This Week: My Body is My Partner
Emotional healing alongside my kid. Plus, links to recommended reading n' listening!
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Dear fam,
Last week, I didn’t write to you even though I had plenty to say! A combination of a terrible head cold (thank you for the weekly virus, preschool!) too much work, and chose to rest instead of writing. Which I’m pretty sure my therapist would agree is progress. So, well done me?
Either way, I’m here now. Still doggy-paddling through life, one day at a time. As I wrote last time, we’re still acclimating to my new full-time job around here. Big Kid is still perplexed by the idea that anyone has a full-time job, making me realize we’ve really raised him with some interesting ideas about the world. For his whole young life, both his moms have been footloose freelancers, able to do work at night so they can make rainbow pancakes with him right now. Now, he asks about all his friends’ parents’ jobs, continuously confused about why everyone works so much.
We explain that, yes, that friend’s parent is a doctor. And, yes, that one works for a big company. And, yes, that one is a teacher. Everyone does something.
As we go through it, we try to make it clear there are a lot of reasons to work. I mean, a big part of it is that we need money. But I want him and Baby to understand that my wife and I also love our work. I write about things that matter to me, for and with people whose values I believe in. I write about people whose voices I want to amplify, people doing Good Work in the world. My wife is the same way — her music brings forward ideas and themes she feels are important to explore, her melodies and words are there to comfort, bring joy, and hold space for others.
Whatever Baby and Big Kid end up doing with their everyday, I hope they do it for the love and passion of it all.
Baby grew a whole inch last week and is now walking around the house as though she’s been doing it her whole life. Yesterday, Big Kid put on a record and the whole family had a dance party in the living room. My wife and I twirled Big Kid, while Baby stood there and bounced with a drooly grin on her face.
It was pretty fabulous.
We’ve been talking a lot about bodies in our house. Big Kid has a lot of sensory challenges, as I’ve written about a bunch. This means two contradictory things are true at once for him:
(a) He is much more sensitive to external sensory information. So, he hears, tastes, sees things more acutely than a typical person would.
(b) He is much less sensitive to internal sensory information. As a result, he’s less likely to know he’s hungry until he’s melting down, more likely to forget to go to the bathroom, and so on.
I am also this way, so I resonate a whole lot with the need to remind oneself, “hey, you might be hungry on account of not having eaten in a long time — wanna maybe grab a snack? Or, like, a whole meal?”
But getting Big Kid to sit for long enough to eat a whole meal or to stop something exciting to go to the bathroom is a daunting challenge. And until about ten days ago, my wife and I were basically at our wits’ end about it.
I mean, I get it. Building a fort out of couch cushions is more exciting than peeing.
At one point, I realized something crucial. What if Big Kid was hearing his body’s cues and trying to ignore them? What if he thought he could conquer his body, override the desire to eat with his desire to play monster trucks?
With that in mind, my wife and I started to change our messaging about it all. I started by explaining that our bodies are our partners. His body allows him to hug, and dance, and sing, and play the drums. He needs to trust his body to know what he needs, whether that means going to the bathroom or putting on headphones when something is too loud. “Your body knows best,” we told him, “You should always listen to your body.”
And it has begun to work.
Over the past ten days, Big Kid has had a lot less accidents. He tells us when he is hungry (mostly). When he goes to eat, or put on headphones, or pee, we congratulate him for being such a good partner to his body.
I think I was only able to see this body-mind disconnect for what it was because, for the last year or so, I’ve been reading a lot about how diet culture shows up in our everyday lives. In particular, the work of
and have been transformational for me in how I see the world.As I reminded my child that his body knows best, that his body is not something to conquer or overcome, I thought about how all the messaging when I was a girl and a teen was the exact opposite. It was all about how to control your body. Magazines were full of tips about how to suppress hunger cues and, as a result, so were our conversations. My gal-pals and I knew how to count calories and congratulated one another when we were able to successfully refrain from eating.
To no-one’s surprise, we all exhibited varying levels of disordered eating. A lot of us still struggle with it today.
Beyond the lifelong struggle to actually feed ourselves (which is terrible enough), there’s something more deep and spiritual at play here, though. We developed an adversarial attitude to our own bodies. Instead of seeing our bodies as what they are — eternally changing vessels that carry us through our time on this planet — we have been taught to see them as evidence of our failing. Of weakness, or sinfulness, or wrongdoing. Bodies are not for pleasure or enjoyment, says the world, as young girls dutifully take down notes. Bodies are for punishment.
All last week, I kept thinking what it would have felt like for someone to tell me my body was my partner all those years ago. Such a simple, obvious message. With the power to eliminate years of pain, self-hatred, harmful words and actions and thoughts.
What a different life it would have been. How would I have moved through the world, unburdened by the constant policing of everything I eat? Everything I do?
A few days after we started telling our kid that he and his body are partners, I helped him out of the shower and wrapped him in a big, fluffy towel. We headed into my and my wife’s bedroom to snuggle and put on pajamas. Usually he and Baby shower at the same time and then run around our bedroom giggling for a few minutes before bedtime. Which is just unbelievably cute.
I’m not sure why, but somehow on this evening it was just the two of us, and we sat on the rug looking in the mirror at our snuggled-up reflection.
“I love my body,” I said to Big Kid, his sweet head nuzzling my shoulder. And I really meant it. Then, after a few moments of silence, I asked “do you love your body?”
“I do!” he said, and stuck his tongue out at himself. Then he started giggling, and I started tickling him, and we went on with out regular bedtime routine.
With all this in mind, I want to offer the following prayers to you all:
May we find a path to rejecting the limitations of harmful paradigms.
May we all find ways to free ourselves from diet culture, recognizing that all bodies are good bodies.
May we be good partners to our bodies.
Shabbat shalom,
Mikhal
What I’m Reading
The exceptional
wrote this powerful essay about how white supremacy in America led to the return (or continuous presence) of Donald Trump.- wrote a beautiful meditation on closeness, illness, intimacy, and the frustrations of relying on a not-so-transparent medical system.
Poems for your weekend! Thank you
!Stop blaming male alienation on female liberation, says
, and she’s absolutely right.
What I’m Listening To
A new episode of
about how to make screen time your friend. This episode is such a gift to parents of atypical kids everywhere, whose children need screens for access, regulation, and many other reasons. Thank you!Deep Dish is a podcast about food and history. The first two episodes are about Delta Tamales and the FOOD OF THE Louisiana Delta and Tteokbokki and the history of Korean cuisine. Both are fantastic.
Radiolab’s new episode about the moon-that’s-not-a-moon sort of orbiting Venus was lovely and super weird.
What I’m Writing
I wrote my first piece for the BBC! It’s about how retirement looks around the world and why (shocker) the Scandinavians are probably doing it best.
- Dreams of Chaos is a Q&A with a writer and creative coach on the magic (and challenge) of not knowing what's next.
Things That Make Me Cry is an essay about the legacy of trauma with some reading and listening resources about the war in Israel and Palestine.
I'm going to try this "trust your body approach." You might already know Kelly Mahler's work. I took one of her workshops a while back, and it was super helpful for me, who had zero understanding of interoception before becoming a parent.