualify for the Olympic Trials.” And finally, the boyfriend who turned to me as the snow fell on his windshield during another winter storm and said, “If you want to be an Olympian, fine. But I’m not going to follow you into that life.” Even that didn’t stop me from running.

*

In my thirties, I injure my hip many times. Riding my bike in the rain through the Berkeley Hills, I take a hairpin turn too fast, and crash, my hip cradling my fall as I slide to a halt in the lane of oncoming traffic. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I take up roller-skating and fall while “going big” on a trick, landing so hard on the cement outdoor rink that tears stick themselves in the corners of my eyes and I forget how to move and how to breathe.

Bruises, scars, and fractures.

Arguably the most fundamental part of my body is injured again and again.

*

The hip socket facilitates circular movement, whether for walking, running, turning the pedals around a bike crank, or doing the flutter kick in a pool. We think of this as progression, as moving forward, but we forget how the motion also traces itself back to where we have been. The hip is the hinge between forward and back, past and future, a mechanism of movement and memory, spiraling through time and space.

My hip’s song at these frequent-yet-rare junctures has taught me that a body is ever and always balanced between the states of hurt and healing. An ilium, a balance, a single wing, moving forward and back.

*

I am in my forties and my hip still hasn’t healed when I find a single bird wing on my living room floor. Covered in soft black feathers with white tips, the wing is shaped like the ilium, the part of my body that stubbornly refuses to heal. How the wing got there is anyone’s guess—the cats are forbidden to go outside and there are no open, screenless windows into which a bird could have flown. Perfectly embalmed, I finger the soft feathers, thinking the wing must be an omen. I carry the wing to the large dining room table, setting it at its center. It is strange to see a biological and engineering masterpiece severed so cleanly from the body that used it. Oh, but it was a body that loved it. The sunlight articulating the ridges along the features recalls the musicality of my own body. Running, I realize, had once felt to me like flying before it felt like so many things closer to the earth, before biological changes, injuries, and time itself rendered what was once light heavy. Running, once, had felt like flying. And within the past and the pain, there it was: the joy and the love of that.

Rebecca A. Eckland is a writer based in Reno, Nevada. She is the author of the 2018 bestselling memoir A Court of Refuge: Stories from the Bench of America’s First Mental Health Court by Judge Ginger Lerner-Wren. She is also the ghostwriter for the 2013 memoir Cracked, Not Broken: Surviving and Thriving After a Suicide Attempt by Kevin Hines. Her essays have appeared in Nevada Magazine, The Transformational Power of Arts Journal, Sierra Nevada Review, Animal: A Beast of a Literary Magazine, Stereo Embers Magazine, The Meadow, Hotel Amerika, TAYO Literary Journal, and Weber: The Contemporary West. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Saint Mary’s College of California and two Master of Arts degrees in English and Foreign Languages and Literatures (with an emphasis on French) awarded by the University of Nevada, Reno.