On Feeling Needy and Blue ... and Grateful (though there outta be a better word)

Awhile ago I wrote about some of the reasons I stopped blogging at the wide tent. In part, I felt like my writing created a false sense of who I am; that in trying to write with craft and wisdom, I worried that I lacked humility, and I was creating an on-line persona that was not quite honest, because it did not share all of my messy, complicated, needy self. I don’t know if my on-line writer persona here at my goodly heritage matches my real-life persona very well at all, but it’s something that I care about and strive for. If I have any wisdom at all to share, and any beauty, I suspect it is more true and more accessible if it’s coming from a real live human being, warts and all.

What I really want to write about today is gratitude, and not just gratitude in general, but a very specific gratitude for which there should be a word, though I’m not sure what it is. But before I can even get there, I have to let you in on a bit of my messy self, which in the past couple of days, has been feeling kind of blue and needy.

But maybe before I get to my blue and needy self, I should back up even further, in the interests of full disclosure and truth-in-advertising, and let you know that I have in my life suffered from pretty serious depression and anxiety. Not completely debilitating – I’ve never experienced a real breakdown, though in the past couple of years I came pretty close, twice. You’ll get more of that in my “Welfare of the City” series, which, come to think of it, is probably why that series is progressing so slowly…. But now I offer up my experience of depression only to assure you that “blue and needy” is not that, and I will most certainly be fine.

But still, blue and needy is, well…. blue and needy, you know? Yesterday in particular, by the end of the day, all I really wanted was a good cry. But by the time the chores and errands were finished, the dropping off at swimming and the picking up done, the stories read and the snack fixed and the teeth brushed … well, I was too tired to even indulge myself in a good cry, so I just went to bed. And the thing is, every Thursday night I’m on my own, because Julie has choir practice. Julie has had choir practice every Thursday night since before we had kids, so I’ve never known any other sort of Thursday night parenting. It’s no big deal … it just is. But last night it just felt like too much.

Who knows why? There are little things … the days are getting shorter, it’s finally gotten bitter cold, peri-menopause sometimes feels like it’s kicking my butt. Then there’s the way bigger stuff … a friend of mine, a young mother, was in surgery yesterday for a recurrence of cancer; another young mother I know is undergoing chemotherapy; one of my oldest friend’s younger brother died; Julie is struggling with stupid school stress and sad family stuff. In the midst of all that, my own desire to be present and kind and helpful sometimes leaves me instead feeling inadequate and petty and, worst of all for me, needy and vulnerable.

But that’s really all just backdrop to what I want to write about, which is not the blues, but rather gratitude. And not just the sort of gratitude such moments certainly call for, the I’m-grateful-for-my-health-and-my-family-and-the-roof-over-my-head sort of gratitude, though I certainly am grateful for all of that. But what I’m thinking about is more fortuitous? Providential? Neither of those words is exactly it, either, but it’s as close as I’ve gotten for that out-of-the-blue kindness, which is usually small, and often unaware of the context that makes it so needed, but precisely in its smallness, and in its lack of intention, it is just the thing. Breathtaking. Grace maybe. I’m feeling grateful for instances of grace, and the friends and strangers through whom God has visited them upon me.

Like the time I went to a family wedding in New York when Micah was just a baby. I had been nursing him since he came home with us at 15 days old, and though I never produced a full supply of milk, I had amassed a huge stash in the freezer of my own milk, from months and months of pumping before we ever even knew about Micah. By the time this wedding rolled around, though, I had pretty much worked my way through my stash, and was almost through the donations from Rachel and Cate who had, with the most exquisite generosity, pumped and donated their milk to the cause of teeny-tiny Micah-boo.

