7 by 7: the body shop

If there's any time of the year to take an inventory of physical healing, spring is it.

April is Body Shop month at Glow in the Woods -- in our posts, we'll be exploring what we've done and not done in an effort to occupy these bodies with grace after babyloss. To kick things off, it's a new 7 by 7 -- join in, won't you?

Our answers are here -- if you have a blog, copy and paste these questions into your own post, link to us, and share the link to your answers in the comments here. If you don't have a blog, please answer directly in the comments.

+++

1 | Give us a few words you would have used to describe your body, your health or your sense of physical vitality before the experience of babyloss—and a few that you’d use to describe it now.

2 | What do you do to take care of yourself? Has this changed?

3 | Give us one or two words to describe sex or physical intimacy before, and then after the loss of your baby.

4 | Has loss and/or grief left a physical mark on you (a scar, a chronic condition, insomnia, a tattoo)?

5 | Do you medicate or control your emotions with food, wine, altered states, prescriptions? Without judgement, what have you gravitated towards in an effort to heal, and how do you feel about it?

6 | Was physical healing important for you in the first year after your loss? What did/does physical healing entail and how did/do you work towards it? If physicality hasn't been a priority for you, what do you do that makes you feel stronger or more able to cope?

7 | If you could change anything about your body and/or health, what would it be? What would it feel like to be either at peace with your body, or at peace with this babylost state?

(to comment and partipate, please leave your answers and/or link on this month's 7 by 7 page)

coming soon: the GITW body shop

Oh, all the words I should not know those doctors wrote on me
Swell up and from their syllable won't let me get to sleep.
The sun will start later, clock out early
And I'll drive around and wait for it.
Follow familiar roads emptied of every memory
Under a sheet of silence and unmarked snow.

'Hymn of the Medical Oddity', The Weakerthans

It's not just a vessel of children, of seed-sowing. It's a vessel of you.

How has your relationship to your physical self changed since birth and loss? Perhaps it's been a conscious effort to accept your scars. Or perhaps you conjured others with ink on skin. You may or may not sleep well. You may rely on down-dogs or uppers or pounds or vitality. Or perhaps all that's changed is invisible to the untrained eye.

For the next round of posting, we're all going to share aspects of our physical healing -- and we hope you do, too. Reflect with us as we think way beyond calories to sex, yoga, wine. But not all at once. Or maybe so. You tell us.

Early next week, we'll kick off this theme month with a new Body Shop 7 by 7 feature to get everyone warmed up -- expect to see our answers and the meme posted early next week, and join in.

Until then, think on this, mothers and fathers alike:

You walked out through hospital doors, blinking in strange air and light, a babylost parent. Your heart and guts had been thrown up into the air like shrapnel, then settled back down again all askew. What now? How do you take care of this body, honour it, forgive it? Or do you?