Of work, healing, and play

Or: Rewiring and reframing is hard!

May 27, 2024

Back in mid-April, I had an appointment with a physical therapist. This one shortly followed an appointment with an occupational therapist. I do not know what distinguishes one from the other, because both are helping me recover from a brain injury and both have assigned daily exercises to facilitate said recovery.

I had seen the occupational therapist first, about a month earlier. And even though I felt desperate to recover so that I could regain functions I’d lost (namely, the ability to drive for extended periods, so that I could get to my parents and son on my own), I wasn’t really doing the exercises daily. They didn’t take that long to do, but somehow I kept not being able to fit them in. I was busy, they were boring, it was hard to see how doing them was really going to help much, and I was getting better all the time anyway (or so I thought), so it was easy to put them off each day. Suddenly Cane would be home from school and it was time to make dinner, after which I would feel too tired to do much of anything.

My extremely competent occupational therapist, Sara, is very nice and supportive. She is also very firm, and she very firmly let me know in April that my commitment to the exercises needed to change. A few days later, I met with the physical therapist who put me through some evaluative paces that showed me just how impaired I still was.

Which got me to wake the eff up.

I had a brain injury. I could not do things that people with uninjured brains can do. That I could do, before I fell and hit my head. I had damaged my brain, which allows me to do, well, everything.

Kyle, the physical therapist, added more exercises, plus he assigned me to do at least 20 minutes of cardio at a specific elevated heart rate, at least four times a week. (Every day would be great.)

I went home, discussed the situation with Cane, and concluded that it was time for me to treat my recovery as my job. For me, jobs have never been negotiable; they have to be done before anything else gets done. Period. My job for pay—occasional substitute teaching—was put on hiatus. All other tasks were relegated to secondary status. They would get done (or not) as I could manage after doing my physical therapy.

And that’s what I’ve (mostly) done. (It’s part of the reason my output here has been spotty and irregular.) Telling myself that therapy exercises are my job absolutely did the trick. When I didn’t want to do my exercises, I’d tell myself: It’s your job, Rita. And then I’d do them.

I will admit, it’s gotten challenging. My job is boring. I’ve seen myself improving—which you’d think would be motivating, but somehow instead makes me feel that I don’t need to work quite so hard—and life has thrown some curveballs that only I could catch. (Really. Some things can’t be outsourced.) I’ve grown frustrated with the slower pace this job requires of me. So many days I’ve gotten to 3:00 pm and found myself wondering: Why can’t I seem to get much of anything done?

Over the last week, as I let myself dive deep into revising an essay, I also let myself slip a bit on my PT.

That’s where things stood yesterday when I clicked on a link from

Anne Helen Petersen

: “My MS Forced Me to Model Slowness and Care for My Kids,” where Kathleen Donohoe explores the impact of MS on her mothering:

This is not the model of motherhood I grew up with, or the one I see celebrated around me. I had a mom who was all go, who didn’t sit down, who went to graduate school full-time with four small kids. I have fully internalized the narrative of mothering as productivity, as effort without limits. But I’m beginning to see that multiple sclerosis has forced me into a different version of parenting, one where my kids know I care for my body, and that bodies are vulnerable and in need of care.

As much as I like to think I have spurned and recovered from all the messages I have internalized about productivity and value, I keep getting reminders that I have not. I am not parenting small children, and still I have had difficulty accepting my body’s vulnerabilities and prioritizing care for it. When the deep dive on writing meant putting something to the side, I chose PT rather than my other responsibilities.

Now, it’s not as simple as saying that this is just about thinking I have to be productive to be good. I want to do most of the things that this injury (and recovery from it) have been keeping me from. I want to cook good, healthy meals for us. I want to work in our garden, and care for my family, and even clean our home (because it feels better when it is clean). I like being productive, and I don’t think that’s just because of ways in which I’ve been socialized.

But the fact that the only way for me to get myself to do something that I need to do for my health and long-term well-being was tell myself that it was my job? That’s probably something to unpack.

Donohoe, exploring why she hasn’t told her children about her diagnosis, concludes: “I want them to know that rest, exercise, checking in with your own needs is the human condition, not something that happens only in a worst-case scenario.”

Not something that happens only in a worst-case scenario.

Honestly, if this is something to unpack, there’s not a lot in the suitcase:

Hard work, in the culture of my family and community, was highly valued.
Individualism, in the culture of my family and community, was highly valued.
Personal sacrifice, in the culture of my family and community, was highly valued.

Framing my physical therapy as work meant that I could prioritize it, because working hard and doing things on my own has been valued.

My creative work—last week, the essay that consumed my brain and hours of my day—is not work in the framework I’ve outlined above. It is a thing to be sacrificed so that I can do my real work (making our home and caring for my family). It is play. And on some level, clearly, I still see taking care of my personal needs as something that is optional. I still see taking care of personal needs, physical and otherwise, as something I do only for myself. Slighting my personal physical needs—rather than, say, not making a healthy dinner for my family or helping one of my children with a task—was the sacrifice I needed to make to pay for my play, which served another kind of personal need.

Here is where I feel the need to say that this dilemma is not pretty small in the grand scheme of all that is happening in the world right now. All that is always happening in the world. I think there’s value, though, in examining what we do and why. Doing that within our own lives might have some positive impact on the larger world around them.

None of my dilemma—which is the dilemma for so many people (especially women) who want to pursue creative work—is simple to resolve. I once thought that, if only I didn’t have to work at a more than full-time job, these dilemmas would disappear. I don’t want to discount the impact of full-time work outside our homes on our abilities to take care of ourselves and support creative work; my life is so much easier to manage now that I’m not doing that, and I’ve been writing more (and better) than I ever have.

But. All of this is showing me that some of what’s held me back from the creative work/play I’ve wanted to do is internal, and getting to a better place with it all is an inside job.

And that is all I’ve got for today. It’s past time for me to head to the gym for that 20 minutes of cardio, and Cane is off from work today, and I’ve got a child coming for Sunday dinner on this holiday Monday. Letting go of some other internalized ideas (about what to share and when) by sharing this piece that I haven’t let marinate. Time to try new things!

Last week we cleared a friend’s yard of weeds. She’s dealing with some hard challenges, and the yard had exploded the way they do in spring. This is the kind of thing I want to have space to do. And write essays. And do physical therapy.

I would love to know how things are going for you. What have you been working on/playing with lately? How do resolve these dilemmas (because we all have them!)?

Of work, healing, and play

Or: Rewiring and reframing is hard!

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