On the Table (and at it)

Torn apart to be put back together--the messy work of grace

I had gone through a bit to get here: a trip to an osteopath/chiropractor who treated me with acupuncture and sent me to a podiatrist. Two visits to that podiatrist, one to make moulds of my feet and the second, to fit my running shoes with the orthotics made from those moulds. I’d been running with those orthotics in place for over a month with no change in the hip pain I’ve been battling over the past year; in fact, the pain was worsening.

So, when the boys and I were out during the holidays for a visit to the library (and a required stop at the nearby gourmet—read overpriced but incredible)—cookie shop, and I saw a sandwich board advertising a physiotherapist who specialised in treating cases that other therapists hadn’t solved, I was intrigued. And, honestly, desperate—beginning to feel like Quasimodo every time I went from sitting to standing.

First, he watched me walk. After my first step, he began nodding. “Yep,” he murmured. Then he put me on the table: on my back, on my stomach, on my side. He walked around, looking and poking and nodding and saying “yep” and naming the parts of me that were deficient, faulty, or just plain fucked.

He told me the plan: he would teach me to walk again. Basically, a new way to carry myself, to undo the damage caused by age and childbirth and, well, the wrong way I’ve been doing things, down to my breathing. He would prescribe exercises and stretches. He would attack the trouble spots while I lay on the table, unlocking and resetting and pulling and pushing. And in the meantime, I would need to stop running.

If I were being melodramatic about it, which I am, I would put it this way: he had to kill me to bring me back to life. Break me down to put me back together. And, because I am no stranger to this process (and also, because I am desperate), I said yes.

Twenty years ago, I was broken down by my professional training, enduring two years of screw-ups and personal failures that undid my identity as a perfect student. That demolition sent me to New York, where my old, black-and-white, simplistic faith was broken down so that I could learn to live by grace—the knowledge that no amount of effort on my part will ever secure or undo the divine love set on me. After New York came marriage and family, and to know the wonderful undoing brought about by those, just sit in front of a mirror for a few hours on a bad hair day. Without makeup. While screaming. From a location called “the edge of sanity.”

Then, of course, and now, there is autism and its attendant, quite targeted, gifts. There was the two years of denial: that cute period when I said things like “The Kid has a superpower” and “Aren’t we all on the spectrum?”, when I wrote triumphant posts on social media—positive vibes only!!!—about TK’s gains, about how he might just jump off this godforsaken spectrum that he was never meant for anyway. I wrote, and lived, for the narrative I needed to be true. Then that merry-go-round from hell went out of business and catapulted me into a new locale: acceptance. Advocacy. Raising the kids I had and not the ones I needed to create.

So when the physio told me about what tearing those abdominal muscles does in the bringing forth of new life—what has happened to my pelvis in the last few years, and how it’s affecting me now—I wasn’t surprised. These truths, I think we almost always know them deep down. We know the wounds we carry. We know where we need healing, and we know the death it will take to make us whole. Then we decide whether to undergo the procedure, which has a lot to do with whether we trust the one doing it.

On that table, reduced to diagnoses, I was broken down to less than the sum of my parts so that I can be reassembled into more. So that “what cannot be shaken may remain.” Dis-membered to be re-membered, and so much of remembering occurs at tables.

Learning to carry myself anew, so much of which involves learning when to be carried. Recognising that the wind I was swimming against in one direction—struggling, fighting, spitting out salt water—is, when I turn directions, what carries me home, where a banquet awaits. And I will be not on, but at that table.

(I spoke about this a bit at my first-ever Mockingbird gig—listen here!)