So I went off for about six hours to this wedding – the longest I had ever been away from Micah -- and Julie went off with Micah and visited Ansley, who lived near-by. It was a lovely, lovely wedding, full of people I adore, but for some reason I’m not sure I can adequately explain, I just felt so out of step. My breasts ached and I had to excuse myself to the bathroom and try to hand express milk so I wouldn’t leak all over my borrowed party dress. Because I had been ambivalent about leaving Micah, I had been late in RSVP’ing, and so was seated with folks I didn’t know at all – a middle-aged single man, a widowed neighbor of the bride’s parents, a couple of family friends and business associates, none of whom really know each other. From this vantage point, somehow, all the young, beautiful, normal people – the young friends of the bride and groom who were so effortlessly and unselfconsciously themselves at this most hetero-normative of all celebrations – it was just overwhelming. I felt like a freak, and all the ways that I have had to invent my life suddenly were just too, too much.

And then, when I finally got back to Julie and Micah, he smelled overwhelmingly of formula.**

On the way home from New York, I just couldn’t stop crying, keening almost. I was completely inarticulate, even to myself. My grief felt profound, yet inexplicable. Somehow the smell of formula on Micah’s breath had become the symbol of all the ways my life lacked normalcy – ways that, for the most part, I cherish, and wouldn’t trade for the world. But in that moment, I just wanted to feel normal in some sort of way that most folks – like the dear ones at that wedding – get to take for granted, but that mostly eludes me.

Certainly at the very least, I wanted to have breasts full of milk and never need a stash in the freezer, but short of that, I most desperately wanted a stash in the freezer. I hated what formula represented, the failure of normalcy that seemed to extend into so much of my life, right down to my ovaries and my breasts. In that moment, I hated formula with a passion, yet that’s what I was going home to: no more of my stash, no more of Cate’s milk or Rachel’s, just a can of baby formula to make up the difference that my breasts couldn’t provide.

When we got home, there was a message on the machine from a total stranger. She had heard, from a mutual friend, that I was looking for breast milk. She had a bunch in her freezer that she was not going to use. Did I want it?

The gratitude I felt in that moment … why isn’t there a word for that? She didn’t know, she couldn’t have known, but her gesture was exactly, exquisitely, profoundly what I needed at that moment. My gratitude to this woman was just as inarticulate as my grief had been just hours before. There ought to be a word for that, for the sort of gratitude you feel when someone totally unwittingly, through just common decency and kindness and generosity, becomes a channel of God’s grace in exactly the way you needed it at exactly that moment.

Which is a very long and round-about way of saying that I feel that sort of gratitude a lot. And believe me, it’s not lost on me how lucky I am.

So this morning, for example, I was feeling better – a good night’s sleep goes along way, not to mention a lot of kindness on my Facebook page yesterday – but still, I was a little punky and blue, feeling needy and vulnerable and inadequate to the task of being present and giving in the face of so much suffering around me these days. I was on my way to yoga with Jen across the street when Pat called. She couldn’t have lunch as we had been hoping, but she just wanted to tell me that my writing lately has given voice to some things – big things – she has been mulling, but has been unable to articulate herself. And she said a lot of other really nice things that I won’t bore you with, but that were just the right thing – making me feel not just needy and vulnerable, but also helpful, present, effective.

I ran across the street, late but with a smile, and then Jen did it all over again: first we could barely get through our practice for all the giggling, and then we fell into a conversation about her experience of pregnancy and impending motherhood that was so open and honest and affirming of my place in her life and her family.

Now I will say that Pat and Jen are probably the two most intuitive people I know, bar none. Both of them have this intense insight, like they see right into your soul and get it right every time. Now that I think of it, I don’t know anyone else quite like them, but they are very much like each other in this way. Which is to say there is no point, ever, in trying to bullshit them. And which is also to say, both of them probably knew that I was feeling a bit punky. But certainly, my gratitude is no less, nor is my awe at not only their kindness, but their willingness to make themselves vulnerable in order to lift me up. What a gift. Am I one lucky girl, or what?

** Please let me here assure you that I do NOT believe formula is evil. I did NOT breastfeed Micah because I think formula is evil, and if you formula-fed your baby, I do NOT think I am better than you, nor do I think Micah will have any sort of advantage over your child. I DO think breastfeeding is a powerful experience, and I’m awfully glad I was able to do it, and if you ever want support I’m your gal. But I think there are LOTS of good reasons to feed formula to a baby, and I’ve said as much while leading a La Leche League meeting. Okay?

