TRUCE

As I write this my two beautiful, amazing children are sleeping-- so free of stress, of pain, of projection, I endeavor to emulate them. But today, it’s a battle. Try as I might to stop it, the ache in my right leg gets referred to my head. There is probably no way this is neurologically possible, of course. I’m taunted today by a heckler that accurately (but cruelly) points out: “You’re not getting any better.” It’s a loop tape in my brain that analyzes and reanalyzes my stance and stride. Alarm bells of dread and worry wring a knot in my neck and the queasy feeling in my stomach surges in a silent threatening undertow. Five years ago, I might not have noticed any of this. The sore unsteady tightness in my side, the way it expands the more that I do. Five years ago, it’s a lifetime…Ryan’s lifetime. I consider my son with his increasing array of Jedi sound effects and Lego masterpieces and have to wonder…which of us has changed more since the day he was born? On that day I remember a nurse midwife told me that the chief reason for labor pain was that it makes motivation irrelevant. You are in it to the finish with your undivided attention. But even with an epidural, labor taught me in a day what I had missed my whole life: I didn’t have to figure out how to accomplish this miracle. I didn’t have to declare, decide, or defend my tactics. I just had to get out of the way. My body, despite years of my treachery, did everything right. This so-called shell of my soul that I had been despising and cursing, undermining at every turn as one would a traitor, delivered us both that day. And in so doing could no longer be the enemy.