Yesterday I swam for the first time since last October. Having finally received the go-ahead for exercise at my six-week check-up on Monday, I spent what free time I could carve out during the week doing a series of activities I hadn't been able to for ages:
1. Tuesday: I took a hot bath.
2. Wednesday: I got a massage.
3. Thursday: I went swimming.
I've come to see these as necessary activities not just for me, but also for everyone around me. On the especially exhausted days recently, not only have I been miserable, but I've managed to make everyone around me miserable too. The destructive power of an unhappy mom is considerable! So my husband knows to send me out of the house when things are getting bad. On one particularly exhausted day, he said to me, "Why don't I watch the baby and you go to Half Price Books and buy some books?" Now, I need more books like I need a tornado to go through my living room (oh, wait...), but I dutifully went and did what I needed to do for the sake of my soul. I don't think what he did is pictured in Porn for New Moms, but it should be.
Anyway, to return back to swimming... During my pregnancy, I splurged on prenatal massages twice. I don't usually go for massages, but I thought my body deserved them then. But what surprised me was how psychologically important they were too. Even during a pretty easy pregnancy, I still felt like my body wasn't really my own anymore. People stared at my belly, and every time I went to the doctor's I was poked and prodded in various ways. It started to feel like my abdominal area was just a totally different part of me, available for the viewing and inspection of others. When I got a prenatal massage, I nearly wanted to cry, since it was the first time I felt like a whole person, with body and mind both belonging to me.
Fast forward to labour, a c-section, breastfeeding... now my body feels even more cut up into chunks. This bit is for the baby, this bit was cut up and needs to be kept dry and not used for anything, this bit is still bleeding, this bit hurts from lifting the baby, and this other bit hurts from bending over too much. It's a completely fragmented experience of my own body. And while massage and the bath helped a bit, it was really when I went swimming that my body didn't feel like bits anymore.
Plunging into the water I felt shocked by its coolness, and so I focused on that. I had been a bit scared about my first bit of exercise -- would my abdominal muscles hurt? Would I feel them pulling the way I did a few weeks ago when I stood up holding the baby? But they felt fine when I started swimming, my back pain went away, and suddenly I could just give in to the meditative flow of being in the water. I've never been a particularly strong or skilled swimmer -- in fact, I really only started to like it in university, after reading a book on swimming and working on my technique (yes, I do everything via book learnin'!) -- but I can now breast stroke for ages.
Even more surprising than the fact that my body felt ok, in fact just like my old, pre-baby body, was this: I found I wasn't getting tired at all. You would think after six weeks of no exercise, lack of sleep, round-the-clock breastfeeding, and only short walks, the first bit of cardio would have me huffing and puffing at the edge of the pool. Not only did that not happen, but I only left the pool because of the cold weather, not because I was tired. I really felt I could have gone on swimming for another hour, forgetting all those worries and to-do lists that usually fill my head.
I am now really looking forward to starting some gentle postnatal workouts and bellydance...Labels: body awareness, massage, postnatal, prenatal, swimming, workout