Author: lauren

To Understand a Body

Pregnancy began as a strange phenomena in a body I understood very well. I could tell what was happening, what was changing, because I was very familiar with the functions and feelings of this body I live in. We’ve become good friends over the years, and lived in a wonderful harmony until recently.

As the pregnancy has progressed, my understanding of my body has blurred and now feels completely lost. I looked at myself in the mirror the other day and recognized nothing. The way my body aches and moans is completely incomprehensible to me. My body wants foods I don’t like, refuses things I love, tires without warning, hurts without discernible reason. My vision is literally blurred, requiring me to wear glasses all day, making my own reflection even less familiar. My legs, once so muscular and capable, now flatly refuse to carry me with any grace. But mostly, my hips are bent out of their natural shape and no longer perform their intended function. The pain this causes makes a major obstacle of tasks like walking and sleeping.

Since I really don’t want to live like that for three more months, I sought the help of a chiropractor. I do not love doctors, but I love this woman. She slid her hands over my bent bones and swollen muscles and made sense of them. When I’d given up on my body, planned to just wait this alien period out and hope it snapped back into place later, this doctor categorized and defined what was happening with each joint and bone.

The pain and swelling is not entirely gone after her first session of ministrations, but it is much improved. More than that though, I have a little hope that my body is still in here somewhere. I might understand her again, at least a little bit. And really, I want to understand her, especially now. Now when she is completing her most magnificent work.

Say Something Well

For people like me, who tend to get angry and say really mean things before thinking them through, my highest goal at a family gathering is usually to just keep my mouth shut. Since the times when I get myself in trouble and hurt people I love always happen when I’m talking, not talking seems like a logical solution.

Too often, I spend days visiting family over the holidays, holding in all my snarky, mean comments. Just before we’re about to leave, the top pops off and I say something truly cruel about a very minor annoyance.

Even if I don’t eventually explode, not talking still doesn’t work. It is quite obvious through facial expression and body language when I’m angry or annoyed. When I just don’t say anything, the person I’m interacting with is left knowing they’ve done something I don’t like, but not knowing what it was. This causes a silent tension between us, which really doesn’t make for a peaceful, harmonious holiday.

When I want to say something and don’t, that thing is still sitting in my mouth, unsaid. This almost inevitably leads me to say that thing to someone else. I tend to put together a quippy little anecdote about the incident and share it with several people. This is not a kind way to treat my loved ones.

Not saying anything is really tempting, even if I know it doesn’t work. No one can accuse me if I haven’t said anything. My facial expressions and body language are very hard to pin down, and I can always say they’re being misinterpreted or deny them completely. Most of the time, the person I’m angry at just has to take all the discomfort of the conflict. Later, I get to feel superior to that person, while I tell funny anecdotes about how unreasonable or silly they are.

I believe the third option here, the challenge, is to say something well. To stand up for myself without getting defensive, to be honest without being cruel, to admit my own hurt feelings without accusing. This is no simple task. The phrases are often simple, but arriving at them takes a great deal of thoughtful prayer, and an enormous amount of self-control and courage to deliver on the spot. Saying those small, kind, hard things out loud to a family member of friend is also an extremely risky proposition.

When I say those things, I’m stepping out of the binary of effector and effected. When I explode or silently fume, I’m only trying to turn the binary in my favor. When I address the conflict, I enter into an interaction where we are equals, both with feelings and opinions. This requires a higher level of engagement, both of me and my loved one. It means we’re in real relationship with each other, actually trying to mash our sharp edges together and make a tighter, stronger connection. It means that we have to do more than just put up with each other once a year. It means that we have to grow, have to talk and listen to each other. It is terrifying and exhilarating and full of hope. It isn’t polite holiday behavior, and might result in tears or accusations sent my way. I’ll try it anyway, though, because polite holiday behavior was never what my soul longed for.

