unkinked.

on seeking care.

A few months ago I had a main artery going into my uterus unkinked. If you didn’t know that a main artery could become kinked in the first place, you’re in good company. If you’re now envisioning the inner workings of your body as a maze of green coiled garden hose, warm and slightly bleached from the sun, well, same.

Massaged and manipulated back into place, this artery can now more freely pump blood through the remarkable, baffling circuitry of my veins. Instead of a slow, sluggish pulse, its beat has quickened and turned lively. Nearly ten years after the birth of my first child and three since the birth of my last, I am finally seeking care for the physical parts of me transformed by those pregnancies and births. Slowly, the arteries and organs and narrow passageways of my most vulnerable places are being coaxed back into place and I’ve felt more myself in these past few months that I did in so many before that.

Today, I returned to the table in my pelvic floor physical therapist’s office, which is an awfully clinical sounding name for a place where something close to magic is performed. The table in her office is covered with a soft white sheet. The room is painted a pale green, gray. Soft music plays as I rest my head on a pillow that cradles my neck. The room is always quiet and warm and smells vaguely of patchouli. On that table today, with a woman’s warm hands palpating the soft middle of my belly, kneading the landscape of my internal organs to better work, and heal, and have space to function, my mind returned, as it has for days now, to women living through waking nightmares in Israel and Palestine. As someone was in the midst of taking the time to ease my tension and soothe my discomfort, to give gentle care and deliberate attention to these soft and sacred parts of me, I thought of the women who have been kidnapped and raped and killed in the course of the last few days. I thought of the women lying in wait for air strikes, without food or electricity or water. I thought of the people—women and non-binary and children, especially— who will be, and always are, the collateral damage of war. On that table with its white sheet and soft pillow, it was impossible not to be struck by the magnitude of care that a single human body needs and deserves, and the magnitude of care we fail, repeatedly, collectively, to give one another.

I don’t have perfect words to offer a terrorized world this week. I am holding those caught in the middle of these battles in my heart. I am thinking of the generations—the centuries—of traumas that these latest atrocities lay bare. I am terrified for the suffering that is still to come. I am praying, as I always do, for peace.

PS. The words of Garrett Bucks resonated deeply with me this week. If you have the bandwidth, they are worth a read.