"I do"
"I, Emma, take thee, body, to be my wedded better half, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part."
Your relationship with your own body is like an arranged marriage. You don’t get to choose who you are paired with but you are expected to do your best to make the relationship work come hell or high water.
The relationship all begins in the womb. You are a human creation baking away for 9 months, each week bringing a new formation and developmental milestone: Tiny fingers, tiny toes, eyelashes or a web of hair. Your parents hold the cards for how you will form. You don’t know it yet but their primary focus is your development both mentally and physically. When they finally get to see you both together and sight you to be healthy and fully formed, they are relieved, grateful and appreciative. They want the best for you both. It doesn’t stop there, however. Their focus on your development as a couple remains a predominant feature on their priority list for what I am sure continues on for the remainder of your life.
Like probably 99% of arranged marriages, when you are old enough to comprehend the dynamics in your relationship, the problems start. External pressures and expectations overwhelm you and you feel like you have no control. Why can’t you have a smaller bum, longer legs, a rock-hard rig or thick hair? You regularly compare and criticise your body, particularly after giving birth. You focus only on what you don’t have, you are ungrateful and you are unkind. It is not what you asked for and it is certainly not what you want to be married to forever. You try your best to make it work but feel that, no matter what, you cannot control the outcome. You become frustrated and trapped in your relationship.
Like an arranged marriage, any external pressures you may feel when it comes to your relationship with your body are unhealthy but oh so common. They make you lose perspective of what is important for the sake of confining to other’s expectations and norms. Your body does amazing for you like creating a human, lifting your child so they can see things from your perspective, producing the right breast milk to keep your child immune, enabling you to function with no sleep or unbroken sleep for what seems (and for some what is) weeks or months in a row.
You are so quick to forget these things, with unhealthy comparisons quickly overshadowing any form of self-love. You are quick to judge your body when it doesn’t come through as per usual, when you can’t run as fast as you used to after having a baby, when you can’t lose the baby weight as quickly as you hoped or when you come down with regular colds courtesy of exhaustion, fatigue or any other word that can come close to describing a mother’s sleep deprivation woes.
Therein lies a recipe for an inevitable marriage breakdown, arranged or not. In what healthy relationship can you continue to take but not give anything in return, criticise constantly but expect performance daily and neglect but push it to its limits? None? I didn’t think so but it took me a real life sickathon to make me check my contribution to the faults in our relationship.
A while back, my body and I came to blows (pun intended) and had a very real lovers tiff. Mark (my real-life husband) and I came down with some form of virus. I initially thought it was food poisoning but hours later wished it was just that. I will spare you the details at risk of becoming Mrs TMI herself, (which in this context also stands for “Toilet Mostly In-use”) but let’s just say we both tried a new cleanse called the Vomite which based on personal testing is capable of shedding 10+ kgs over a short two-day period.
At the risk of sounding over dramatic, I think the experience became a worthy contender for the world’s most memorable natural human experience with childbirth. The entire time was spent either feeling sorry for myself, blaming my body for failing me or trying to parent. That right there is a recipe for a cocktail I like to call the Bloody Mary (Nightmare). Perhaps it is more of a mocktail though because surely someone is taking the piss? It was not until I sobered up again with copious amounts of water and started to feel normal again that I appreciated what my body had done for me in the past year. Now if I was in a marriage with my body, I sure wouldn’t stand for that. No one likes being taken for granted.
Once the trauma had worn off, I sensitised with my body. I found myself focusing on only positives because I was overwhelmed with gratefulness for feeling healthy again. I was compassionate for what my body had put me through. The pain, the torture and the fatigue. Fair enough that it has its off days every now and then. It isn’t it superhuman. Perhaps it was my body’s way of telling me that it wanting to feel appreciated, loved and valued for all the things it does for me. Whatever the reason, I know for sure that I don’t want to risk a relapse.
It is so important to remember what you promised your body on your most important day of your life, figuratively (#pungamestrong) speaking. Renew your vows. It is important in a time when comparisons are rife and hard to avoid to remember what you owe your body. Love, compassion and gratefulness. Unlike marriage (arranged or not), you can’t divorce it so you have got to do everything to try and make it work.
Em x