Learning to Live in My Body
My twin sons graduated from kindergarten this week. Last Friday, when I sat down in the front row for their graduation performance, Abigail in her carrier on my chest, I began to cry.
The graduation performance was at 11:30am on a Friday morning. This is probably what it would have looked like if I was drinking: Thursday was a heavy drinking day for me. Forever and always. Since high school. Thirsty Thursday’s. Thursday night in grad school was $3 martini night at the bar beneath my apartment. Thursdays were the night before the weekend, which, you know, is essentially the weekend. There were several places I worked that had half-day Friday’s, so that was another reason Thursday was a day to overdo it because Friday was going to be a waste anyway.
In any event, I had a long history of Thursdays being a party night, and having various and always ever-reasonable reasons for such, I would most certainly have been hungover on this Friday morning.
I would have been sitting in that folding chair, maybe wondering if I smelled like booze through my sweat. My hair would be down because I always showered when I was drinking, but with this humidity in the south, my hair would be curling up, sweat on my brow.
A pounding head. A dry mouth. Licking my lips. I would likely be shaky, because I have always drank too much of most everything, and that includes coffee (which I still indulge myself in). The general feeling of fuuuuuuck. Followed by God I hope no one notices.
My sons would have come on stage and I would have grinned at them. I would have blown them kisses. I would have teared up when I saw them, my boys, my boys who started out so teeny-tiny, my sons who spent the first 40 days of their lives in the NICU, me visiting twice a day but being apart overnight.
I ached when I left the hospital back then. I physically ached when I got to my house. I would sit in the driveway and stare at the front door and I would think I don’t know how many more times I can walk in that door without my babies.
I often tell them I could fit their backs in the palm of my hand when they were born.
My three sons were 5 months and 20 months (the twins) when we moved to North Carolina. I began having trouble taking them to the doctor. I couldn’t follow what the doctor was saying when the doctor started talking. I would stop at the door. I could hardly go into the office.
And I had three under two. This was before Covid, so we went to every park, museum, play place, etc. Hand sanitizer was a thing of the NICU, something my sons and I had outgrown. These kids were sick all the damn time. And I was a stay-at-home mom who could barely enter a pediatrician’s office.
I was still drinking and taking an anxiety medication that had been prescribed to me after Cade’s birth back then, but I started to investigate EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and trauma in the body.
EMDR is a modality developed specifically for trauma, primarily through the VA (its initial focus on war vets). It is an effort to access parts of the brain that are paralyzed in survival mode and in effect, working to protect you from the traumatic memories. In his landmark book, The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk argues that these memories have rewired your brain to have a trauma response to flight, fight, freeze, or fawn.
I am historically a fawner -- befriend the enemy. Become little. Become malleable. A doe batting her eyelashes. But with my babies, I froze.
I just had to stop freezing. So I began EMDR. Over the course of several weeks, in my sessions: We started the session with my water breaking in the living room, and vividly relived the experience of my labor, being wheeled into the OR, touching Cooper’s head crowning between my legs, the look on the student doctor when I saw, the doctor saying, “We’re doing the section.” The anesthesiologist pushing the mask over my face. Waking up and asking over and over, Where are my sons. Having sons. The pumping in the NICU. Smelling a blanket that smells like them and looking at pictures to encourage a letdown. The skin-to-skin, the leaving and the leaving and the leaving them behind. Riding up the elevator. Approaching winter in Spokane. I had gone into the hospital on September 30, the last day of an indian summer, with green grass and leaves and warmth on my shoulders. By November, though, I was watching snow fall outside the hospital window. The day we brought them home.
Cade’s pregnancy and birth bled into this EMDR work, too. I had found out I was pregnant with Cade when the twins were 7 months old. I had just left my office job to pursue our tree care business full time. I was run down. The NICU had changed me. Working in the sun, I thought, being my own boss. This would fix it.
The first week I was in the field, I started dropping feeds and pumping. I had never made enough milk for the boys, not once, ever, because I had missed my window coming out of my anesthesia. The only thing in my whole life that I worked harder at than trying to moderate my drinking is breastfeeding those boys.
