Hi, loves. 🌿

Some notes on May

1.

Some weeks need to be reserved for your body. Set everything else aside. If you don’t, your body will force you to. You will be out for a walk when the problem begins, a walk you didn’t even want to take but some voice in your head — it doesn’t seem to be your own — insisted you should. You wanted to stay in bed with a novel and your coffee, the way you do most Sunday mornings, the only morning you get to sleep in and can reliably be left alone because the kid is having her time.

But this morning, you spill coffee on the white sheets the moment you get back in bed and know you’ll spend much of the day driving across the city and back, or sitting in an uncomfortable pew at a piano recital, so you get up and go out because someone on the internet has told you you need those 10,000 Goddamn steps.

Halfway through the walk, the walk you truly didn’t want to take, your dear, beloved sacroiliac joint starts nagging. By the time you’re home, you’re already lying on your mat, a tennis ball pushing into it, trying to pry it loose. It doesn’t work. The thing is stuck. You think of yourself at age 20, when this first happened, how you got down on the wood floor of the Lower East Side dance studio and wondered how you’d get up again.

You spend the rest of the week dealing with this — crying on the acupuncturist’s table, whispering fears into your husband’s ear. A friend reminds you, like someone does every time your back flares up, this will be harder on your mind than on your body, and she’s right. The job, for you, is to not go crazy. The job is to not add suffering to the suffering. The job, for you, is to have faith.

2.

Because you are an expert in dealing with your body in its various states of breakdown, you have an army on hand, so in addition to the needles and the ice and the ibuprofen, you meet with your Pilates teacher over Zoom. She asks how everything is and you tell her, Today I am not crying, and she tells you that’s good and also the crying is normal, it’s fine! But then she says something else to you, something you didn’t know how badly you needed to hear after all these months of trying to be a woman in midlife who eats her protein and lifts her weights and does her hundreds and watches her intake of bad fats and keeps an eye on her cholesterol and takes her supplements and whose belly fat just grows in spite of all the hard work. She says, simply: Your body looks like it’s being used.

She means this kindly. Not like you’d say it to a new mother, who looks exhausted and depleted and used up, not like someone said to you when your baby was six weeks old: you look awful. She means the opposite.

The pride you feel is outsized. This is perhaps all you’ve ever wanted, your whole life, back to age four when you could not stop dancing around the living room: a body in use.

3.

A week goes by and things settle. They always do, even though you still don’t believe it. Years of chronic pain will do that, make you believe otherwise, make you distrust everything, most especially your own muscles and joints and nerves. The mind needed to be tamed. The body did, too, but the mind has the harder job.

You think back to the osteopath in Paris who treated you only a handful of times over the course of that fateful summer. On the last visit, he said, You are all fixed, and you looked at him blankly because no one had ever said this to you. Now your mind just needs to understand that your body is okay. It might take some time. You have reminded yourself of this every few months since he told you this, way back in 2009. Your mind just needs to catch up.

The moment the fire in your S.I. joint calms, along with the burn down your leg, you no longer care about the belly fat, not one bit. You no longer care if you need to buy bigger clothes, you no longer care about the internet telling you that middle-aged women need to lift weights heavier than three pounds, eat 130g of protein, walk 10,000 steps, drink a gallon of water. Your body looks like it’s being used. That is all you want. You want it to feel good. You simply want to be able to use it.

4.

You tell your acupuncturist, I don’t think the state of the world is helping my body. You start to cry. To her, you can speak openly about all of this because you agree on most of it, you think, and there are so few people you agree with these days, its own small agony you can’t talk about except with your husband, to a small group of girlfriends. You tell others you aren’t feeling terribly impacted — you do not know the hostages, you do not have family killed, your are not being bombed, you are not being displaced, you are not losing your family day in and day out, you do not have a right to any of this — and yet you go for a walk and are suddenly crippled by pain. You read constantly, you watch everyone’s posts online, sometimes horrified, sometimes heartbroken. You watch the protests unfold on college campuses, and people text to check in, to see if you’re all okay. What can you write back? This is all just so—

5.

You have a beautiful Mother’s Day, a perfect day — perhaps the first one in all your ten years of mothering you felt no existential angst, surely because your kid is old enough to make you a delicious breakfast and you’ve made the day’s plans in advance. Your family sees the musical Come From Away and you soak your face with tears. The actors perform the opener — welcome to the land where we lost our loved ones and we said, we will still go on — and you forget for a moment that this is a play about September 11th and instead cannot help but think of the mothers in Israel and the mothers in Gaza and cry even harder wondering why so many of us can’t bear the thought that they don’t all deserve our tears.

6.

You go back to walking, but track nothing. You don’t know how long you walked, how many steps, how high your heart rate. You only know that you stopped when the nagging began. You measure things internally now, like you once did; you go back to the original kind of tracking, the private sort the phone knows nothing about, the feeling alone. You walk plugged into nothing, not the news, not the endless loop of Taylor Swift, but to the sounds of the neighbourhood. Your mind goes wild, out there on its own.

When you get home, you will roll out your mat not because it is what a woman in her forties should do, but because you want a body that looks used, you want a body that is used, you want to feel alive and agile and resilient. You, too, want to go on.

Sending love,

Abs xo

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