For as long as I can remember, I've been able to dream myself out of nightmares. My subconscious and I... we have a pact. I pay attention when it speaks and in turn it declines to press the point once it's made.

But now... now I have nightmares I can't wake from.

A couple of months after the baby was born I put her in the baby carrier, nestled against my chest with her face resting on my collarbone, and went to the chocolate shop. The curb leading up to the door is very steep. I misjudged it. Completely.

For the first time in my adult life, I fell. Not just tripped. Fell. Both of my feet left the ground.

There was no time to acknowledge there was nothing I could do. A two-month-old baby landing on a concrete edge with 140 pounds on top of her was not going to survive, and it didn't matter that I didn't have time to brake my fall.

We stopped.

I was on my knees. My right palm was flat against the ground. My left was wrapped around her, cradling her head... which was less than a foot from the ground, the length of my bent arm. She didn't even blink. When I looked down at her she was staring at the world with mild curiosity, unperturbed.

And I, I shoved myself upright, stepped up onto the curb and walked into the chocolate shop. I shook while I drank, and the heat of the chocolate scalded my scraped palm through the paper cup. I could feel the bruises spreading on my knees.

Once upon a time, I'd thought vanity would be enough to spur me to exercise regularly. It was... for a while. But it never kept me at it, day after day. Running until my ribs feel like curved knives. Lunging with sword, point-out, my legs burning and arm trembling from exhaustion. Biking uphill, pollen stinging my eyes.

When vanity wasn't enough, I thought it was over. The only thing that could possibly motivate me, I thought then, was the romance of a cause. But what cause could possibly obtain, in a modern world? I was never like to be the heroine of any story.

More fool I.

To be quick enough to dive for her. To be strong enough to hold her. To be fast enough to race her. All my nightmares are of her coming to harm. I know inevitably she will. But if it is in me to prevent it, I don't want my body stopping me.

So I run for her. And as my heart expands and I feel the love of those around me, I run for them. For all of the people I have failed to understand need me. Need me to be strong. To be healthy. To live and laugh alongside them for as many years as my heart will beat.

I don't think the mother's nightmares will ever go away... but then, my duty won't either. So I no longer try to dream my way free of them. The point has to be made, again and again and again. When I wake I lean forward and rest my brow on my arm, and then I renew my resolve.

Live now. Pay attention. Grow strong.

Grow strong.

Tags: health, life, mom in spots, philosophy
Current Mood: quiet
Current Music: Gabriel & Dresden - Dangerous Power

For various reasons, Baby Wigglet hasn't been sleeping through the night, so I'm only managing maybe two hours of fencing a week, less than I want. Plus, last week was rather demoralizing because the three adults who usually show up for group practice didn't. I was surrounded by energetic, athletic and aggressive teenaged boys and girls. Let me tell you, there's nothing like having a little Asian girl—who's still taller than you—giving you pitying looks because your short legs don't let you lunge as far as her to make you feel old and decrepit.

Anyway, hyanan's offered to teach me iaido, so I took her up on it and we started this weekend. While I often feel like an inadequate mother (no matter how many times people assure me otherwise), I have to believe I get cool points for entertaining the baby while practicing cutting up a rival daimyo's samurai on my lanai. Wigglet sat in her blue chair and chewed on her tiny stuffed whale toy and was quiet throughout, so it must have been interesting to watch.

After that we packed her up and went to get food and groceries while still dressed in practice outfits (this is the point where I note that hakama look much better on guys). I joked while we were walking through the frozen section that we were like some bad intersection of an anime series and a cheesy 80s movie ("Two Samurai and a Baby!"). hyanan rolled her eyes, maybe, but she's used to me by now. Poor woman.

I have by now forgotten almost all the nuances of my first lesson and am left only with some bizarre specifics, such as the belief that if I don't hide my thumbs some ninja will come cut them off. But I find that there are a lot of similarities between fencing and iaido, at the fundamental level: there's a shared emphasis in balance and its seat in your hips, in the notion of threat and implied threat, and in the emphasis on situational awareness. Learning is the same also, in that both instructors echo each other: "Do it slow and learn it well, speed will come later."

When I think about what I'm learning from all this, I keep coming back to one thing: I need to write more fight scenes.

No, wait, that's not it. What I'm really learning is that in high school I should have joined the fencing club, because that's were all the athletic boys who were still into knights and dragons and geekstuff were.

