Noticing
Great grief isn't made to fit inside your body. it's why your heart breaks
Grief has manifested itself in my body. Awkward symptoms, none to be found on the sheet they gave me when I left the hospital on things to expect when your body is recovering from surgery.
A lot of people ask how I'm recovering physically. Which I understand because the surgery was a big deal and left me with some pretty fancy scars and its the primary reason I'm writing this from the bed instead of working. And I usually answer with "I'm healing slowly but fine" and its the end of the discussion.
Sometimes I prefer it that way because it gives me an excuse to duck out of the conversation earlier (if I was anti-social before I am extra anti-social now. I have to use my fingers to count the number of text messages and emails that have gone unanswered)
Most of the time I wish you would ask about my dead baby. Paris. tell me you remember. Tell me you know this surgery wasn't just a surgery, that there was this life that was inside of me and it was real. that the surgery took more than my fallopian tubes, my ability to bear future children. It took my child too. Tell me you remember that.
But no one asks or mentions anything beyond the surgery, and if they do it is a tiny blip in the conversation before things get awkward because grief is messy and the conversation turns to something else.
Mostly I keep Paris to myself. I can't keep him safe and remind him to wear his mittens and eat the crusts of his sandwich so I do this. I protect his memory from people who don't fully understand the value of his short life, from comments like "God saves those He loves" and "Everything happens for a reason" and "This is all a part of God's plan" and I do so with the ferocity of a wild animal protecting her cubs.
I've become skeptical of people, untrusting, my instincts overriding my belief that people are good and that those I love won't poke at my where I am most tender.
I've always found it interesting to see the link between physical symptoms and emotions. I don't put a lot of weight in the connection and jump to the conclusion that every physical symptom I experience must be related to a specific emotion but more often than not when I look up what I'm experiencing physically I find some relation to what is happening emotionally.
So yesterday I typed in emotions related to some physical discomfort I'd been having that I was pretty sure wasn't related to my surgery and recovery.
The first website I found broke down the physical reaction into sides of the body. Where I was experiencing pain on the side of the body where my pain was located was related to feelings of powerlessness and failure. specifically between parent and child. For example, it read, thoughts of I am a bad mother.
I had to take a moment to catch my breath.
The body doesn't keep secrets. Everything emotionally I held inside my body, when not expressed, has manifested itself into physical symptoms.
Notice me the body says, louder and louder until I pay attention.
'Oh I do' I reply to the guilt and shame that appears to have filled me so deep the only answer was for it to spill over from my emotional self into my physical self.
Notice me, my dead baby screams into conversations
"Oh I do. Sweet one, I do. How could I ever forget?"
Grief has manifested itself in my body. Awkward symptoms, none to be found on the sheet they gave me when I left the hospital on things to expect when your body is recovering from surgery.
A lot of people ask how I'm recovering physically. Which I understand because the surgery was a big deal and left me with some pretty fancy scars and its the primary reason I'm writing this from the bed instead of working. And I usually answer with "I'm healing slowly but fine" and its the end of the discussion.
Sometimes I prefer it that way because it gives me an excuse to duck out of the conversation earlier (if I was anti-social before I am extra anti-social now. I have to use my fingers to count the number of text messages and emails that have gone unanswered)
Most of the time I wish you would ask about my dead baby. Paris. tell me you remember. Tell me you know this surgery wasn't just a surgery, that there was this life that was inside of me and it was real. that the surgery took more than my fallopian tubes, my ability to bear future children. It took my child too. Tell me you remember that.
But no one asks or mentions anything beyond the surgery, and if they do it is a tiny blip in the conversation before things get awkward because grief is messy and the conversation turns to something else.
Mostly I keep Paris to myself. I can't keep him safe and remind him to wear his mittens and eat the crusts of his sandwich so I do this. I protect his memory from people who don't fully understand the value of his short life, from comments like "God saves those He loves" and "Everything happens for a reason" and "This is all a part of God's plan" and I do so with the ferocity of a wild animal protecting her cubs.
I've become skeptical of people, untrusting, my instincts overriding my belief that people are good and that those I love won't poke at my where I am most tender.
I've always found it interesting to see the link between physical symptoms and emotions. I don't put a lot of weight in the connection and jump to the conclusion that every physical symptom I experience must be related to a specific emotion but more often than not when I look up what I'm experiencing physically I find some relation to what is happening emotionally.
So yesterday I typed in emotions related to some physical discomfort I'd been having that I was pretty sure wasn't related to my surgery and recovery.
The first website I found broke down the physical reaction into sides of the body. Where I was experiencing pain on the side of the body where my pain was located was related to feelings of powerlessness and failure. specifically between parent and child. For example, it read, thoughts of I am a bad mother.
I had to take a moment to catch my breath.
The body doesn't keep secrets. Everything emotionally I held inside my body, when not expressed, has manifested itself into physical symptoms.
Notice me the body says, louder and louder until I pay attention.
'Oh I do' I reply to the guilt and shame that appears to have filled me so deep the only answer was for it to spill over from my emotional self into my physical self.
Notice me, my dead baby screams into conversations
"Oh I do. Sweet one, I do. How could I ever forget?"
Comments
Post a Comment