Where Beauty is Found

The stretch marks have arrived. As I was examining this new phenomena on my body this other day, it occurred to me that I will look different after my baby is born. I plan to be fit and eat healthy, because I feel better about life when I do that and it’s a good example to set for my kid. That doesn’t say much about my appearance, other than that I probably will not be way overweight. Even with being fit and eating well, I will still have stretch marks. My abdominal muscles might permanently separate. I might have varicose veins. I will not have the body type that we define as beautiful.

What if, after having a child, my body looked like I’d had a child? Is that so awful, really? How much of my time, energy, money, and mental capacity should I spend trying to make my body look like I’ve never been pregnant? I completely understand the motivation for doing just that, trying to re-shape the female form so we look like we’re younger, thinner, and less mom-like than we are. Everything we see and hear tells us that’s the only way to be attractive, to be considered beautiful.

The economy (for lack of something more specific to blame) has a motive for convincing women that we are constantly falling short of an impossible goal for attractiveness. We spend a ridiculous amount of our expendable income buying products to get ourselves closer to that goal. One of the ways this happens is that we see that impossible (for most people) goal all the time and almost no others. There is one very specific body type that we see in movies, television, commercials, and other types of media that is considered attractive. Not only are we very sure which girl is considered the “pretty” one in media, but it is extremely rare to see a girl who looks much different than her at all. It’s not just that the pretty girl is held up as desirable, it’s that her counterparts aren’t seen at all. It is a well-supported fact that the human brain develops an affinity for things that it’s familiar with. That’s why mom’s cooking is always the best, because it’s her cooking we’ve had the most exposure to. Since we have a ton of exposure to this one body type, and nearly no exposure to any other body type, we will naturally prefer the one we see.

A while ago, I was watching Fur: And Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which is a gorgeous film about a photographer who takes pictures of “freaks.” The movie opens with the main character approaching a nudist colony to take some pictures. This circumstance sets up the movie to give us a view of some non-traditional body types. The photographer meets with the couple who runs the colony. They are a couple in their fifties or sixties, rather normally shaped, sitting in wicker chairs and having a normal conversation. I particularly noticed the woman. Her slightly cottage-cheese thighs, her large breasts, and the soft look of her white skin. Very different from the flat, tanned, perky, pointy, women; the only kind of women I’ve seen naked on the screen. This woman was lovely.

I have searched and searched for a still of that particular woman, but I can’t find one. Instead, I found this image of a nudist couple which is very similar.

I would not mind looking like this woman in thirty years. I hope that I will be able to view my own naked body and appreciate the years that are in it, the experiences buried in the folds of my skin, the softness that is meant to be there for our comfort. I hope to appreciate beauty in more than one form, but particularly in my own.

Blaming the Abuse

This Saturday I had the honor of performing “Girls Like Her” at the Daybreak Human Trafficking Forum at Bloomington Covenant Church. It is always awesome to share a mic with people who are up to their elbows trying to end this travesty in our cities, state, and even the world.

Often, when I speak about human trafficking, especially when I cite the frightening statistic that the average age of entry into prostitution in the United States is 12-14 years old, people will say, “I bet a lot of those girls have been abused.” This response has always bothered me, but it’s been recently that I’ve come up with a good reply. Now, when someone says that to me, I reply by saying “Rape is a fairly common experience for an American woman, and not all of them end up in prostitution.” I say this not to be dismal or to shock people. I say this because people who blame human trafficking on child or sexual abuse aren’t aware of what their thought process has just done.

We don’t assume that prostitutes were abused as children because we want to have compassion for them. We don’t need to add child abuse to feel compassion for a 13-year-old in the sex trade. We blame the sex trade on former abuse because we’ve already given up on people who have been sexually abused. Sexual abuse is such a hideous and incredible trauma, we get too overwhelmed at the total tonnage of the damage inflicted on that person. It is tempting to mentally throw them away, because we feel powerless to help them. If greater tragedies befall them, we can deal with that without cognitive dissonance; they’ve already fallen off our personal grid for people with potential and hope.

