Shaky bones

Healing at the intersection of pelvic floor therapy and Cranky yet Sweet Tile Guy remodeling our washroom.

Hello friend,

This moment between moons you’ll find me in inner turmoil from lack of a morning routine. I’m mourning my routine…get it? Mom jokes aside (my teenage cousin vehemently believes are not funny): We’ve gone four weeks without a shower, a few days without a toilet, and have welcomed one very particular Polish man to tile the only bathroom in our house. Most of our interactions are me responding to his plea, “No more changes to the tile!” Ahhh, my own little slice of Under the Tuscan Sun, sans divorce or Italian villa.

The good thing about all this chaos is it’s making me notice something about my hip and pelvis pain — less routine, more inflammation.

Brief backstory: This Spring I started training for a half-marathon happening in the Fall. I was very deadset on running this half. I made it to three miles midsummer before I pinched a nerve in my right hip and could barely walk. I’ve been in physical therapy for my hip and pelvis ever since. The second time in two years I’ve had to quit training for this half-marathon.

I’m learning about pain, ego, and not being kind to my body. If only I could’ve run away from it, literally, like I WAS TRYING TO DO. Instead, I must sit with a tennis ball pushed into my right ass cheek and consider the emotions buzzing through this body of mine. My anger stems from feeling no one really cares what was required of me to bring a baby into this world, nor do they try to empathize with decisions I’ve made in response to having my first child knee-deep in a global pandemic. Or try to consider that I might be carrying around some emotional fallout from it all. Just another weight I’m expected to carry with style & grace, I suppose.

It’s so deeply threaded into our cultural language and expectations of women that this is just what women do, now be grateful for it damnit, that it feels like my actual, genuine emotions — this is both scary and sacred, I’m both grieving and elated — are just being glossed over. It’s on constant loop over a loudspeaker no one but me can hear. I want to point vehemently and say, Hello?! Did you hear that? How are you not hearing this?

Any time the topic of mothering, marriage, careers, finances, or pandemic comes up it further validates my piss-poor mood and that is how I know there is healing to be had. Before healing, you have to admit first that you are hurt. PT (physical therapy) diagnosis or not, I believe my inflammation will continue until I come to terms with this chapter of my life. I will have to keep deferring race tickets because the endless loop of the story we tell ourselves can help or it can hurt. That, & the physical exercises I’m being given each week to do at home.

My physical therapist had me sit on a yoga ball, engage my core, and lift my right leg up followed by my left. And, I could not do it.

“I don’t understand how I can go twenty-nine years having my body be strong without me thinking about it. Then I have a kid and now my body doesn’t know how to do anything. How does that happen?” I ask through hot tears of frustration after a round of seemingly simple exercises that have me out of breath and aching.

“You had a kid,” my physical therapist responds, “and you really just breezed right over saying that. Your tight abdominal, pelvic, and hip ligaments stretched further than they ever have before to hold a growing baby. The hormones helped you handle it but all of those have transitioned to a different state now. Those ligaments aren’t just going to snap back. You have to retrain them, and it would be good if you could be gentle with yourself about it.”

My muscles don’t trust me. They don’t believe I can hold my own weight, or whatever I’m lifting, so they tighten as a survival tactic. A sailor’s knot if I’ve ever seen one. This lack of trust is happening north of the initial pain as well. My head was telling my core to lift my leg on that yoga ball and nothing happened. It’s disconcerting to tell your body to do something and have her dismiss the request. Betrayal. So often this interaction between brain & muscle happens too fast to notice in a healthy mind-body connection. But when a part is not working as it should you see there are many steps required for one small action. To imagine all the steps I must take now to get back to that half; some days it depletes me. It depletes me most when I hobble home and there is no water to heal, to wash over this tired, achy body who is lifting her heart out of the car seat for the 100th time today.

I’m no anatomy expert and this will further prove that, but a large piece of my heart left the inner cavern of my ribs as I welcomed my daughter to the outside of me. She is morphed from my own skin, blood, and sinew and I was her container for a brief stint of forever. These bones are shaky as a result, my skeleton click-clacking away. I’m trying to get acclimated with a little less of me on the inside while trying to keep such a close eye on my heartpiece on the outside. And she is growing! Quickly. The weight increases steadfastly.

I imagine my stretched ligaments, my swollen muscles with all their little knots looking up to that ribcage of mine, to the shadows of the spine. They chatter,

We’re sorry we can’t hold you the way you need at the moment but the sound of those shaky bones, the way they chime, is a beautiful tune.

Mother music.
Woman rhyme.

A chorus of ancestors keeps me company.

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Other things on my mind:

This summer my favorite book had to be The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George. Poetry in novel form, never read anything like it. Here’s the rest of my summer reading book list for your final beach reads before the frost comes (board books for littles are listed too).

I’m sharing more in bits and bobs because it’s my particular approach to healing. Write from the scar, not from the wound as Marlee Grace quoted in class last week. Uncomfortable as it is it keeps scratching to get out in this form. If today’s letter resonates, here’s another one.

If you read last month’s letter you know I’d like to write a book someday. And god damnit, listen to what happens next; Marlee Grace offers The Architecture of Book Writing class for three Sundays in September and I sign-up the very. next. day.

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Say one thing you want to do this week, out loud. To your partner, your baby, your mother, your puppy or feline, or friend. Then, observe. See what happens when the trees hold your words. They are the best listeners.

Until next time, Em