This year both of my babies got Hand Foot Mouth Disease for Thanksgiving. Do you know what that is? It’s disgusting and I’d never heard of it before my boys came down with it. First you get a fever. Then come the red spots. Then the red spots go from being little itchy pock marks to painful blisters all over the body- especially on the hands, feet, inside the mouth, and around the genitals. Our 9-month-old looked like he had genital herpes and our nanny said, “It should be called hand, foot, mouth, and genitals disease.” I guess that name is too long.
Now both teachers at our older son’s preschool have it, so school is closed today. This means that I have very little time to write or to do anything for that matter. So let’s get down to the heart of the matter and keep it brief but deep. You ready? A lot came up for me this week watching my super healthy beautiful joyful Buddha babies get sick and need so much comfort from me. The illness began with a 24-hour fever and both boys wanted to lie, sleep, and suck on my body the entire time. It was both humbling and exhausting to feel their need and my role as the ultimate comfort.
I felt powerless watching them get so sick and covered in itchy painful spots. This was their first real illness. Actually the older one had Covid once but this was way worse and lasted much longer. The night after Thanksgiving he was up every hour screaming bloody murder because his feet felt so buzzy and weird. He said it felt like bees were flying around inside his feet, not stinging him, just buzzing around all night.
The love I feel as a mother is a bizarre combination of knowing I would do anything for my boys, that I would kill for them, I would fight for them, and at the same time I’m so tired and just want a break. I want to go to Hawaii and drink coconuts on the beach for a week. But I can’t leave them. I love them so much and I miss my old life, my pre-kid life, so much too. I know that choosing to have kids is about the long game and I really try to be patient. I can see how this will be fun one day. I can almost taste it. But right now we’re in the thick of it, with a 9-month-old and a 4-year-old. I look forward to the times that I get to be alone or only with other grown-ups.
Last night I went out to this ecstatic dance event and I danced my ass off! I embodied all the wild inappropriate tantrums that I wanted to have all week but couldn’t. I stomped, punched, jumped, groaned, and shook. I felt the weight of my body and allowed the sensual heat to grow and burn through me. I imagined the music pulsing inside my body, burning up what is no longer needed and feeding my cells, filling me up for the long week ahead. I let myself feel sexy and untouchable. I let myself feel safe in my sensuality, shy and brave at the same time. I closed my eyes and felt through the room and fed on the beauty being created by this community all finding pleasure together in our bodies. It felt like an ecstatic orgasmic rave orgy and I never touched anyone.
This is my medicine. I can be the nice mommy at home but then I need to dance my sexy ass off, to disappear, and be witnessed in community. I felt the fear of the last week in my body and all the layers of stress that I worked through one by one until the climactic chaos of the dance exploded and I was able to die and be reborn. There’s something so healing, so cathartic about finding freedom in the body. Letting all the veils go.
I worked so hard last week to represent safety for my boys, to be their comfort, their home in my body. And I got scared. I felt in a visceral way the fragility of life. The thin veil between life and death. Hand Foot Mouth Disease is just a minor virus that runs its course through the body but the world is full of so many dangers, so much violence and instability. How do I raise my boys feeling safe in their bodies, safe in their minds, knowing that so much of the future is beyond my control? How do I feel the intensity of my love for them without this love becoming a shackle holding them back to keep them safe?
Through this dance I was able to embody these questions and shake them through. I kept coming back to the sense that this life, however long or short, is meant to awaken us with all of its beauty and all of its ragged pain.
We had to cancel our Thanksgiving plans this year so we didn’t get other’s sick. Instead we invited another family with Hand Foot Mouth Disease over to party with us. We celebrated with all of our sick spotty kids. We celebrated love, community, and life in all of its forms, all of its fragility.
Love,
Carol
Feel free to comment below! How was your Thanksgiving? What illness did you get? Just kidding, I hope you weren’t sick :) How do you celebrate life?
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