Can's and Can't's

There are lots of things that I can't do. Ski, for instance. Run in high heels. Watch a scary movie without having a full-blown panic attack. Grocery shop without buying at least one thing not on the list. Finish a knitting project.

There's a whole other list of things that I can't imagine I could possibly do until I find myself doing them. Moving, for instance. Moving again, that is. (If you're keeping track at home, this is move number 5 in the last 11 months.) As I empty these rooms that I so recently put my stuff down in, I tell my brain shhhh and I turn up the volume on my audiobook. It's no use getting upset about it, just keep loading up the car and moving your shit, and repeating steps 1 and 2 until you are out of here and into there and please god let this be the last time for awhile, I tell myself.

I didn't think I could resolve a shoulder dystocia, either. In my head, I was screaming to myself, I can't do this, oh my dear god, I canNOT do this, please oh please, let this not be my job, and meanwhile I had told the patient to flip over, NOW, and stuck what felt like half my arm inside her and pulled her baby's hand past its shoulder hard enough that I thought I'd break it, all the while knowing that a broken arm is better than a dead baby and then out he flopped, wailing and snatching his arms away from me and it was over and nobody died, not even a little bit.

I still don't think I can live in this body, in this life, forever without always longing for something just outside myself. My patients, every. single. solitary. day, asking me, "Do you have kids?" and I say, No, and smile. I used to say, Not yet.

I look down at myself and squeeze a series of concentric circles on my palms and try to slow my breathing as I idly imagine what it would be like to not feel such an intense disconnect and dysmorphia with my own physical self. Would it be like the moments just before falling asleep, or just after having sex with someone you love, or right in the middle of a run - would it be like those moments but all, or most of the time, rather than these mere flashes of feeling right and whole? I am both wildly curious and utterly disregarding. It is so foreign to me, I cannot even imagine it.

But then again, I couldn't imagine moving again, or being a midwife, or driving across the country, or camping by myself, or living on a reservation, or ending a relationship without once begging to be taken back, or house-training a puppy, or stitching a repair, or a million other things that I have done, am doing, will do.

The running in heels, though. I don't really care if I never figure that out.