Plantar Fasciitis (for Melissa)

When I was a kid, I never ever thought of myself as an athlete. Running made me wheeze, and I hated team sports because I knew I was going to let everyone down. In elementary school, I was always in awe of the tomboys among my friends who actually choose to play kickball with the boys at recess; I only played kickball when forced to by my gym teacher, and I was always the proverbially last-kid-to-be-picked. Even worse than kickball was volleyball. I had a natural reflex to duck away from a ball hurtling itself right at my face. The pain of a volleyball hitting my glasses right on the bridge of my nose is still vivid, and I probably haven’t played volleyball in thirty years. I will be quite content if I die never having played volleyball again.

In high school, I found a small niche for myself in the drama program, and never gave a thought to sports. In middle school, the basketball coach had half-heartedly tried to recruit me, simply because I was tall. But I would no sooner have joined the basketball team than a Christian youth group. As an adolescent, I was not even agnostic, not about God, not about sports: I rejected both pretty much out of hand.

So at the age of thirty-five, two miscarriages behind me and facing the stark likelihood that I would never carry a pregnancy to term, I felt pretty alienated from my body. For years I had assumed that though I was soft and not particularly strong, I had a body just meant to grow and nurture a child. Though I didn’t – and still don’t – care much at all about having a biological connection to my children, I did very much yearn to experience pregnancy and childbirth. I was sure I was going to be really good at it. As it turns out I was wrong.

I was also as heavy and out-of-shape as I’ve ever been after a couple of years of low-tech yet grueling infertility treatments, two miscarriages, depression and a sedentary desk job. I was heavy, out-of-shape, alienated from my body, disappointed that I would not experience the physical challenge of childbirth – and totally without any resources to draw from in facing those challenges. The conventional wisdom was that I should exercise, but I was so convinced that I was not an athlete, I didn’t even know where to begin.

I’m not sure what led me to my first lap around the track. That’s as far as I got that first time, one agonizing lap. A quarter mile. At the end I could barely breath and my thighs were burning. The next time I added half a lap, and the next time another, until very, very slowly-but-surely, I was up to two miles. I left the track out of sheer boredom, took to the trails in the woods, and – still the slowest runner in the park – I was, nonetheless, a RUNNER! An athlete. I would say to Julie regularly, “You know what, I think I’m actually a runner!” At first she was very encouraging, but eventually she began looking at me with a sort of “no duh!” kind of look on her face. But for the longest time I just never stopped being astonished. A runner! An athlete! Me!

Then I got a little cocky. Somewhere in the most secret recesses in my brain I began thinking that maybe I could really be a runner. Like run in races and stuff. I started looking into 5k’s, which seemed fairly reasonable, but my secret goal – unspoken to almost anyone, it seemed so absurd – was to run Broad Street, a ten mile race held every May in Philadelphia. In January, I started training in earnest.

You know what happens when athletes get cocky? They get injured. About a month before the Broad Street run, I was felled by a searing pain in my heel. I could barely walk. I had no idea at all what was wrong with me, but the pain was so excruciating and my devastation so dramatic, I feared my running career was over before it had really even begun. I was convinced that my body was never going to be my friend. Fortunately, I was wrong.

My friend Pete quickly diagnosed my malady as plantar fasciitis, and a little Googling suggested that this need not be the end of the world, though pretty clearly Broad Street was not in the cards that year (as it turns out, Broad Street has continued to elude me every year due to injuries). My Googling also suggested that if I had set out to inflame my plantar fascia, I could not have gone about it with a more targeted training program: I was running sprints, I was running up hills, I was running in sand. Oops.