Furthermore, any bad decisions a person makes after they are sexually abused can be excused, explained, and rationalized by the abuse. A lot of bad decisions can follow abuse, but when we blame those bad decisions on the abuse, we rob the survivors of their personhood. We are essentially saying that they have no personal responsibility and therefore no power to make meaningful choices. This is why the 12-steps are so powerful for people who have suffered abuse, because going through that process allows them to reclaim responsibility for their own choices, and therefore, power over their own lives.

When I hear someone say, “I bet those girls have been abused,” I know they are trying to make sense of the situation. They are trying to explain why such an unbelievable truth has crossed their path. I understand that, I really do. But if you are talking to me, blaming former abuse simply will not do. I stand as one of the luckier women who has been abused, and has found health and healing in the hands of brave and compassionate people who were willing to keep me on their grid. I want to be that person for other survivors, and I want to help other people gain the strength and perspective so they can be that person too.

In the Cracks

I recently finished reading A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by Michael Dorris, a really intriguing story that covers three generations of women, moving backwards in time. Lots of great stuff there. But probably the most impacting part of that book for me was a couple of secondary characters. They are a happily married couple who work in the service industry, live in a trailer, and drive around in a car that’s held together with rubber bands. They don’t have a lot, and a lot of what they do have isn’t in great shape. But they make do, or they do without.

I remembered as I read about this couple, that I used to do that too. At a time in my life when I’m very anxious about money and having enough for all the things we “need,” it was great to remember that a lot of things can be made to do or done without. Even basic things, like leaky winter boots. I think I need new boots because my socks get wet in these boots. But honestly, are wet socks the end of the world? If I went one more winter with occasionally wet socks, would I die? Sure, it would be nice to have new boots, but I can make do without them. I find this a really freeing state of mind. I feel less penned in, less a victim of my circumstances, more in control of my money and my life. All that from a couple secondary characters in a novel.

Right now I’m reading The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. There are so many really earth-shattering themes and words in that book, it’s hard to believe I was able to find a spot that wasn’t super important. But I did, and it could really change my life. The main character, who is a novelist, mentions in one paragraph that he averages writing 500 words a day, five days a week. He writes 500 words in the morning, then reads over the 500 words before bed and sleeps on it. By writing 500 words a day, he finishes a novel every year or two, which still allows time for re-writes and edits. I did the math, and 500 words 5 days a week for 52 weeks is 130,000 words. Which is just to say, the math works out.

To me a good writing day has to be over 2,000 words, and a great writing day is 5,000 words. That said, I don’t think I write more than 130,000 words a year. The writing days that are “good” don’t happen as often as I want, and great writing days are a rare and wonderful thing. But I can write 500 words in a couple hours or less, that’s nothing. I could write 500 words before Ben leaves for work in the morning. I could write 500 words while my child is napping. I could, right now, write 500 words even on days when I nanny. This totally blows my mind. It could seriously revolutionize the way I look at my craft. It could be a lifeline through my upcoming life changes. And honestly, it really doesn’t have that great an impact on the plot of The End of the Affair.

Not only do I learn a lot about my craft by reading fiction, some elements I find in stories can actually change the way I live my life. I think sometimes God speaks to me through novels, picks out something that really isn’t super relevant to the main point of the book (or is, you never know), and uses it to teach me something, to open my mind, to make things a little better. I love that God speaks through art, that he touches me through the medium I love most. I love that I find wisdom in the cracks of good stories.

Pregnant Writing

Pregnancy has done strange things to my creative life. Despite my writing days still sitting all in a row, it’s a herculean effort to sit down and actually write things. There are the typical creative excuses, that I’m still half-editing my last project (due to come out soon on the ebook market!), that I’m working on a first draft which is always difficult. Then there is the obvious, my shiny new novel is about achieving a harmonious relationship between consciousness and physical self, and throwing a second physical self into the mix is a major wrench to the project. I can blame pregnancy hormones for destroying my ability to focus, or bemoan my new need for an afternoon nap.

