Mind Body Mama: World of Hurt

For one who’s been finding her truest voice in the keyboard of late, I’ve been awfully silent the past week. I’ve been in a world of hurt. It was either a rib poking out of my chest wall or referred pain from an undiagnosed cervical disk problem, or a complex intersection of both with a little neck/upper back/shoulder girdle de-stabilization thrown in for laughs. At any rate, it hurt. Every time I took a deep breath it felt like someone stabbed me in the chest with an ice pick. And sometimes my hands went all numb and tingly.

In my typically more-geek-than-jock fashion, the injury came more from writing about karate than from doing karate. (A client who blew his knee out on the slopes last winter deadpanned, “I never write about skiing.”) It’s a classic keyboarding injury for me and one I saw coming when it was just a teensy light at the end of the tunnel the weekend before last. That’s when I settled myself into the inadequate desk chair, in front of the too-high folding table, to type non-stop against a pressing deadline. I knew I was strapping myself onto the tracks but I couldn’t help myself—the passion to write and the pressure of the deadline were too great.

So for a long while there was that stabbing pain; now I’m rationing my keyboard time and I’m on the bench at karate. But that wasn’t even the fun part. The pain—or perhaps the lack of oxygen to my brain because it hurt too much to breathe—scrambled my ability to think more than one step ahead of myself. It was like a crash course in mindfulness. I couldn’t organize myself well enough to think of the future or remember the past. My to-do list became rudimentary. “Snack, shower, Tylenol” I wrote one day. Those are the kinds of things that usually don’t even make it on to the list, I just do them—but suddenly they were the main event.

As I was navigating through the pain-haze, Birth Pie reminded me that I was confused because pain had shot my brain’s Executive Function to hell. Birth Pie is a trained doula so she knows something about pain and its effect on intellect and personality. But the real reason Birth Pie was tuned in to Executive Function, and lack thereof, was that hers was shot to hell too. She’s been missing a lot of sleep because of sick kids, and holding stress on behalf of her family in the way of all mamas.

This was mildly alarming because I tend to think of Birth Pie as my other wife. (If you’re the type of person who finds it odd or offensive that a nice girl like me has a wife to begin with, you’re reading the wrong blog. No hard feelings—please move along.)

But this isn’t about Sweetiebabyhoneylicious, my crabby old honeybunch. This is about Birth Pie without whom I could run neither my business nor my home. I’ve heard that other women have taken on parenthood without having a woman friend like this, but I wouldn’t want to try it. I’ve also heard that other women have sisters and mamas and aunties and cousins who play this kind of role—babysitting back and forth without keeping score, washing each other’s dishes, making casseroles. My family is too far away and they probably would balk at that kind of intimacy anyway. We just don’t do that.

The last time my Executive Function took a gainer due to illness, back in October, Birth Pie came over and made me some to-do lists. “Call clients—cancel appointments, ‘So sorry,’” reads one. Another: “Read a poem. Hug your kid. Drink tea.” Then she washed all my dishes and sent her husband over to the school to pick up all the kids. The last time illness hijacked her Executive Function on an overnight flight from the west coast, I let myself into her house to steal her phone list and organized a week of meals to be delivered.

So last Tuesday when she mentioned that she still had dirty dishes from Sunday, it occurred to me to go over and wash them—but the impulse was vanquished by the next ice pick to my clavicle. And somewhere between the next few punctures I realized that things could get bad, very bad, if one of us did not shape up soon. On Wednesday the two of us had trouble herding four kids home from school, and that is a not a bad ratio—but one kept dropping his book, one kept lagging behind, and one kept running ahead to look for a puppy. It was only a matter of time before they realized that we were not on our game, and then all hell would break loose.

Except it didn’t. Two chiropractors worked some magic, and I rested all weekend, and no more stabbing. It’s more like someone poking their index finger into my chest, and while that makes me irritable and I’d like to punch whoever is poking me, I can think again. Birth Pie’s less stressed in general, although she still has some stuff on her mind, but when she stopped by on Monday I had time and breath to listen to her and offer some council. On Tuesday she brought me a pork chop. Things are back to normal, and not a moment too soon.