My daughter is almost 8, and one of the most intoxicating, euphoric things I stupidly still do with her, is carry her around in my arms every chance I get. I carry her to bed at night, I carry her out of bed in the morning and I pick her up spontaneously when ever the opportunity presents itself or she does something insanely cute. This need for carrying my offspring around is probably primal and instinctive. But the feeling of bliss, the enthralling, intoxicating smell of her, her soft sweet hair in my face, her porcelain cheeks under my fingers or her sweet forehead under my lips, is nothing short of divine. I regularly get sucked into this heavenly vortex, weak to resist, like she’s my addiction, and I find nothing ethically concerning about it. My concern is she weighs 65 pounds, that’s a lot of added weight on my poor, surgically repaired and pain ridden spine and back.
Recently, my daughter and I were walking down our street, she said something sweet that overcame me with desire to pick her up. So I did. She hopped up to add momentum and quickly wrapped her body around me, she became a part of me, like a koala bear, wrapped around my torso. She knows it really helps when she lays her head on my shoulder because the more merged with my body she is, the less strain and longer holding time we have.
As we walked, actually wobbled, like one giant body mass, merged in a hug, I started to feel pain in my ankles, my knees and in my back, I felt my heart pump, and I started to lose breath. I felt her 65 pounds inside and outside of my body, baring down on me from everywhere, slowing me down, and messing with my breathing. The pressure was rapidly reaching the point of no go and I had to put her back down on her feet and get quick release. She did not resist. Just like she hops up to add momentum when I am picking her up, she hopped quickly down and with concern when I told her that I needed a break.
The moment she got down, I felt immediate release and relief in my body, it was so drastic that it cased a sudden lightning like revelation. In the last few years, I actually lost the equivalent of her body weight, the same weight that I just put down next to me, the whole 65 pounds! I actually walked around and did things in life in a fat suit of that much extra weight, merged with my body, wrapping up and pushing down on my bones.
That which I can now pick up and put down when ever it pleases me or when my back allows, used to be a part of my body and by undeniable extension a part of me. The pressure and pain of carrying 65 pounds of extra weight was excruciating not only on my body, but on my heart and many of my tender feelings. The weight came on gradually, over the years, with each painful blow in life, with each moment of personal anguish, stress and grief, came few extra pounds. Those pounds slowly and gradually followed the ebb and flow of my life for years, blending and merging in, keeping me imprisoned and in pain, until I felt every kind of bad in the book, inside and out, day in and out. Added to the emotional, personal agony I was silently living, and all the physical discomfort of the added weight, the expense of re-buying clothes in various sizes, doctors bills, chiropractors, various medications for depression because I was sad and miserable in my skin, I was judged and weighed by others pound for pound and sometimes with added cruelty, for almost an entire decade, full of tears, grief and emotional anguish I hardly ever want to recall.
That decade is over and passed now. This is the aftermath, and everything is different. Now, I walk feeling like myself again, as if I unzipped the suit and walked out of it, like me again. I breathe with ease and I feel one with the cosmos and with myself. I learned how to meditate, how to listen to my body and my instincts, how to eat well and eat to live, not the other way around. I learned how to move my body, how to hear it, and how to enjoy it. I feel million times better now in every way, and it makes me cringe when I think about the chronic feeling of “bad all around” I was living and accepting for my chained reality.
Tomorrow morning, when I wake up and resolutely smiling proceed towards my daughter’s bed, so I can have her in my arms, wrapped around my body again… when I am wrapped in her divine loveliness, I will feel incredible gratitude and awesome relief knowing that now, I can actually set that weight down anywhere, and I can feel like a brand nouveau good old me, all over again.
Categories: Love and Lore
Tags: agony, bliss, body, body image, breathless, chiropractors, daughter, depression, eat to live, emotional pain, extra weight, fat suit, feelings, gratitude, grief, health, image, instinctive, judging, love, pain, parenting, primal, self image, stress, sudden revelation, tears, weight, weight loss
spacegoons blog 
Nice!
Thanks Scott! 🙂