No, that's not it either. (Though I'll share that bit of wisdom with my daughter when she's old enough.)

Um, when I figure out what I've learned, I'll share it with you. Count on that. Just keep your thumbs tucked in or you'll have to use base eight.


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Tags: fencing, health, iaido, mom in spots
Current Mood: loopy

The muscles of your extremities are redundant. Pull something in your right arm and at least you've still got your left. What you want to avoid at all costs is pulling the postural muscles in your trunk, anything that keeps you upright/stabilizes you while moving or standing. And if you absolutely must strain one of those, you want to go with one that can be reached easily from the skin, like the broad superficial muscles of your back. At least then you can directly apply ice, heat or massage.

...so guess what I did!

I reflected while waiting for the oxycodone to work last night that there's nothing quite like that "can't do anything but bear it" feeling. It makes you patient and smears time. It occurred to me that I've spent 12 years of my life fighting for a writing "career" that conforms to some specific social standard.

Yesterday that state of calm powerlessness overcame me about both my body and my writing.

I suspect that after I recover from the physical injury, things will change.



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Tags: health, writing
Current Mood: drugged

I am tense, mask under one arm. "Forgive me," I say, quiet but without hedging. "It's been over a year. I have forgotten all that I know."

"Let us see," he says. We salute one another and then he says, "Let's start with a simple exercise. En garde. Keep your distance, now."

And then--

--I remember. Everything I thought I'd forgotten. How to stand. How to move. How far away I have to be for a lunge to succeed. How to parry. All my fancy disengages. I even remember obscure rules--"That wasn't my point, was it." "No... you're right. I attacked first and you didn't parry."

But there are things I'd forgotten--

--the smell of sweat and steel and nylon. The way five minutes of this has me working harder than twenty minutes of jogging. How good it feels to make no excuses for aggression or cunning. How much you laugh when you fail... how much you crow when you score the unexpected point.

An hour later, I am ready for another hour. For another two hours. I am perched on the concrete ledge just off the strip, sucking down a bottle of water and panting like a wolf in the summer sun, watching other people assemble for the group practice I can't stay for tonight... and I feel at home... as if I'd never left. I never want to leave.

There is exhiliration in running. Solitude has its pleasures, and you should know who you are when no one's around. But it's nothing to this. This is a fierceness of joy I wish I'd known about as a teenage girl, when I misspent my youth's most resilient years hiding in dark libraries, thinking that flesh was a cage I had to rise above in order to reach more spiritual aims. How I wish I could go back and tell myself that you can't rise above your body by ignoring it. Like a crack in a dam, the longer you neglect the flesh the more power it has over you, until at last it is your master and you drown in the tide of its demands.

"Are you staying?" one of the other fencers asks.

"Not tonight. Next time, though," I say. And grin. "You'll have to be nice to me, though. I just got back from being pregnant. Hey, coach!"

"Yes?"

My eyes have caught on their uniforms. "Do I get a patch now? I have my own gear."

"Ah! Of course." He hands it to me. "You didn't forget so much as you thought, eh?"

"No!" I say. "No."

"It's hard to forget these things," he says. "The body remembers. And of course, it helps when you have an excellent teacher!"

I laugh. One foot behind the other, plié into a curtsey, hands folded over the grip of the foil I hold against my chest. "It is the truth." I straighten. "I will see you Saturday."

"Very good."

Once I get home I assemble all the necessary tools and sit, light gleaming on the needle as I stitch. Fleetingly I think of getting this done by a professional seamstress, because it's no small work to sew a patch onto the arm of a jacket... but only fleetingly. I will do it myself as a commitment, written in cloth, sealed in steel. I will not be that girl again.

As I work, I sing.


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Tags: fencing, health, life
Current Mood: fierce

Blue silhouette like a veil, rippling over grass and uneven concrete: woman stretched, hands in pockets, errant curl floating in the breeze. The stars are so bright it aches to look at them. Or maybe that's the wind stinging tears from my eyes. It's 60 degrees out--cold, for the first time in months--and I am walking. Not for exercise, but to enjoy the weather. I'm not dressed to exercise. Loafers. Jeans. A shirt that's more baby slobber than fabric... a sweater over it.

Just a walk. Feet moving. Look up at those knife-bright stars: Orion's belt, my favorite constellation, such symmetry. Staring up, it strikes me then: rhythm of my stride, sway of spine, eyes up.

I'm alone.

In my body.

