Body Complex
in my body. My mind floated. I slept a lot. I ate, I didn't eat, I didn't care. My husband helped me tenderly to do things like get out of bed, go to the bathroom, play the computer game Riven, cry, find reasons not to jump out open windows! And I was very disconnected from my body, and that disconnection was helped along by the numbness from the pain meds.
At two or three weeks out, it came time to get sober off the percocet meds. This was a rude awakening because now I had to deal with my body. I wasn't drugged enough to sleep alot, and I began to actually feel physical pain. My arms ached to hold my child. This is a phenomenon called phantom ache http://www.misschildren.org/DeathEthics/... . But then I didn't know it was a real thing. I thought I was losing my mind. And my hatred for my body really kicked in gear. It became impossible for me to think of losing the pregnancy shape of my body because that would mean that time had moved forward-- no way! Time had stopped dead like my child when they told me he was born still. People around me would say things like, "If you lost a little of the weight, you'd feel better." Or "The shape of your body has nothing to do with grief, so if you need to lose weight, then lose weight." Now I really thought I was losing my mind because I thought I was talking rationally. It made sense to me that my body was still connected to the moment in time when my child died. But no one around me seemed to get that. And the bottom line truth was that it didn't matter if they got it or not. Only I could come to terms with the failure I felt and the resulting guilt about failing and the hatred of my body.
So for an entire year after the death of my child, I did nothing in terms of my body. I didn't watch what I ate. I didn't exercise on a schedule. I did a little bit more hypnotherapy, but not much. I didn't obsess. I didn't care. Instead, I threw myself into forming KotaPress http://www.KotaPress.com, into making a legacy for my child, into processing my grief and healing in active ways so that I could properly honor my child's life and
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