Healing the Mind-Body Split of Motherhood
I’ve been thinking about my body a lot lately: How is it working? Why is it hurting? What can I do to help my body do more things and feel less pain?
It’s a fraught topic for me and, I think, for a lot of parents, especially parents who have given birth, because for the first years of our children’s lives, our body is not our own. It feeds our babies; it carries our babies; it rocks them and bounces them and paces the same path through the house with them at 3 a.m. Up until I had my first child, my body was me and I was my body — there was no separation between the two. But in those early days that stretched into weeks into months into years, my body became a tool, a baby-making/baby-raising machine. It was something I was inside of and controlling (or at least trying to control) but not necessarily part of.
This mind-body split is a coping mechanism, I think. How else can we subject our physical selves to the pain and stress and literal trauma of growing a life and giving birth? For me, at least, it was a lot easier to make peace with torn tissue and bleeding nipples if I imagined it happening to a thing I owned, rather than the person I was. It’s just my body. It will heal. It’s strong — remember how it made an actual human? It can survive this too. Just keep going.
All of that was true, of course. My body (and I inside it) did survive. But that imagined separation between my body and myself? It has survived, too. Even now, years after the crisis mode of doing whatever it takes to keep an infant alive, I still hear it inside my head whenever I come down with a cold, or a debilitating tension headache strikes, or my knees ache: Just keep going. And my youngest is 6 now.
Part of the problem is that there are still not enough hours in the day. No, my kids won’t die if I don’t check that they’ve actually brushed their teeth when they said they did. (Do all kids do this? Why are you lying to me? I can see that your toothbrush is dry!) But I’m not just trying to keep them alive anymore — I’m trying to raise them into happy, smart, successful (and hygienic!) humans. So their doctors’ visits and dental appointments and haircuts and school assignments get prioritized. Because I know that my body will survive.
What I’m thinking about lately, though, is what might happen if I applied that same standard of care to myself. Because first of all, I don’t actually know that my body will survive. What if these aches and pains aren’t normal, are indicating some sort of underlying problem that could end me? But the thing that’s even scarier is this: For years, this body has just been surviving — and there’s so much more to life than mere survival. What if I treated my body not as something I’m just trying to keep alive, but as something I’m trying to nurture and support and grow? What would that even look like?
No, really, I’m asking! I’m still trying to figure it out, but I have a few ideas:
Making (and keeping) doctors’ appointments: I saw a primary care physician this year for the first time since … well, I can’t even remember. I’m thankful that my tests showed no serious issues, but I still don’t have solutions for my joint pain, which is way more severe than it probably should be for a woman my age. I’m also overdue for a dental visit, a mammogram, a dermatology visit … the list goes on. If my kids needed these things, they’d have been done ages ago. (Proof: The four different therapies one of my kids visits on a regular basis.)
Exercising: No, this isn’t a weight-loss thing. It’s a lack of physical activity thing. Folks, I hate to exercise. I honestly do. My preferred mode is curled up in a comfy ball with a book or movie, and my limited free time prevents me from entering Preferred Mode often. But I know I need to move my body around so it keeps, y’know, being able to move around. Ugh.
Letting myself be sick: “There are no days off in motherhood!” I hate how true this is. There is very little I can do when I get sick except power through it, because there’s no one else who can get the kids to school in the morning or keep my work tasks on track. I haven’t figured out how to actually do this one, tbh.
Making small, supportive adjustments: Here’s an example: My neck and back are wrecked from sitting at a computer all day for work. I’ve tried correcting my posture myself, and failed, and beaten myself up for failing. But this week I asked myself, “What would I do if one of the boys were struggling with a goal?” The answer: Find a better way to support them. So I got myself some support, literally, in the form of these office chair cushions made of memory foam that encourage straight-backed sitting at work. I’ve also started keeping this cozy neck and shoulders heating pad beside my desk for when my neck gets tight and painful. It’s only been a few days, so any results I report now are probably made up. But it does feel good to have gotten some help!
Learning how to repair the mind-body split of motherhood is something that will probably take me the rest of my life, but I know it’s worth doing. And not just for reasons like “you can’t pour from an empty cup,” or “there’s a reason they tell you to put your own oxygen mask on first,” though that is part of it. I’m trying to remember that my own health and happiness are just as valuable as my kids’, and that I can’t have either one of them without also having a body that feels nourished and appreciated. It’s not to make me a better mom. It’s to make me a better me.
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