No one developing beneath my skin. No one to eat for. No one to protect. All the weight that's on me now is mine. Mine to keep. Mine to lose. Mine to carry.

I'm alone.

And then my foot stretches out and pushes off and I'm running.

Because I can. Because I'm alone in my skin again, and I'm free to push. Because when the ache erupts in my side, hard like ropes, sharp like razors, it's okay, it's mine, I can push past it. My ribs become claws and my chest stiffens but I am laughing without breath, because at last, I realize, I realize: I can go back to what I was. I'm free.

My new year's resolution: I don't want to lose weight. I don't want to fit into that dress or that pair of jeans. I don't want to look nicer.

I want my body back.

I want to dance for hours in the ballroom while genet sings to whatever's on the iPod. I want to chase people half my age across the strip until I'm dripping. I want to swing shadesong off her feet next time I see her, because what fun is it to be as short as we are unless people can whirl us around?

I want my condition back. I want to break my limits. I want to sweat and laugh and flop on my back, trying not to vomit from exhaustion. If this is runner's euphoria it's as much mental as it is physical. I want to endure. I don't want to live in a cage anymore, in a dark corner of a prison of flesh. While I exist here I want this body to be a prism, refracting as much of the real me as we can achieve in tandem.

By the time I get home, my hands are back in my pockets and my head is down again. But the sweater is untidily wrapped around my waist and I have blisters on my feet, and at my side my silhouette ripples on the grass like a banner.

Next time I'll wear proper shoes.


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Tags: health
Current Music: De/Vision - All I Ever Do

Cumulative sleep deprivation is really, really heinous. And not just because you almost put formula in the coffee maker (hey, they're both powders, right?).

Three months post-pardum, I am (I think) presently at the point where my body's done shedding the eighty pounds I gained over the entirety of my pregnancy. I'm now about ten pounds off from before all this started. This is still ten pounds heavy enough to make half my wardrobe inaccessible. Which irritates me. Plus, as I've mentioned before, I have learned to enjoy exercise. I love running, I love dancing, I love fencing. I am eager to get back to these things. So eager, in fact, that while the baby was napping one evening, I took myself out to jog, where I discovered that... I am not ready to jog again.

I learned a while ago that if I'm breathing easily, I'm not working hard enough... but if I'm nauseated, I've passed the happy place. The beautiful middle ground is where you're fighting the world to breathe and everything's a white fire and all your joints are singing defiance and praise and you feel alive and fierce: a feeling I can't get from merely walking or other lower impact forms of exercise.

It used to be that this middle ground was pretty broad. I could hit it ten minutes into whatever I was doing and it would stretch for... oh, fifteen minutes sometimes before I started crossing over into nausea. And in that fifteen minutes, you can jog/dance/fence a lot before you have to stop and blow and walk to get your wind back.

Now the space between "I'm panting" and "The world's gone white and I'm going to throw up" is about... oh... two minutes. Less.

It's the lack of sleep. The more broken my sleep is the day before, the narrower that band gets, until on days when I've slept only a few one-hour increments, just walking makes me dizzy.

I am frustrated. I miss exercise badly--my kind of exercise, not the boring stuff. But I am resigned to the fact that until I start sleeping for longer than two or three hours at a time, I'm not going to be able to do it safely.

This babycare thing? Is the most grueling physical marathon I've ever done. The baby is only occasionally sleeping four hours straight now, and I never know which night she'll choose to do it. But the first week that she does it consistently? You will know. BECAUSE I WILL DANCE AND SING AND DRAW TRIUMPHANT PICTURES.

*fallsover*


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Tags: health, mom in spots
Current Mood: frustrated/tired

I used to feel self-conscious using the word "headspace" to describe anything going on in my mind... it always sounded... I don't know. Like something that belonged to teenagers who write poetry about vampires and use black lipstick. Adults are supposed to have thoughts and feelings. Headspace was reserved for the overly dramatic.

But on considering it earlier, I realize it's not only not a squeaky-teen word, it's actually useful. It implies that your emotional state is a place where thoughts and feelings happen, and the disrepair (or the cleanliness) of that space affects all of them. Your headspace becomes the master mood-controller, the lens that affects how you see everything, and a good one will transform negative situations into bearable things, and a bad one will turn even the happiest day into something cruel and terrible.

I guess it took watching what being tired did to some organ above and beyond my feelings and thoughts, the thing that was generating them, to realize that you really can have a headspace, and it's not the same as the things that live in it.

