black lives matter — Notebook — Leah Claire Kaminski

It’s hard for me to be in my body. I’m on the couch right now, forgetting to breathe as I listen to H cry. We are re-nap-training him, still, again, forever. Today he wanted to stay with me in the dim tent of blankets, smiling at me as he nursed; instead I set him down in his crib.

The best I can think to do for him is let him find the ability to soothe himself. The best I can think to do for him is give myself an hour a day without touch, with my own body alone.

I’m trying to feel my breath, focus on where the different parts of his cries hit my eardrum.

I tend to run away from sensation. Shallow or absent breaths, tense shoulders and hips, numbing the way my body feels emotions with food or drink or smoke, depending on the era.

During labor I felt I was fleeing my body, or fleeing through my body to find a place where the pain wasn’t. The moment I succumbed to it fully, I screamed like a child, turned over in the hospital bed clutched the railing and screamed, high and breathy, not in pain but in fear.

I can’t say I’m proud of how I responded to his birth, really. I was not calm, I did not breathe through it, and I was not centered. I screamed and screamed. I could and do remind myself that it did go fast, nearly precipitously so, and it was a surprise that it happened when it did, only a few hours after checking out of the hospital for blood pressure monitoring at 38.5 weeks.

But that attempt to comfort myself relies on implicit agreement with the premise that I did it wrong.

And I was, have been, sometimes am ashamed; I blamed my pelvic floor issues (a rectocele if anyone’s counting) on the psychological block I felt against the pain and the pushing. And it was probably a primary driver behind a fleeting but very strong desire to get pregnant again, quickly — I wanted a delivery do-over.

Instead, though, I try to sit with it and let it instruct me. Not on ways I need to improve myself or get stronger, calmer, less afraid. But on how to comfort myself, and the ways I feel fear.

It was only in the moment of re-entering my body and accepting what was happening that the required pushing, and the safe birth, happened at all. In the moment that I turned inward and could actually feel his head in the birth canal, and told him we were going to get it done.

This week I am feeling something familiar in my body, but I’m having a hard time directing my attention to it; my mind glances away from it in fear every time I decide I need to know what’s going on. But listening to H right now (fully embodied in anger himself), I feel fully the heavy emptiness in my diaphragm, the catch in my throat. It’s dread, and anger.

I’m having nightmares too. Of gruesome murders at close hand, petty and rageful fights, any kind of apocalypse. I wake myself up shouting in the early hours. Waking is like tearing the air from around the dream, like fighting through water, my chest tight and silenced, mouth jawing, and then I’m awake and afraid, flight mode at 5am.

My body stays in the 5am ditch, but as the day proceeds away my mind goes. It’s the heritage of CPTSD, anxiety, bipolar II, depression. Sensing threats everywhere and tuning them out. The fear lives in me, replays itself daily in my body, and so I have learned to separate myself from it until my most common feeling is a fuzzy kind of bifurcation.

It’s impossible to write poetry without being embodied. Metaphor requires body, requires thrust and committed impulse that cannot be executed by brainpower alone. Everyone knows Emily Dickinson’s “if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry”. A ridiculous poet used it as a pickup line on my best friend at Cambridge’s Cafe Pamplona in 1999 so the line is fairly ruined for me, but it’s really the truest — to read poetry is physical, and to write it is, too.

And this is why I’m so afraid of it. Why I avoid it for months, years at a time. I’m always fleeing my body.

I used to describe, back when I treated every symptom of my anxiety and depression like the symptom of a drug trip, feeling like I was about half an inch and to the left of my own body, all the time. Once you describe such dissociation there’s really nothing else to say; you can’t observe anything but the unhappy friction it creates; eventually, you just end up repeating yourself.

I wonder too if this has to do with the fact that I really don’t know what I look like, but I’m not sure. Do others know how they look? Is their proprioception more fine-tuned, have they not been triggered out of their bodies? Does the one of a kind pink manta ray feel his pinkness, do the gray feel their own mottles, as beautiful because as sure?

This morning, online, so many ways to feel fear, disgust, anger, hopelessness. Amy Cooper’s panicked racist lying, her everyday grotesque manipulation. The calm cop with a knee on a dying human’s neck like it was any ground you might kneel on to garden, change a tire, pick up something lost. The economist calling people “capital stock”. The Chicagoan angry he’ll have to wear a mask in restaurants. “If people are afraid they can stay home.” The bodies of the servers literally not present.

So many ways the full coursing life of our bodies is denied. Why not run, why not numb. So easy. So many of us fleeing. When we should look back even though we become pillars of salt.

And how can I desire to sit, anchored, in a body that sits in a world burning, melting, lobed with polar wind and disaster?

Why bother sitting in a body that sits in a world touching bodies that use other bodies as pawns, coal mine canaries, “human capital stock”, targets, punching bags, fleshlights, trash. Bending bodies like bridges the wrong way and never allowing them exhaustion. Heavy limbs of the dead. Of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, of George Floyd.

How can I sit in a body that might, if I knew her, allow Amy Cooper space to “be afraid”, or could even be her? Out of disinterest or forgetfulness or laziness or exhaustion or fear of conflict, or fear of losing hard-scrabbled status. How can I confront the body that doesn’t just witness but takes part.

Harder to escape a body under immediate threat. I know it too, in my own ways. Impossible to not be there when you’re murdered by police, or by white fragility, or by being an essential worker in a pandemic. Auhmad Arbery could not have forgotten what he looked like, not ever.

So today because I am not under threat, I sit and feel under threat. I feel the echoes of threat threaded through my body and know they are only echoes. Because it costs me nothing to confront my own inchoate dread, because my own old traumas are not standing bodied before me, I feel every inch of my living body.

Because I birthed a white son whom the sun shines on today, because I am able to safely run from my own fears, today I will stay. Feel the dread and anger, know two things: we are safe, many others are not. Know the feeling is right.