Massage musings

Her hands moved along the length of my shoulder, popping and cracking their way through.
“What is making the grinding noise when you do that?” I asked her.
“The knots in your muscles. Yours are very hostile”. She responds.
Hostile. My muscles? My connective tissue itself? My genes? This Body? Hostile.
“Your worries and stress are all being held right in here”. She moves her hand lightly along the area where I can’t even remember relaxation. The tightness that holds my posture and strength and possibly even my resolve. That is where her hand circles.
My worries. I avert my eyes and think “Please don’t cry!” I’m always wound tight and crying is easy to come by on any given day these past 13 years, but I don’t want to cry here and feel the fool. My worries and stress…my mind jumps to an image of my daughter, in her immobilizer. Her shoulder unable to stay in it’s socket. Her body rejecting it’s basic design. Hostile. My genes passed on to her. My worries. My resolve not to break down and cry.
“How’s your daughter?” She asks. This young woman sees right through me. I’m sure my eyes tell my fear and sorrow in the moment before I can steady them with a cover.
“She’s in the immobilizer again. Back to the doctor tomorrow. She can’t seem to keep that shoulder in it’s socket. Hopefully they have something new to try”
“Oh. Poor girl.”
Yes, that. As the masseuse moves her hands across my shoulders, down my arms, back over the shoulders and down the spine, I feel new awakenings of pain with each area she touches. So many muscles holding tight to worries of their own. I didn’t even know they were hurting like that. Somehow I managed to overlook the individual pains and accept the overall pain in my neck and head that is almost always present. I assume this connective tissue disorder is to blame, but so what. My daughter has it so much worse.
I imagine how her body would respond to this massage. Her shoulders would certainly pop out, then suck back in, leaving that hollow space and hollow feeling for a moment, followed by a jolt of sharp pain. Her fingers, her knees, her jaw…No. No massages for her.
If I have overlooked pains and worries camping around my muscles throughout my body, they are insignificant to the non stop inflammation and pain my first born lives with. It’s unlikely she has ever lived without pain, so she probably doesn’t realize how bad it is, but she knows it is there. Fatigue grabs onto her during regular activities and it steals her away bit by bit. First with a turn of the foot, then a limp. A knee that spins inward, a hip that jostles and slags. Her joy fades as she trudges on and soon, hopefully, she can stop. Rest. Ice. Medicate. It hurts. It always hurts. And why? The genes. The connective tissue disorder that I passed on to her without realizing what I had done. Certainly some of those worries and stress are born of guilt and of sorrow.
“Finished” says the masseuse. She smiles and glides from the room, ready to see the next client. I get up, feel each newly awakened ache and swim in a heated pool of grief for my girl. I put on my shoes and go home.