My apologies to the emo-poets everywhere. In penance, I admit I did indeed write love poetry to vampires when I was 15. The black lipstick, not so much, but not for lack of looking. (Back then it was rather ridiculous to write love poetry to vampires because the only ones we had were either psychotic monsters or the Anne Rice variety, who were aliens that had no desire to sleep with you nor have a romantic relationship with you. But I think I make up for this fault in my judgement by also having written love poetry to Elric of Melnibone, who was far cooler than Lestat. I think, anyway. *shines halo*)

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Tags: health, language
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Assemblage 23 - Naked

Few things improve my daughter's mood like being held. This wasn't so bad when she was eight and a half pounds... now that she's over eleven and putting on ounces every week we improvise. I flop on the couch with a book and build a portable cradle out of mounds of afghans, until she is cuddled up against my stomach and I have my hands free to read.

Late in the long, old hours of the night, though, when I am too tired, I drowse and look down at her peaceful face and tuck her hair back behind one ear, and there is a warm safe sense to everything. I recognize that I'm the one generating it, but I enjoy it as much as she does. The dog comes and sits beside us, and even body-wrecked I am secretly glad to be awake.

And I remember something I should not have forgotten, because didn't I go through months of massage school to learn? That we need to be touched. We need to be held. Sex gets in the way. Customs get in the way. Hormones, expectations and society get in the way. But we came into this world in the most intimate embrace imaginable, cradled in someone's body... and even before we understand the world at all, we know that we need to be touched by a loving hand and held in loving arms.

I think of all of us, physically estranged, holding everyone at polite arm's length. "I'm not a touchy-feely person," we say to each other, as if this is something to be proud of. Maybe it is, because of the sheer self-discipline it takes to put aside what is, in the end, a very human need. But I think of how many emotional pains cannot be solved with words... can only be solved with the physical reality of hearing someone else's heartbeat through their skin and feeling the trusting calm of their body against yours, and know that we give up too much, and I don't know how we could get it back.

It used to be hard, looking at people with an artist's eye, longing to touch to understand skin and bone.

Then it got worse, looking at people with a massage therapist's eye, seeing how much pain and loneliness we hide beneath skin and muscle.

Now, with a mother's eye, I have to look away. It breaks my heart.


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Tags: health, life

As I mentioned a while ago, what I want for my birthday is to go back to the salle. I've been worried about this because for nine months I've been down for the count: either too exhausted, too sick or too unwieldy to move. I worried about losing all my pregnancy weight after the baby arrived; I worried about losing my conditioning. I wondered if I'd have the strength to keep a foil level for longer than a few seconds.

haikujaguar cradles 9 lb+ baby in one arm while handling bottles from refrigerator.

haikujaguar swings baby in one arm while fumbling for diapers.

haikujaguar does bizarre crane-like dance in the middle of the living room while handling baby.

haikujaguar does baby dead-lifts from the ground while trying to clean the carpet.

*glances at arms* Right... not so worried about arm strength anymore. I'm a little concerned about finding my center of gravity again, since for the past four months, it's been moving outside my body (you want to talk weird, consider having your point of balance resting on top of your stomach instead of in your hips)... but if I keep crane-dancing while hauling around nine pounds of wiggling baby, I think I'll figure it out sooner rather than later.

Combined with the New Mother Weight Loss program ("Yay, time to sit down to eat, wow, this is delicious melon--ahhhh, must go pick up baby!--*forgets food*), I should be fine by October. o_O

(artfulruin, I have not forgotten our bargain, re: warning people about impending birthdays..!)

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Tags: health, humor, life
Current Mood: *flop*

I think most of you have noticed by now I rarely discuss anything negative that comes my way. I thought I was the only one, but it turns out ozarque does a similar thing, and she posted her reasons here. They are harmonious enough with mine that I felt an instant surge of, "Oh, yes, thank you!" so I'm linking it for your consideration.

There are a couple of exceptions:

1. If I need help and I feel the people reading can give it. Prayer and positive energy is good; sometimes even distant, you can also give me concrete aid. I try not to be shy about asking for that, since I consider it unfair and impolite to never give people who care about you an opportunity to help you.

2. If I can turn it into something positive, either as a funny anecdote, or a way to discuss coping or changing your life, useless ways of thinking or bad habits (as with my post about having anxiety/panic issues and the subsequent entry on how I cope with it).

I like to keep things constructive around here. As much as I appreciate people's concern, nothing