It was a pretty major set-back. But confident that I would, indeed, run again, and with Pete as my coach, I set about healing my heel. First, I stopped running entirely for almost a month. I started wearing a brace at night that Pete loaned me, which kept my foot flexed. It was terribly uncomfortable, and usually I would kick it off before the night was over, but it really worked. I also got special inserts, again recommended by Pete, to put in my new gel-cushioned running shoes, which, for the first time, I actually spent some money on.

When I started running again, I started back at the beginning. Well, not all the way back, but I did go back to the track, which is soft and flat, and began with maybe a mile. I increased really slowly, and took it easy if the pain flared up. I’m not much of a stretcher, but I started taking care to do gentle stretches for the bottom of my feet. And eventually I was back up to my normal running routine, now with even bigger dreams in the secret recesses of my mind.

In my experience, plantar fasciitis is a permanent but manageable injury. My right foot flares up occasionally, usually when I get up to four miles several times a week. This just happened recently, but due to the genius of my friend and yoga instructor, Jen, I have recently had a bit of a breakthrough in my treatment. I’ve been doing private yoga once a week with Jen for several months, and because she knew I had suffered from plantar fasciitis in the past, she has been working very diligently at making sure my feet are planted very firmly and evenly on the ground, especially in my down dog.

“See that crease at your ankle when you’re bent forward?” she will ask. “Let’s make sure that’s even. Make sure your foot is evenly grounded, especially the big toe.” I knew this had something to do with my plantar fasciitis, and Jen really is a genius, so I trusted her implicitly and took care to be mindful of how my feet felt on the floor. But I wasn’t suffering from any heel pain – my running was great, though I was only going a couple of miles most of the fall – so I didn’t really get it.

Then just the other week, there it was, after just two four-mile runs, that familiar, stabbing pain in the ball of my heel. I prepared myself for a set-back, but didn’t despair. I don’t have Pete’s brace, but I started flexing my foot whenever I could. Started doing gentle foot stretches. And a new pair of shoes and new inserts are on my shopping list.

But the real key has been paying attention to my stride, both when walking and running. I tend to underpronate, especially on the right side. When I focus on making sure my foot is evenly planted on the ground, most of the pain in my heel just disappears. Since rolling to the outside of my foot feels natural for me, compensating means being especially mindful of planting my big toe firmly with each stride.

Soon I will be adding weekly Pilates sessions to my weekly yoga practice, and Jen and I continue to work on strengthening and re-orienting my legs to correct for the underpronation in my stride. And don’t tell anyone, but I think maybe I’m finally going to run Broad Street in 2010!

notes: on bodies

I have an essay about bodies and incarnational faith in my head that has been percolating for months now, but it’s just going nowhere. I think this needs to be a conversation first before it can be an essay. So I’m going to throw out a list of things I’m thinking about, and if any of them resonates for you, leave me a comment won’t you? (I can’t tell you how much it makes my day when you all leave me comments!) Consider this a bunch of jumbled thoughts in search of a thesis and some organizing principle.

I.

I have exactly no background in theology or philosophy, so I can’t and won’t try to talk with any authority about the so-called “mind-body dichotomy,” except to say that it seems to me to be alive and well, and I think that’s sort of a shame. Again, I have no idea what others have meant by “mind-body dichotomy,” but what I mean by it is this distinction we all seem to have between our “Selves” and our “bodies.” And how I hear this distinction play itself out in real life is that almost everyone is pretty critical of their bodies – no matter what kind of bodies they have (and see, there’s the distinction right there in the very language we use, this notion that we “have” a body, sort of like we “have” a light blue mini-van, or ratty brown dansko clogs, or a red clock in our kitchen; not that we “are” our bodies, but WE “have” them). Most of us think we’re a little too fat, or a lot too fat, or a little too skinny, or a lot too skinny; we don’t like the wrinkles here or the sags there, and our thighs are too lumpy or our hair is too frizzy or our boobs are too little or our butt is too big or or or … it’s pretty endless, isn’t it, the stream of judgment our Selves dish out to our bodies? And our bodies are just mute, everyone’s favorite whipping boy, the repository of so much shame and disappointment and judgment.