All that is true. It is also true that when I find myself with usable work time, I spend it on mommy-like things. Some mommy-like activities can’t be avoided; I see the doctor quite a bit more than I used to, and clothes shopping is now an ongoing activity. But then I can spend hours updating my baby registry on amazon.com, and even more time culling the articles and replies to articles on The Mommy Playbook, a forum for moms-to-be. I make coffee appointments with friends who are moms just to grill them about their birth experiences and advice for those frightening first few months of parenthood. I go to the mommy group at my church, I research schools in my neighborhood, I read endless reviews and consumer reports on various baby products. I obsess, you might say. I swim in the pool of ideas for the upcoming change in my life.

Being a writer is such a core part of my identity, more than a lot of things you might think. A few years ago when I was battling (and sometimes losing to) depression, it was when I found I couldn’t write anymore than I knew I absolutely had to do something about it, even if it felt drastic. The poor cute husband just shook his head and said, “Not because of me, or God, but because of your writing.” Although it sounds a little sad, I was a writer for over a decade when I met my husband. While I have doubted or turned away from God at several points, the pen and paper have always come with me. Certainly if it came to some weird cosmic twist and I had to pick between my husband and writing or God and writing, the writing would go away. Only the person left over for my husband or God would be an essentially different person than me.

Is it possible that motherhood could change me at such a fundamental level that I could somehow cease to be a writer? Who would that person be? And honestly, is it happening already? Early in my pregnancy, I noticed that Google Chrome guessed that I wanted to visit The Mommy Playbook before it guessed that I wanted a thesaurus. That was such a strange event, because of course, the thesaurus is where I spend such a great amount of my time. The endless search for the perfect word is my private safari, my personal collection of hunted treasures.

While I fear that the writing part of my being will disappear, in a back corner of my soul, I know better. I know I will find a way, even if I can’t fit it onto a physical calendar. It may look different, and it may be short and choppy for a period when there aren’t several hours tacked together for concentrated composition. Yet, I will find a way to scribble down some phrases that capture pieces of my life, of my spirit, of the world as I observe it. I will find a way, if not because I hold a gritty commitment to my vocation, then only because I simply can’t help myself.

A Nice Frame

After two years of infertility, my husband and I are quite miraculously going to have a baby. We discovered this shatteringly joyous news during my pre-operative physical, because I was supposed to have my thyroid removed due to a small case of cancer. That is a crazy-ass story, and I cannot frame it. I can’t pull a simple moral out of it, or force it into any kind of cohesive sense. Some helpful friends have offered to frame it for me, which leads to conversations like this.

Me: I’m pregnant!
Them: That’s great! Did you decide to stop trying and just let it happen when it happens?
Me: Not really. I got cancer, though.

The truth is that I despaired that it would ever happen. Facing thyroid cancer, throat surgery, and a possible radioactive treatment that would prohibit us even trying to get pregnant for an entire year, I put my face in my pillow and sobbed. When a good friend expressed that she was having some stress with her pregnancy, I cruelly replied that everything would be okay and my tumor would keep me company.

The truth is too that when my doctor told me that I was pregnant, I went into panicked hysterics, imagining doctors pressuring me to terminate the pregnancy or dying of cancer because I chose to carry the baby. Even after that, there was the next-day ultrasound where the tech couldn’t see anything in my uterus, and my doctor telling me later that day that I might have an etopic pregnancy, in which case we’d have to “get rid of it” or it could kill me. There was my husband saying, “that’s an abortion pill” about four or five times that night.

All of this stress eventually fell away, because the pregnancy was caught very early and they just couldn’t see the little bud yet. We’ve since had a successful ultrasound where we saw the pregnancy in the right place and a tiny tripping heartbeat.

Real life stories don’t frame up very well. There are too many factors, and any simple frame job leaves out very essential elements and feels dishonest. Real life stories don’t frame well because they aren’t finite. Life keeps going, the plot keeps thickening, and very few things come to a firm conclusion. I don’t think I can pull one moral out of this story, because it has too much stuff in it. If I look at just one piece at a time, just one factor, I can come up with a few different vignettes, like these.

