Christ has no body but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours,
yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world,
yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
yours are the hands with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
no hands, no feet on earth but yours,
yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

–usually attributed to Teresa of Avila (1515–1582)

In February, in a moment of quiet meditation, I walked the labyrinth during our church’s women’s retreat up in Healdsburg. I had these words in my head and was thinking about what it meant to be Christ’s hands and feet on this earth. I was thinking about the incarnation and embodiment, about what it means to have a body. And as I walked the path, I thought about how sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I don’t see a body, I see a palimpsest of experiences layered onto an external frame, layers and layers imprinted on my skin by abuse and violence and the neglect that came after.

Continue reading “on embodiment and resurrection” →

I recently added this icon from Uncut Mountain Supply to my collection. It’s a Russian icon of the Theotokos the Milk-Giver, and it reminds me that birthing and caring for Jesus was how Mary answered God’s call and that there is more than a little of the divine in the messy, embodied experience of being a postpartum woman.

Continue reading “on Mary, mother’s milk, and me” →

The night before my daughter was born, a year ago yesterday, I woke up sobbing at 3AM. I’m not sure why this detail matters, but it does. The night before my daughter was born, I woke up sobbing at 3AM, and I cried until 5 when my water broke. I was both sure and unsure that it was my water breaking (how do you know what something is when you’ve never felt it before, otherwise known as the entirety of pregnancy), but the contractions told me it was serious. Right from the start, they lasted just under a minute and came every minute, every ninety seconds at most. There was no time to recover in between contractions, to employ any of the comfort techniques we had learned in childbirth prep class, to tell my husband how he could help. There was no time to breathe. There was only time to panic.

I didn’t have a birth plan. Have the baby, that was pretty much the entirety of the birth plan, although L. would add “in the hospital” to that, as the idea of a home birth was enough to give him heart palpitations. But as I got closer and closer to the birth, I wondered if I could do it, an unmedicated birth. I wanted to be able to do it. I wanted to try, and see what my body was capable of. I wanted to be tough enough, woman enough, to see it through. It turns out I wasn’t, but maybe it counts for something that I wanted to be.

Continue reading “on birthing a child, or a creation story” →

Back in May, my husband reminded me he had Memorial Day off, and my first thought was, “Good, then I can get some work done!” And then I remembered, I don’t have any work. I’m done. I finished my Ph.D. And it was both a happy and a sad thought.

In April, I defended my dissertation. I was awarded a PhD, magna cum laude, a pretty good achievement by all metrics, surely. But when my committee welcomed me to the academic community (their actual words, by the way), I felt no sense of accomplishment, no pride, just weariness and emptiness. It surprised me, and it surprises me still. I worked so hard for this–shouldn’t I feel something?

(My therapist would say, there’s that word again: Should.)

Continue reading “on being done” →

Pregnancy was really hard on me.

I feel silly typing that, because untold people are out there being pregnant every day, and many of them even enjoy it or at least get through it with a lot more grace than I did.

I may have gotten a lot of grace, but I sure didn’t exhibit it. It wasn’t as much the physical aspects, although I complained about them plenty. I could deal with the fatigue, the 30+ weeks of nausea, the loose joints, the nerve pain that had me literally crying towards the end whenever I tried to get out of bed, the blood sugar spikes that came with gestational diabetes, the heartburn, the low-lying placenta that had me on modified bedrest for a good chunk and took exercise off the table for my entire pregnancy, all the other aches and pains that had my doctor saying, “Yes, I’m sorry, that comes with the territory and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

But I didn’t deal well with the mental aspects. I’m not going to say a lot about it (some things are private, even on the internet), but it had a lot to do with prior traumas which reared their heads in ugly and unexpected ways. Pregnancy thrust me into limbo and an extensive identity crisis–and not because I didn’t want a child. All I’ve ever wanted is a family of my own, and now I was getting one. Yet it upended my life in ways I had not foreseen and couldn’t deal with.

Continue reading “a reflection on pregnancy, two months postpartum” →