No One Told You the First Thing to Arrive Would Be Exhaustion

You have been told, in one way or another, that when the holding finally stops you will feel lighter, and that a settled woman is a peaceful one, and that you will know this work is working because you will start to feel better. I want to tell you what actually happens, because I have watched this happen in myself and in every woman I have walked beside, and hardly anyone says it out loud.

The first thing that comes is the tiredness, and it does not come gently.

You come in on a Saturday afternoon and sit down in the chair by the window, with the list still on the counter and half the day still in front of you, and you cannot get back up, and I do not mean that you would rather not, I mean that your legs will not answer you. Something in you starts to panic then, because you have never once been the woman who could not get up, and you have no idea who you are if you are her.

Or your hands shake while you are holding your coffee on an ordinary Tuesday morning, with nothing wrong anywhere in the room.

Or you are standing at the sink with the water running and you begin to cry, and your mind goes looking for the reason and cannot find one, because there isn't one, nothing happened, and crying with no story attached to it is a very strange thing to happen to a woman who has spent her whole life able to explain herself.

This is the part I most want you to have before you need it, because this is exactly where women stop. You feel wrong, and you decide that feeling wrong means the work has failed you, when what is actually happening is that a body which stood guard for forty years is finally standing down, and standing down feels nothing like the peace you were told to expect.

So think about what you carried, and think about when you carried it. You worked, and you raised them, and you sat in waiting rooms, and you answered the phone at hours no one should have to answer a phone, and there was no room in any of those years to come apart, so you didn't. The tiredness was there the whole time and you kept it underneath everything else, because keeping it underneath was the only way through, and now there is room, and everything you set aside is arriving at once, in the wrong order, with no warning.

You are paying now for what you could not afford to pay then, and the tiredness showing up is not a punishment and it is not a setback, it is your body deciding, after all this time, that you can be trusted with the truth about how tired you are.

I won't promise you the tiredness passes quickly, because a body hands the holding back in pieces .. some of the holding goes in your sleep, some of it goes on an afternoon you will not remember afterward, and some of it stays a while longer because your body is still deciding whether you meant what you said.

But I will tell you the one thing I wish someone had told me. The tiredness is not the work failing you. The tiredness is the first honest thing your body has said to you in years.