That was the kind of situation I was motivated to leave behind us. But I also felt attuned to all the benefits for my big walking talking babies: the sense of safety and peace that nursing gave them, the magical way it calmed a tantrum or distress over a skinned knee, the reassurance it provided when we reunited after I had been away at work.
The slow, gradual process of putting more and more limits around nursing was different for each kid. With Beatrice, the less she nursed, the more she wanted to maintain soft-and-warm style physical contact with me in other ways. First came The Belly - as in, I need The Belly, Mama! Unless she was otherwise engaged, she wanted to have a hand planted under my shirt, as often as possible, regardless of setting or company. No matter if Mama was wearing a dress - she just ducked under the skirt and slid up an arm.
Good thing motherhood robs you of your modesty.
Gradually, The Belly became The Neck, which at least made it easier to keep my shirt on. If I were carrying her on my hip, or reading a story snuggled up, or singing a bedtime song, a little hand often wrapped itself around my throat. Strong emotions would lead her to squeeze at times, or worse, pinch (if I had a nickel for every time I have said gentle, gentle with my neck Beatrice we could have self-paid for that stem cell transplant).
Even though her hot little hands don't wrap around my throat as often as they used to, the big kids still tease her about it. And me. They say I look like an otherwise youthful mother with the curiously worn and wrecked neck of an eighty year old. Beatrice laughs. She loves feeling ownership over The Neck. (There's something there for my clinical friends who have a penchant for object relations theory.)
The thing is, I don't mind at all. I get it. At least, I imagine I get it. The Neck is part of my body, but it is something much bigger too. It's an anchor, connecting Beatrice to herself and her family and the solid earth beneath all our feet.
Yesterday I talked to a dear friend on the phone, briefly, in the middle of my work day. The sound of her voice never fails to give me a sense of peace; a break from the work of being 'on' and vigilant and responsible and responsive and anticipating the next item on the to do list. There is no thinking involved in the settling that happens - just an embodied sense of safety, of downshifting into a mode that suggests that in this moment, miraculously, there is no need to do, only to be.
The mere sound of her voice makes me feel like that - a pleasant weight, a long exhale, a stillness inside. Also the warm solidity of Mike when I lean into his side, the particular smell of my mother's neck (the neck!) in an embrace, the strong shoulder of a beloved friend that shifts to accept my heavy head, the smell of a cool damp green morning in the woods. The sight of a client's clear eyes in a very connected, focused-feeling session.
It is these moments that ground me when the unknowability and terror of our present circumstance threatens to break me into a million pieces and blow me away on a strong gust of dry wind.
I love receiving your kind notes and texts and emails. We just lived through an emotional whirlwind, overwhelmed by the awareness that countless supporters took time out of their busy days on Tuesday to help us convince our insurance company to reverse their denial of Mike's stem cell transplant. Things like that happen to us. It's extraordinary. People send us gift cards, dinner, offer to do our laundry, send beautiful notes and poems and art - and they've been doing it for almost two years now.
So that helps me to know cognitively that I'm not alone and I won't fall apart. That whatever happens, I will be able to still be me and still take care of my family - with the love and support of all of you.
But it is what I feel via my senses that helps my entire being know - heart, mind, body and soul - sustaining me in a mysterious way. Today's felt moments build on my own abundance of neck-anchors in childhood - nursing, being held, knowing a set of arms were open and ready to receive me. Things that can't be communicated through a screen: the feel of warm cat fur, swimming in the ocean, leaning against my sister in a church pew, the sound of my mother singing, my father laughing, ice cream cones on a wooden bench. And all of this is layered as delicately and thickly as phyllo dough inside me, and it is illuminated like sunlight passing through honey when I hear Edith on the phone, or climb into bed next to Gabriel at night, past present and future all gently aglow, saying you are supposed to be here, you are supposed to be you. It is good to be.
And all the cracks and fissures that these past months have lined me with, as Leonard Cohen reminds us, only make the light more visible; warmer to the touch.
After days like those earlier this week spent glued to my phone, I feel cut off from that solidity and warmth. I become disembodied. Sometimes I really do have to make medical arrangements and communicate with friends and arrange child care. Ask for lots and lots of help. So there's that.
But it's interesting that I usually feel compelled to check my phone constantly, to turn off the world around and my own body with it and sort of float through a Facebook or Instagram feed for awhile. Some unacknowledged part of me is always anticipating a piece of news that might just turn things around. Maybe Mike doesn't have cancer after all. Or maybe his doctor just found out there's a new cure and we can access it today. Maybe the Pennsylvania board caught wind of all the challenges I'm facing and decided to let me skip the rigamarole and just send me an LCSW license instead. Maybe if I just keep scrolling...
Those things aren't going to happen. I know. Yet I find it hard to break the habitual stance of phone-vigilance. Everyday life with its uncertainty and fear can feel so hard, and the little dark screen in my pocket offers something else. Yet when I leave everyday life, I leave everyday life - and with it all the sights, smells, sounds, and tastes that anchor me to this moment and to the created, beloved world.
Why would I turn away from it all for a minute more than necessary? Being a person is so very odd.
Despite my weaknesses, I do believe that as I age and those glowing layers of felt experience accumulate, a bone-deep confidence grows. Inhale, exhale, look up at the sky.
It is so very good to be.