A lot of people told me that I just needed to relax to get pregnant, but apparently, I needed to increase my stress level. The crushing weight of having cancer sent a shock of stress throughout my whole body, and one of my very smartest eggs said, “I have to get out of here!”

After my last negative pregnancy test, I cried out to God for some help with my despair. I read the story of Hannah in the bible, a woman who was infertile and was blessed with many children, the first of which was Samuel the prophet. She went to the temple to pray for children, and the priest there told her that God would grant her request. It says she went home happy. Even before she was pregnant, she was happy. I asked God if I could have that too, if I could be happy even before it happened. He gently told me that Hannah was happy because she believed the promise, and I didn’t. I prayed and asked for others to pray for me that I would be able to believe the promise too, but I couldn’t bring myself to embrace it. I want children so badly, the very idea of actually having them brings me to tears. God didn’t wait until I was able to fully believe his promise, he gave me a baby anyway. I think that God is showing me that he isn’t going to wait until I’m all cleaned up and perfect before he’ll bless me. He loves me just like I am right now.

The same day we found out that I have cancer, we also learned that a dear friend of ours died the night before. This friend had taken it upon himself to pray for Ben and I to have children. He prayed for us whenever he saw us at church, and told us that he prayed often for us on his own. He gave me a powerful prophetic word that God had children for us, and he held my hand during the hardest part of the Mother’s Day service. I fully believe that after God had healed all of this dear friend’s wounds and brought him into health and fullness, this friend continued to petition God on our behalf. I can see him smiling and saying, “could you take care of this now?”

That’s what I can glean from this crazy, wonderful, unbelievable period of my life. I don’t know what will happen next or what kind of story this might become. I know there is more to this than I can understand, and I think I can live with that.

And Now for Something Completely Different…

I have thyroid cancer. It is not life threatening. I am really sorry if you are a friend or family member who is hearing this news for the first time. If you are interested in the particulars, see my FAQ below. I’m happy to answer any other questions you have.

My Cancer FAQ

How serious is it?

Not serious at all. My life is not in danger, and I don’t have any physical symptoms at this point. There is reason to hope, possibly even expect, that one small surgery should fix the problem entirely.

What kind of cancer is it?

It’s papillary thyroid cancer, which is one of the most benign forms of the disease. There is only a 1% chance that any cancer will spread outside the “thyroid capsule,” and mine was caught early.

What is the treatment plan?

On July 5th, I will have surgery to remove my thyroid. I’ll have to stay in the hospital overnight, and I should be fully recovered in 1-2 weeks. After that I’ll have to be on hormone replacement for the rest of my life, since you do kind of need a thyroid to live. If the cancer hasn’t spread, then the surgery will cure it. If there is any spreading or other reasons to be concerned, I’ll need a radioactive iodine treatment about six weeks after the surgery.

Is radioactive iodine like radiation or chemo therapy?

No. Thyroid cells are the only cells in the body that can absorb iodine, so the treatment will have no effect on any other part of my body. I will have to be in isolation for a few days (they mean it when they say “radioactive”), but I shouldn’t have any symptoms.

How was it found?

I’d gone to a general practitioner to get some antibiotics for a lingering cold. She examined my throat and found a small nodule on my thyroid. Three doctors and four tests later, they think I have cancer.

Wait, they think you have cancer?

Yep. Depending on which doctor is speaking, they are 50-80% sure that it’s cancer. I have heard from other thyroid cancer patients and a few nurses that doctors always say that. They are covering their butts in case they remove a necessary gland and it turns out there isn’t any cancer in it.

Isn’t it great that you might not have cancer?

No. I do not take comfort in uncertain doctors. Furthermore, whether it is actually cancer or not doesn’t change the treatment plan at all. I am a pragmatist, so since we are acting like I have cancer I prefer to call it that.

If you are the praying kind, I would very much appreciate prayers for quick recovery, that no cancer has spread, and that I won’t need radioactive iodine treatment.

Hopefully very soon we will return to our regular programming with a cool, artsy, reflective piece on something profound.