Wombs

The other day I got another massage, my first one since Christmas, which is not a good track record in terms of self-care. The massage was from one of those group discount deals in a place I’d never heard of, located in the middle of nowhere and far away from child care. But this massage was a mother’s day gift from my husband and I was determined to use it and not let the group-online site make money off of him by never using their coupon. I dropped off my daughter at her grandma's, said goodbye as my girl wailed away while pressing her nose flat against the screen door as I drove into mid-day traffic to go get relaxed.

The place was in an industrialized part of the boonies, where there are oxymoron-named business parks and big box stores. The antithesis of my usual place of massage. Because of poor signage, I parked on the wrong side of the building where I was headed, then had to walk alongside the building and promptly stepped in a puddle of muddy water that I hoped wasn’t leaking from anywhere gross. The actual massage place smelled of too many essential oils to wrap my olfactory nerves around, had Muzak spitting from overhead, and housed a big receptionist desk that dwarfed the person behind it. The massage therapist who came to greet me was a perfectly quaffed large woman in a floral lab coat – the kind of highly-masked, very restrained woman with a quiet angel voice lilting toward a hint of Southern drawl, who my judging mind thought might actually murder people and bury them in her yard. But I followed her through the beige-painted corridors of the big building, for my muscles were tight and I was desperate for a massage.

I’ll cut this story short – bypassing the weirder details of the therapist’s super long explanation about my upcoming massage, the dark, colorlessness of the room, the fact that I upgraded to a deep tissue massage for $50, and the fact that she wouldn’t touch my feet – and get to what she said near the end of her elbow-digging, painful-to-the-point-of-wanting-to-throw-up massage, “Honey, your tension is not normal, every-day-tense people tension. Something is wrong with your insides.”

After a bit more conversation while she dug her thumb under my shoulder blade, in which I told her I did have gallstones, she turned me over and sneered. “Naw,” she said, her hairdo unmarred one strand during the rigors of her work, “Seems like something else. Your bladder maybe, or uterus?”

“Um,” said I, “Well, I did have a massive hemorrhage after a C-section two and a half years ago.” Then I started to fucking cry. Now normally, I don’t mind crying on the massage table, and indeed I have done it often, but in that strange environs, I was none to happy about the tears rolling into my ears. But to the masseuse’s credit, her mask melted a little and she patted my shoulder.

“Aw honey,” she said, “I see by your tears what I say is true. Your organs have feelings, you know. You need to lay your hands on your uterus every day, going to bed and waking up, and tell your uterus you love her.”

The pain of the massage and the soreness of my butt and shoulders afterwards were nothing compared to having to tell my uterus I love her. But, I have been doing exactly this – laying my hands on my still-swollen belly and saying, “I do love you. You carried our child, you made her so healthy, you helped her become who she is. I am sorry we had to cut you open to get her out. I want you to heal.”

I feel ridiculous doing this kind of healing work. But, that massage woman was just weird enough I figured her intuition must be right. I’ve come out of denial about some physical signs I’ve had in my uterus like cramping and strange, sharp pains. And, several months ago now, I got an abnormal PAP, which I’ll have to get checked out again soon. Until then, I am willing, even if reluctantly so, to do what I can to heal myself.

The uterus – or womb, as I like to call her because the word womb is so much gentler and kinder of a word – is women’s connection to creativity, according to many healing traditions. The fact that my creative life is in flux is no coincidental occurrence in light of new awareness about my womb. There is much work to do on both fronts. I start, besides saying these silly affirmations and deciding on which doctor and/or printing press to spend my money, by reading about the uterus’ connection to the body.

In Debbie Shapiro's book, Your Body Speaks Your Mind, the author says “the womb is the centre of creative life, the darkness from which light emerges, the female heart. Issues that can arise here are, therefore, deeply connected to our inner world, our darkness and most primordial feelings. These are particularly to do with being a woman and/or a mother. Feelings of doubt, guilt, failure, shame, fear, resentment, hurt, loneliness, being unnourished, being unable to nourish - all these and more are connected with the womb.” I don’t know what mother doesn’t feel some of the latter-named feelings – who can avoid such vulnerability when rearing another independent human being? And when it comes to mothering, what feelings are not encountered as tugs in the womb – and not just the dark ones, but also, all the positive feelings like joy, wonder, pride, and regenerating love? Reading that passage, however, does make me ask, how often do I allow myself to feel the full range of these feelings? How often do to I try to stuff the negative one, or spend time on, say, the computer, to avoid the bright glare of the positive feelings? How often do I do self care? (I think one massage every six months would indicate, “not often enough.”)

I’m particularly interested what Shapiro says about the womb as the female heart. As a teenager, see, I had open heart surgery because of a hole in my heart. I’ve always said that experience was a positive one – one where I grew into my womanhood without all the shame and self-consciousness that many other teen girls often experience. The experience of having my only other major surgery on my womb, however, I’ve so far said, has not been similarly positive. But I am now willing to rewrite this getting-old story – to use all the gifts of my creativity to find new light in any darkness I perceive within my womb. No matter what unfolds from here, I know my creative work needs to be strong and deep, loved and nurtured and in quite touch with my wise inside woman in order to heal my wounds and my womb. What if I said my second major surgery was a positive one? What if I really let go of my old story? Who would I be if all that tension dissolved? I am excited to find out the answers and simultaneously pray for the strength to hear them. My hope in writing all this down is that other women and their mythic womanhood wombs feel loved enough to do the same.

