scribblechic

It started with an excruciating pain during an unfamiliar exercise. Despite my admonishment of physical resolutions this year, I was swept up in a sudden need to move and threw myself enthusiastically into a new routine.

My efforts at stillness had quietly underscored the way I use movement both for avoidance and empowerment. Restless distractions that allow me to cloak worry in productivity are intimately related to the way I use exercise to purge those feelings I struggle to name.

Yesterday, inventorying for injury in a posture of submission to a very immediate sense of vulnerability, I tested the smallest movements with patience and settled among my thoughts.

Our bodies are great teachers in crises.

My body demanded I identify the harm and tend to the moment at hand. There’s a certain power in naming what hurts, allowing ourselves to speak directly without apology for weakness.

There is also humility in acknowledging what worked once may not serve us now. Freedom in accepting that our needs and abilities change over time.

Images can be deceptive; a body may appear healthy, but hide a deficit of strength. Similarly one can appear weak while exercising great strength.

Lastly, we teach our children as much in good health as we do in injury and sickness. It is natural to tend to another in need, but there are great lessons in self-care.

In those moments of stillness as I tested my body for stability and considered how I had changed, what I might need, and the actions that would best nurture healing, the thoughts I had been circling in movement all week settled into place and I marveled at the way life invites us to presence.

This past week my son wrapped up another academic term with finals. The end of anything brings the beginning of something else and we’ve been chasing significant change with unconventional choices in anticipation of his new term.

There has been great joy in the anticipation of these adjustments, but also remorse and grief for the years I held my son accountable to a pattern of commitments that contradicted his needs for another’s impersonal trajectory of success.

For all my efforts to parent outside the mainstream language of success, I’ve bought into patterns of parenting that conflicted my earliest days of motherhood; days before labels invited comparisons that bred fear and worry. For years I gauged good enough and belonging by unfortunate standards akin to fitting in.

While verbally celebrating my son’s individuality, I was shaping his future with a mass-produced machinery of normal. If A, then B. Never accounting for a factor of C.

There is so much more to this moment. I’ve been gathering my thoughts, privately, trying to decide how to mark this milestone in writing as we embark on a new adventure. It was strange that a physical injury is my introduction to sounding out these changes, but so it is:

Name the harm.

Understand what worked once, may no longer apply.

Recognize that images are deceptive, one can appear weak while exercising great strength. 

Our actions speak more loudly than words, our children are listening to our choices.