Having babies is fucking hard on the body.
Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed pregnancy, for the most part. And birth is pretty amazing too. But my back has never been the same since I herniated a disc pushing my daughter’s pram through a department store, and it only gets worse as I age.
I wasn’t even pregnant with my second child yet when I had my first encounter with the horrible pain of spinal injury. I was young (relatively) and fit as I’d ever been. Even so, it took two massage therapists, a physio, and a couple months of twice-weekly reformer pilates to get me right again.
And then with each subsequent pregnancy, it got worse.
My oldest is 13 now, the youngest 6, and I still have to be careful when I’m lifting bags of compost for the garden, or swinging across the playground equipment like a much younger person, or sitting too long, or sleeping oddly, or any number of other seemingly innocuous things I may do to enrage the back pain gods.
Just this past year, I mentioned it to my GP. I’d been traveling frequently back and forth between the west coast of Australia and the east coast of the U.S. (basically as far as you can go before you start coming back again) and the long haul flights were killing me. I was still doing twice weekly pilates, seeing a physio, and sucking down heroic doses of ibuprofen morning, noon, and night. I was soldiering on. Pushing through, as usual, because nobody has time for back pain, Especially when you have three kids. And somewhere along the way I convinced myself it probably wasn’t all that bad.
Still, the pain was shooting down my leg, causing spasms in my hips that woke me up frequently at night, and sleep is fucking sacred. Seriously. Fuck with me all you like during the day, but if you get in the way of my 9-10 hours a night prepare to taste my wrath. And by taste my wrath I mean listen to me complain grumpily for as long as it takes to caffeinate and/or make an excuse to go have a nap. (Yes, I do need that much sleep. Yes, I am aware that’s more than the average. Fuck off.)
The GP gave me a pointed look when I told her how many tablets I was taking every day to just manage my pain – not even get rid of it entirely. When she prodded my calves, my ankles, my toes with a pointy stick and discovered a loss of sensation all down my right leg, her lips pressed together into a pale line. I let out a nervous laugh as she handed me a referral for a CT scan.
Unsurprisingly, the results showed two spinal discs that had been damaged to the point where the nerve was being impinged upon.
While it was much as I expected, what happened next was a bit of a surprise.
I was laid up in bed for about five days in complete agony.
And it wasn’t because I’d done something to make the back pain worse. It was just because I finally had someone else, someone important, with a medical degree and a fancy machine, tell me that yeah, actually, it was really bad.
All that time, over a decade of living with it, and telling myself that it wasn’t really that bad, that I should toughen up, seemed to catch up with me all at once.
It was like a switch was flipped.
The results of that scan showing that I had a real, observable, measurable injury gave me permission to feel the pain of that injury.
As if perhaps I had convinced myself that I had only been imagining it.
And getting the word from the doctor that it wasn’t all in my head, that I wasn’t just making excuses to be lazy, that I wasn’t being a hypochondraic or melodramatic, or attention-seeking, and suddenly my whole body leaned into the pain, like my brain had finally caught up to the message my body had been sending all along.
And it really hurt.
What the fuck?
Looking back at my history, it makes a lot of sense that I would put on a show of being fine, that I would minimize my pain so effectively that I would even convince myself it wasn’t real.
My mum was disabled. She lived in constant agony. And my dad wasn’t particularly kind about it.
Being in pain isn’t just a burden on your own body, it feels like a burden on your loved ones as well. So you hide it to keep them from having to feel uncomfortable on your behalf, to keep them from casting you pitying looks, to keep some sense of autonomy when you need extra help for things that able bodied people take for granted.
When you lack physical strength, you develop an armor of “inner strength” that people love to comment upon, patronizingly, with pressed-lip smiles and sparkling eyes. “You’re so strong.” They say. “Good for you.”
At least that’s how my mother navigated the world. Always smiling. Never letting on how fucking hard it was. Hating her body for betraying her, but determined to compensate for her physical defects with personality plus.
It didn’t help that the medical profession blamed all her problems on her weight. And then turned around and blamed her weight on her inability to exercise. She was trapped in a cycle of ineffective diets and cultural judgement, just as surely as she was trapped in her own skin.
And then when she got home, she was shamed for it all.
So yeah. It makes sense that I wouldn’t let myself feel my pain either.
My mother was, by her own admission, never very good at maths. I suppose it’s no wonder that the calculus of pain and self-worth that she handed down to me leaves me in the red like badly-kept checkbook.
Just like my mother, my worthiness is measured in acts of service weighted against the space I take up. In order to balance the ledger, I must give more of my self than my needs demand; I must make my needs (as well as my body) as small and unobtrusive as possible.
According to that equation, pain is a variable I can’t afford, as it both increases my needs at the same time as decreasing my output. Being in pain, giving in to it, requires that I do less and need more. My self worth goes into irrecoverable debt.
So, like my mother, I have learned to swallow down my pain in mouthful of too many ibuprofen and slap a smile on my face and carry on.
And fuck my uncle seven ways to Sunday with a rubber chicken if this isn’t a feminist issue. If this isn’t the same equation being taught to women everywhere. Be smaller. Want less. Do more. Give more. Give until it hurts. And then give some more. And smile about it.