So sometimes I wonder what it would be like if the tables were turned, if the Selves just shut up for a minute, and let the bodies have a turn. I bet the bodies would have a thing or two to say to their Selves, don’t you think? I think most of the bodies that their Selves love to hate would be pretty damn pissed off at how ungrateful their Selves are. If you think about it, our bodies do a LOT of nice things for us … I just imagine them saying, “And all you can think about is how big your butt is? Really?” It just seems kind of petty, doesn’t it, in the face of everything else your body does for you?

II.

Let’s make a list, shall we, of all the nice things our bodies do for our Selves. Be as specific as you can. I’ll start with a few thoughts. My body allows my Self to …

…hear Julie’s gorgeous descant floating above the congregation on Sunday mornings

…taste salt and vinegar potato chips and Three Philosophers beer

…walk on the beach, the waves roaring in my ears, the sun shining on the surf

…nurse a child, one I didn’t even give birth to

…run, sending endorphins to my brain and keeping my moody Self relatively happy

…lay hands on a dear friend and pray for healing in her life

How ‘bout you?

III.

And, it turns out, even folks who have, by any objective standard, bodies that are simply exquisite, even they can’t get over themselves and just be grateful. I know this because my friend Jen, who is a dancer and a yogini and a Pilates instructor, tells me that her dance students and colleagues are often the most harsh critics she knows of their own bodies.

Jen and I do yoga together once a week in her beautiful apple green home studio, and I’ve never experienced yoga like I do with her. She approaches my body in yoga like an artist approaches a canvas – a serious artist, one who intends to create nothing short of a masterpiece; an artist who approaches her craft with both loving passion and exquisite technique, and so is both gentle and demanding, holistic and technical. That my body gets to be the medium of her art once a week feels like nothing short of a divine gift, and sometimes when I catch a glimpse of us in the mirror I gasp and say, “Oh my god, look at us! We’re so beautiful!” And Jen laughs in delight and tells me she’s going to take me to all her dance classes to give her dancers a pep talk, because they don’t so much see it.

And I have to just wonder, what’s up with that? I mean really. A couple of weeks ago, Trixie and I went to see Jen perform in the Fringe Festival, and I loved watching all the dancers, more than I ever have before, I think because I just forgot about wondering what it all “means” (which makes me feel stupid) and I just reveled in their bodies, which were so awesome, and moved in such gorgeous ways. There was one man in particular, whose body was different from many male dancers I’ve watched – he wasn’t built, his muscles weren’t round and pumped, in clothing you might even think he was just skinny, and not so strong. But when he danced, all his muscles showed themselves, long, strong lines stretching from joint to joint and moving him in the most beautiful lines imaginable. I was enthralled.

After the performance, Jen met me and Trixie for a cheese steak at Pat’s, which happened to be just a half a block away from the dance studio, and I grilled her: “Are you serious? Those dancers don’t understand that their bodies are near-perfect gifts? They don’t just walk through the world reveling all the time in how beautiful they are and in what their bodies can do? Really? I just don’t get it.”

IV.

I don’t know how I got so lucky (I like to give all the credit to my parents, who were pretty wonderful, but it may just be the way I’m wired), but I really love my body. And if you don’t know me in person, you should know that my body is pretty much just fine as a whole, and it has a few quite nice features, but it also has more than enough features that fall far short of any objective standard of “beautiful,” so if I wanted, I could be quite harshly critical. But for some reason, I’m just not. In fact, I seem to have the reverse of the body-image issues that plague so many folks who see their bodies as much less attractive than they really are. I generally feel much fitter and prettier than I probably am, in fact. Sometimes when I’m trying on clothes in the harsh light of a dressing room, I am startled and wonder, “Oh! Is that how I look to other folks? ‘Cause that’s sure not how I feel!” But then I just shrug and think, “Oh well, too bad for them if it is!”

