I feel like I’ve talked a lot on this blog about mothering yourself, making yourself do the things you don’t want to but know you really should, taking care of yourself the way your mother would if you called her often enough. Well friends, this is why blogs are a stupid idea, because the second we start giving advice, life teaches us something new that we probably should have known by now and we end up looking less than intelligent.
I started doing crossfit in order to take better care of my body. I’d let things slide and it wasn’t good for me so I jumped in at the deep end of the fitness world. I woke up early, I did things I hated and I felt pretty good about myself for doing them, even as my body was in pain that I just took as a matter of course. I even signed up for the CrossFit Open which had me doing crazy things like 200 lunges (Knee all the way down to the floor, thank you very much) with a 35 lb dumbbell on my shoulder. My pain increased and I thought that was just a consequence of being 37, overweight and having done nothing athletic (other than having babies) over the course of my adult life.
That pain was actually tendinitis that was getting more and more extreme because I wasn’t taking care of it. The past many months have been a process of resting it on Doctors orders (a mistake), procedures that sound worse than they are and a lot of physical therapy. The therapy is the most important bit, I’ve seen the biggest change from that. My therapist gives me strengthening exercises and stretches and then does some soft tissue massage that hurts like hell but is effective.
So now, six months later, I am able to clean my house, walk without pain (mostly), I’ve even started running a bit. My kids have rolled with things pretty well but I’m pretty sure they’re excited that I’m up and less grumpy again.
I thought many times in the intervening months, about writing the struggles down and I just some how couldn’t. I couldn’t put into words the failure I felt. I needed it to be behind me before I could tell anyone.
This strikes me as symptomatic of our “fine” culture. Even when we are really struggeling, if some one asks us how we are we all will automatically say “fine.” In some of my deepest, darkest moments, I have appeared happy and fine to others. We want the happy ending to come before we can tell anyone how hard things are.
I started this blog to try to combat that impulse, the same one that has us cleaning up one corner of our house so that our instagram stories will look like they are professionally curated. I vowed to show the messy side of life and rather than do that, I went dark. So that sucks and I’m sorry.
It is in sharing our struggles that we can actually grow and help others to grow. My battle with tendinitis is nothing epic but in my head the discouragement seemed like something I should be past. I’d done something wrong and I couldn’t keep going with the gains that I had made and a bunch of the weight I’d lost came back and all of that sucks and I couldn’t talk about it.
But this is life, taking a stand and getting knocked down and muddling around in the dark and getting back up. I think I’m back up, though I still have a ways to go but I’m at least on my feet again. I’m sure the next knock down will come in its own time and I’ll try to do better in sharing it when it comes.
Messy Homeschool 