I had, in fact, started drinking more liberally, since I was not intending to breastfeed anymore. This was why I took a pregnancy test. I would feel really bad if I was drinking and pregnant, I remember thinking.
That day, when I set a pregnancy test on the bathroom counter and saw just one line, I remember thinking, thank God. And then I looked back ten seconds later. TWO lines.
No fucking way.
As it turned out, my IUD had become embedded in my c-section scar tissue.
To recap: Cooper and Llew had been born early because Cooper’s water broke. Multiples (twins) and preemies have a higher likelihood of prolapsed cords. As a result of the prolapsed cord, I was put under general anesthesia and the c-section was coarsely performed. And then, after all that -- the IUD was inserted and embedded itself into the fucking c-section scar.
Thus: Cade.
Cade was born at 4lb 10oz. at 37+6 as the result of a subclinical infection of the placenta as a result of the IUD. They made me choose a day in the 37th week to have him taken — and I waited until the very last day they would let me.
In short: it was all happening exactly as the universe had laid out for me, but not as I had wanted it.
3 sons in 15 months. 47 total days in the NICU.
The EMDR was ultimately what brought me around to energy healing -- it was all happening in my body. I followed a light on a bar and vividly relived the traumatic memories -- when it was working, really working, I felt it happening in my brain, like popcorn. I felt the synapses and neural pathways reconnecting, or unconnecting, un-fucking themselves.
This was what happened to me when I began to do energy healing.
It was an effort to learn to live in my body. I could now walk into a doctors’ office and listen to the doctor without going into freeze.
Since I was making zero progress in traditional talk therapy -- as I have mentioned, I was perhaps even regressing as I was extremely effective in mental gymnastics to demonstrate all the reasons in the whole world as to why alcohol was most certainly not my issue -- I started looking into alternative healing.
Meditation. Working with shamanic practitioners. Reiki. Grounding -- putting my feet on the ground and asking the earth to take my negative energy and just fucking help me. My three sons were outside swinging on a playset. My marriage was over. My feet were on the grass. Help me not drive to the store today, I would say. Just for today.
I just wanted to be able to walk into a doctors’ office with my kids without shaking and later, to not die of alcoholism. Whatever course of action was required for that.
I also did things like chain smoke cigarettes after I had gotten the kids inside and set up on the TV and shoveled fistfuls of candy into my mouth, but -- I also asked the universe to guide me and to let me flow with what is and accept where I was as exactly where I was meant to be in that moment in time.
But this past Friday, when my sweet twins walked on stage in this gym in Fuquay-Varina to perform songs for their kindergarten promotion, I was not hungover.
Today I live in my body, and in this gym, on this day, what I experienced in my body is this: the organic, unencumbered tears. The leap in my chest when I saw them. The lump caught in my throat, these boys, my adorable boys in their little polos, singing and dancing to these songs. Moving as they moved with all the other children on stage, with no indication that they had a “rough start.”
The NICU had once said perhaps they wouldn’t enjoy touch because the first touch they had in life was not loving. My boys cuddle up to me, and I think of this often. We work with Llew quite a bit, in fact, on asking permission from strangers to hug them.
When Abigail was born this past March, the surgeon remarked that the scar was somewhat jagged, and that she just followed the pattern to re-open my uterus, to pull my sweet Abigail from my body. The c-section scar is crooked because of the speed with which she had to make the slice.
My boys are fond of this story: “And then, she sliced mommy open, and she pulled you out!” I slice across their lower abdomens with my finger, and they giggle. I pretend to pull out a baby and Lion King hold up the stuffed animal. My boys think this is hilarious.
I hear women complain about their c-section scars, and I say: You mean the mark of my body that saved my sons’ life? Yeah, I think I like it alright.
On a folding chair, holding my new baby against my chest, the sweltering humidity and heat of a North Carolina June pouring into the gym. Sweat on the back of my baby’s hair. Holding my husband’s hand.
I was fully myself and feeling everything in my skin. It can be uncomfortable. But I am confident and to live this way — being whole, showing up for my kids, being able to truly look at myself in the mirror with clarity and clear eyes — always outweighs any momentary and fleeting discomfort.
What a journey!❤️