I do try to take good care of my body, and I love it even more when it is strong and fit. But when I am doing things to make it so, like running or yoga, it’s not because I hate my body and want it to be different, but because I love my body and want to enjoy it even more. Even when my body has not been working so well – like when I struggled with infertility, and gained a lot of weight – even then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t hate my body so much as feel really alienated from it. The split felt pretty extreme. I felt much of the time like pure intellect and raw emotion, but pretty disembodied, and it took running a marathon and nursing Micah to connect everything back up. But even then, in my worst moments, I think my body’s self-image (and that’s interesting language, isn’t it?) was unrealistically positive, relatively speaking.

I count that as a blessing, by the way.

V.

Now I know that there are many folks who have bodies that make life hard for them in very real ways. Their bodies keep them in chronic pain, or they don’t allow them the range of experiences they would like, or they are simply failing way too soon, or they are fundamentally wrong in some way, like they don’t match up with their Selves’ gender. I am trying to figure out how to be careful, and where folks like this fit into what I’m thinking. But it also seems to me, somewhat ironically, that those Selves who have the most legitimate complaints about their bodies are often the most loving and forgiving of their bodies, and the most grateful to them. That seems like something interesting to explore.

V.

I have a vague notion that some of the blame for this mind-body dichotomy lies with our friend Paul (and/or sketchy interpretations of Paul), right? Except it’s possible that I’m just in over my head here. My friend Pierce, who was a Pauline scholar as an undergraduate, and with whom I went to law school, tried to give me a lesson on corporality in 1 and 2 Corinthians on Facebook, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to take a whole evening, face-to-face (i.e. our bodies actually in the same room), probably with beer … and good food … and of course a Bible. And even then I’m not so sure I’m gonna get it (and let’s face it, Pierce is way smarter than I am, and the only reason I did better in law school than he did is because I, being the total nerd that I am, never missed a class and briefed all my cases, whereas Pierce, being totally NOT a nerd, did not; and in the end it turns out maybe he was right because look who’s earning a living practicing law, and look who is doing neither!). But if any of you theologians want to take a stab at explaining what Paul had to say about bodies in the comments, I would be ever-so-grateful (or if you just want to make a date with me and Pierce for an evening discussion over beer and good food, leave your availability! I mean, how fun would that be?)

VI.

Okay, and since we’re talking about theology (where, I reiterate, I am in way over my head) … aren’t bodies sort of at the heart of being Christian? Isn’t incarnation and resurrection pretty central to our faith, for those of us who are Christians? Isn’t it the central scandal of Christianity, as Kathleen Norris says, that God “came to us and share our common lot” (in the words of the UCC statement of faith) … in the form of a fully human body we know as Jesus? So what’s up with Christians hating their bodies?

I’m not so good at praying, but the closest I sometimes feel I get is when I close my eyes and try to imagine Jesus as a real live person. I always imagine he is long and thin like that dancer I saw recently, the one whose muscles didn’t bulge but instead stretched in lines across his body that were as perfect as the lines his body in turn made in space as he danced. I imagine that Jesus had unruly hair, maybe even dreads, because who has time to groom on the road, right? And that his skin wasn’t as dark as Micah’s, but certainly darker than mine. And I wonder what he smelled like, because I’m sure it wasn’t deodorant or after-shave, and I wonder what it would feel like to hold his hands, and whether he snorted when he laughed. I would love to fix him a meal and watch him eat, because I bet he loved to eat, and I love to watch people who love to eat. And I wonder if his face got soft when he was listening to someone he loved, and I think he must have liked to touch people, and kiss them, and walk arm-in-arm.

I love communion, maybe because it’s as close as I feel like I get to the incarnate body of Christ as he lived in it; and I love all the messy, complicated relationships that make up church (and I like them in person better than email!), and I love worshipping and praying and working side-by-side, literally bodies touching, eating, singing, crying, laughing, sharing our stories, because that’s what makes me feel like part of the body of Christ, which is when resurrection feels most real to me.

VII.

See, I have no idea where this is going. So holla back!