My Body, My Saboteur

Sick days, motherhood, Bones, and my ultimate demise

Photo by valentin ciccarone on Unsplash

Mostly because I’ve been sick, I’ve been thinking about my body and how, although necessary, it will be and perhaps at times it already has been my ultimate betrayer and my eventual downfall. It’s hard not to think this when you’re shivering under a pile of blankets and unable to breathe through the excess of mucous that your mortal coil decided to produce. Or when you’re changing all the clothing on your bottom half for the third time that day because everything you consume seems to come out the other end unexpectedly as a spray. It’s hard, under these circumstances, not to feel at odds with your vessel, even when you’re a relatively healthy person otherwise.

And there have been many essays lately about motherhood being a trap set by patriarchal forces, about “mom rage,” and being “touched out.” There are two new books out with these phrases in their titles. I am a mother of three children who are now all between the ages of ten and adulthood—believe me, I have experienced some rage in my eighteen years of parenting. While I can understand how these ladies feel, it seems to me like my own body laid this trap for me. The call came from within the house. Capitalism and the patriarchy have shaped the experience, but my body is what got me here. More specifically, the hormones.

I had a teacher from second through sixth grade who, once when we were lamenting the fact that our time in her program was coming to a close, said that she didn’t teach children seventh grade and up because they became different kinds of people with different concerns at that age. Loon was the word she used to describe them. She’d say things like, “Here come the loons,” when the bell would ring and the hall would flood with thirteen and fourteen-year-olds. What my teacher didn’t say, undoubtedly because of the conversational can of worms it would open up for her pre-pubescent audience, was that it was the hormones. They kick in around thirteen and don’t stop until your forties, apparently, at least for those producing the female cocktail. I’ve witnessed this onset with my own children as well. And all of these chemicals in the system affect the brain, like it or not.

Now that I’m forty-three the hormones are running out, like a car with less than an eighth of a tank of gas and flashing the warning light depending on whether or not you’re driving up a hill. I feel like I’m waking up from a decades-long daze. It was the hormones all along! Bodily functions drove me to the intimate moments with my then-boyfriend/now-husband and resulted in the bodies my body created. This is why I’m surrounded by adorable little people who don’t clean up after themselves and think I’m annoying.

I’m not sure I ever looked around and thought: having children is an excellent idea! Does anyone really want to bring a sweet and innocent person into this mess? No hopefulness made me a mother of three. It was pure bodily function, pure release of enough hormones to short-circuit rational thought. Motherhood, when you really think about it, is additional care and feeding for bodies. Additional doctor appointments and shit to clean up… not unlike a disease. Of course, I love my children. I made them with my own flesh. And having kids is perhaps never a bad idea because it will be nice to have someone biologically wired with affection for me taking care of my dying body one day. But this is how they got here. My body is so crafty an adversary that I couldn’t help myself.

So here I am, sick and battling my bodily function, yet again. The never-ending burden. My vessel. My husk. I have been resting it and managing its symptoms and feeding it ginger beer and saltines. Because I’m sick with the newfangled disease that no one knows what it will do to us yet, and it is my first time, I have been preoccupied with the damage my body will sustain in its viral clutches. I have been googling extensively and worrying about getting the kids sick. Thinking about the years it will ultimately shave off my body’s living years, wondering if it will ever be the same again.

Because I haven’t felt well, I’ve also been watching too much television. More specifically, I’ve been binge-watching Bones starring Emily Deschanel as Dr. Temperance Brennan and David Boreanaz as Special Agent Seeley Booth. This was my favorite show when it aired, and earlier this year I started watching it from the beginning on Hulu. At night, when I’m too tired to read or do any more French lessons, I watch an episode or two as I lie in bed and strive to asleep. I love the show for so many reasons—Brennan’s personality, the sexual tension between her and Booth, the banter. Every episode centers around a set of human remains, often decomposed beyond identification and discovered in some darkly humorous situation in the opening scene. During the course of the show, the bones are cleaned and laid out on a light table, and then examined thoroughly by the greatest forensic anthropologist in fiction and her team of witty scientists. What would the team see in my remains? Not only my age, sex, and race. But also the arm I broke in college and the way it was meticulously set with pins by an orthopedic surgeon, the foot I broke while walking around my own house that wasn’t set at all. The widening of my hips through multiple births. The tailbone break from the first. The repetitive wear on my carpals from typing. The constant slouching. And who knows what diseases will show their mark, what cause of death.

Because having a body means a slow deterioration shaped by the accumulation of events, the living, the wear and tear. Although I didn’t always, I try to take care of it, especially now that it's past its peak condition. The regular doctor visits, the daily walks, the religious sunscreen application. I start most days with a green smoothie made entirely of fruit, water, kale, and ground flax seeds—no added sugar or anything that didn’t come from a plant. Yes, reader, I have evolved from a youthful binge-drinking, cigarette-smoking hussy, into a person who eats three-plus servings of fruits and vegetables before the sun comes up. I monitor fluid intake. I will start doing yoga again—not because I want to be a person who does yoga, as was the case in my twenties, but because I can feel the vessel creaking and weakening around me. Its eventual demise, and therefore mine, is growing nearer. All I can do is manage it. Keep it fed and as healthy as possible. Moisturize and stretch. And live every day well before this body takes me down once and for all.