Friday, March 14, 2008
The human body amazes me. As I watch my son’s and daughter’s bodies grow, I am continually astonished by the complex involuntary processes at work. Teeth form and push through skin at just the right moment. Fat converts to muscle that lengthens and strengthens as it is needed. Digestive tissue milks the perfect balance of nutrients from food to meet metabolic demand.
The body is smart too. It knows more than the mind does about what a human needs to thrive, causing pregnant women to crave oranges (the white inner skin is a cure for naseau) and sick children to eschew dairy products (which cause mucus production.) The body carries all the experiences and all the memories that the mind has no room for. Like a gentle grandmother, the body gathers up forgotten or abandoned bits of self, knowing that you might want or need them later.
During my last year of grad school, both my grandparents died. My grandfather’s passing was an expected culmination to a prolonged tango with diabetes that we were all prepared for. But my grandmother died more suddenly and more mysteriously six months later of “heart failure.” Her daughter has always said she died of a broken heart.
My heart broke too when she died. She was younger than my grandfather by 7 or 8 years, and I thought that fact, coupled with my searing love for her, would ensure that she would live long enough to see my children be born. I stumbled through the end of grad school, moved back to
But later that year, I had a massage. I was up at Harbin Hot Springs – an historic and hedonistic “clothing optional” retreat center in Northern California – with my good friend Artemis - the only person I could imagine enjoying being naked in public with! And this may actually have been the first massage I had ever had. The therapist started at my feet and made a slow and pleasant journey upward, paying extra attention to all my various trouble spots (“I’ve got really tight hamstrings….oh, my lower back is pretty tweaky…and I’ve got some scar tissue in my right shoulder…” etc.)
When she got to the back of my neck, she made a soft exhalation – a little sound of surprise. She said, “You’ve got quite a treasure trove here.” I loved that. The image that my knots and achy places were actually storehouses for important stuff my body was hanging on to. As she gently worked this spot, I started to cry. Then I started to sob. I cried and cried and cried. And the therapist never missed a beat. She just kept rubbing and kneading and breathing with me. “Oh,” I thought with sudden clarity, “that’s where I’m keeping my grandparents.”
The body knows. It knows when to hold ‘em, and it knows when to fold ‘em. For weeks, my body has been trying to get my attention with one complaint after another. My feet hurt when I get out of bed in the morning. My hips have been achy enough that I’m sleeping with a pillow between my knees, just like I did during pregnancy. All of my treasure spots have been sending out regular neural distress signals, like little homing beacons, whispering “here…here…look here…” So I finally got it together to visit a chiropractor this week. And just my luck, I picked the best one who ever practiced during the last 100 years. A gorgeous soft-spoken German woman with hands like fluttering doves. She spent an hour and a half with me during the first visit on Wednesday and 40 minutes with me today. She is not in a hurry. And she is not daunted by the vast amount of work that lies ahead to bring my body back into a state of alignment, harmony, and health.
In particular, she focused on gentle manipulations to my abdomen and my pelvis, which is surprisingly twisted and torqued, even considering what it’s been through lately. She’s also been working on relaxing the backs of my legs, which seem to still believe they have to work hard enough to keep me and the burden of my baby upright. In essence, my body is still behaving as though I’m pregnant. And I don’t think this is just standard post-partum repair work we’re doing here. I think that as chipper as I have been about the less-than-ideal experience of birthing Miss V, there are aspects of the trauma that have lodged themselves in my body, because there is something I need to know or learn about myself before I let them go.
So, I’m going to let the body take the lead for once (although I’m sure my brain will try to be a back-seat driver.) I’m going to keep visiting my chiropractor, do yoga, drink water, and lie around and look at the sky as much as I can. I think my life might depend on it. Not in the “I’m going to die young if I don’t do this” sense, but more in the “I’m going to wake up one day crushed under the weight of my own sadness” sense. Left to its own devices, grief tends to multiply, like mold in damp corners. What is a grain of grief right now may turn into a waving field of grief if ignored.
Grief. A word we seldom use, unless we have to. But like mold spores, it surrounds us and permeates us daily. Personal grief. Collective grief. Temporal and historical grief. And we make so little space for it, until we have to.
And you? What treasure stores does your body carry? What would happen if you took out those rusty keys and unlocked them one by one, took out the contents, and let it sift through your hands like fine pearls?
Be well.
photo by estherase
