This is a season of endings and beginnings. Ending: Hollywood strikes. The Eras Tour (U.S.). What feels like eternal summer. Beginning: Awards season. The Eras Tour (International). What feels like eternal Christmas. Closer to home, my postpartum physical therapy sessions came to an end and my self-healing journey began.
The sessions ended because my insurance wouldn’t cover any more, and in this case I don’t really blame them. I was supposed to do some exercises at home, but one thing no one ever tells you about having a baby is that it makes you have no time and be tired, so I never did my exercises. I showed up to each appointment like I did to my childhood piano lessons: guilty, unpracticed, and acutely aware I was wasting my instructor’s time. I also knew, deep down, I could have probably done the exercises if I had looked at my phone less. Or looked at my phone while I was doing the exercises.
I think part of the problem was the office was somewhat depressing, so I dreaded going. It was clinical and sterile in all the normal ways, but it was also wedged between a giant freeway and the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office. I realized this last fact while staring out the window in the waiting room. Police cars and ambulances kept puling in and out of the building across the street, but none were blaring sirens. Closer inspection revealed why (the word “CORONER” emblazoned across the ambulances, the two refrigerated morgue trucks parked outside, my Google maps telling me that it was the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office).
It was hard not to think about this during my appointments, in large part because half the exam rooms looked directly out onto the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office (the other half didn’t have windows). As I stared up at florescent lights and my (very kind and professional) therapist instructed me to engage my transverse abdominus as she felt around my internal reproductive system with a gloved hand I thought of colder bodies being prodded in less gentle ways.
On the last day my therapist, now pregnant herself, shoved hand weights into a plastic pillowcase and we practiced picking it up like the baby in a way that didn’t make me feel like my hands and fingers are all going to snap off at once. The trick is in not bending the thumbs. We sat and wrapped up our work together, and I recalled how she told me at that first session that time would take care of a lot of the issues I had when I first arrived, and I told her that ended up being true. It probably would have been less time if I had done my exercise, but that went without saying. I wished her luck on her own pelvic floor journey.
I’m relieved to be done. I’m not back to what I was but I’m on my way to whatever is next. I’m somewhere between beginning and ending, which when you think about it, is just life.
This was of course funny, smart and interesting -- and also poignant, raw, and moving. Thanks, Langan.