Massages and Healing

The other day I received a massage from a lovely and irreverent masseuse and physical therapist with by the fabulously apropos name of Sue Knotts. Sue, as another friend writes, has “huge unfettered tits,” a British accent and conducts her work way up a river valley in the middle of nowhere in a yurt. The yurt is always warm, the chickadees and juncos and nuthatches twitter outside the plastic, crisscrossed windows, and the river runs below with gusto and song. I love the drive out there this time of year, in autumn, watching the river rage and roil below, the fall leaves wet and sticky while they blow across road and windshield. There is dampness in the air and on my skin as I walk up the small ramp to the yurt. I carry a cooler of fish – my husband’s catch the past few days of three Dungeness crab, two little fresh trout, and, also, a block of frozen sturgeon. All this seafood goes in trade for Sue’s work on my body. I feel excited for the massage, and grateful to both Sue and my husband for providing such an easy deal for me.

Sue invites me in, has me sit in the big chair by the fire, asks me about my health and what’s up these days. I don’t see her nearly as often as I should, as my body needs, certainly as my spirit desires. I tell her the usual, my back, my shoulders, all tense even though I’m not even working right now, though I have no papers to grade. And then, of course, there’s my abdomen. Sue is one of the few therapists I know who’s willing work on my middle, the torn, sore muscles, the fascia she is fond of discussing. She even breaks out a Gray’s Anatomy to show me that line down the center of my abdomen, mine probably a wreck of torn tissue and scars.

So, she gets to work, we talk a little. She laughs with a little low-moaned giggle at how lopsided I am; my right shoulder, a bundle of toughness. Then, she turns me over, and I am looking at leaves and perhaps a dead beetle stuck on the skylight screen overhead, which shows only a white page of sky. She rubs my abdomen, feeling for separated muscles, and rubs the place down low where my scar is, where they pulled my daughter from my body. And suddenly, the water wells in my throat and I’m making sucking and sniffing noises. Tears roll from the corners of my eyes, finding grooves in my neck and dropping onto the table. Suddenly, I am transported to the moment when they took my child out of me, but on Sue’s table I feel more whole and smaller that I imagine how I felt in that operating room, where the blue cloth separated me from my body and my sense of myself is gigantic, like the place from where they took my daughter was actually a mile way.

But on Sue’s table I can feel how small I really am, how close my daughter must have been when they took her and how back then, my arms were fettered so I couldn’t have reached out to grab her even if I had had the energy or wherewithal to do so. I am still so sad that I was so removed from birthing her, even though of course I was there and she was coming from my body and she was quite stuck and there really might have been no other choice. But, all these months later, lo two years, I am crying again, even as I write this.

Sue offered me a tissue box without saying a word since she of course noticed I was crying, but the truth is, I held back on her table because I was embarrassed that I still haven’t stopped crying about how I didn’t birth my own child through my body, that I had to have a cut in my belly to get her out, that my own cervix or pelvis or whatever it was would not open up enough to let her come through into this world without such violence and tugging and yanking and invasion. So, yes, I still cry about it all, even as I think about all those folks, including me, who say and think I should “be over it” already, I “should be grateful,” which I am, for her, but not for the birth, that I “could have died if I stayed at my midwives birth center” if I had indeed still hemorrhaged with the same amount of blood, which is true, of course, though we’ll never know if I would have lost as much blood without the c-section. Anyhow, myself and others can say what they want, the reality is, I still have to cry. So what, so I’m still sad and, short of crying and then going on to function pretty darn well the rest of the day, I don’t really know what else there is to do. Does a person ever need to stop mourning? Is there an ending point to such a momentously difficult event in one’s life? A while ago, over a year at least, I did a little ritual with a group of friends where I let go of saying that the birth wasn’t what I wanted, and said instead that the birth was the perfect one for us, but that affirmation, while I believe it and it helped, doesn’t make all the pain and grief disappear.

Sue said my abdomen definitely felt “boggy.” I thought that word seemed apropos as well. She has good words. My stomach is a big pouch – people talk about the c-section apron, I talk about the fully loaded fanny pack I wear on my stomach. Lately, the fanny pack has gotten fuller, and partly that’s due to the holiday time of overeating, especially with my daughter’s birthday being on Halloween, but I know, too, the bogginess is a lot of pent up energy, still more mourning that needs to happen. However, as I get further away from the birth, the thoughts of “I really should be over it,” happen more often. Plus I keep also thinking, “I’ve already cried about this, haven’t I?”

On an anatomical level, Sue mentioned the possibility that the lymph system housed in the groin may be quite disconnected from the abdomen it’s supposed to be flushing out since the nerves from the surgery are shot. I thought this theory made a lot of sense and haven’t really seen anything about this post-partum complication from the surgery anywhere in books or on the Internet. She likened my situation to women who’ve had breast surgery or mastectomies and have had to have some of their lymph system taken out, and I thought of my sister and that fear she had of lymphedema and thought the same thing about my body.

So, why am I putting all of this emotion and blubbering out there? A long time ago I read an article in a book and I’m sorry I can’t remember nor find the reference to this quote, or possibly this paraphrase since I can’t find the actual reference but here’s the idea I loved: “He had nothing better to do than heal.” I’ve always loved this passage and since I’m not working now – other than, of course, the full time work of rearing my daughter – my other job is to heal. I have to heal from this birth and since I originally started going back to work nine weeks after my daughter was born, I didn’t do enough healing at the time. I got sidetracked with other people’s papers and stories and books to read, and I’m sure at the time, that work was the perfect thing to keep me functioning, but now my job is to just sit here at my desk when I need to and cry, or allow myself to cry on far-away, massage table deep in the woods.