I support access to medical care for all.  I do NOT support the way in which it is being offered.  Access to allopathic medicine without prior drastic changes to the system will not help this country be physically nor financially healthy.  I do believe relieving the stress of not having access to emergent care is of absolute importance.   I remember the nagging five years of fear during my mid twenties without health insurance. Despite being a healthy young person, I was active in the outdoors.  In the back of my mind, I knew at home, I couldn’t even afford a broken bone. With regards to medical care, I felt the best when I was in Mexico, Canada or pretty much anywhere other than the States.  On one of my trips to Cuzco, Peru, I got horribly sick from the altitude and emergently needed IV fluids. I was afraid to go in because of my American experience of medicine, but had no choice.  The total ER visit was 15$. I was shocked that even with my meager savings, I was able to afford my own healthcare directly. This is where healthcare for all would be possible.  It’s about stopping the racket of stuffing the pockets of greedy pharmaceutical companies and for profit medical corporations.  Its about decreasing administrative costs by creating reasonable direct payment for services. Medicine cannot be part of unregulated capitalism and be affordable for all. It will not work. We have a disaster to clean up first and need voters to speak up now.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/080615/6-reasons-healthcare-so-expensive-us.asp

One of my favorite examples of the utter criminality of Pharma and rising costs of medicine in America is the story behind the treatment for pinworms.  As a taxpayer, anytime I treat a medicaid child for pinworms (which is more common than you want to realize) it now costs upwards of $600 per treatment for an old and once generic drug out of my own tax dollars!  Read the linked article and think what will happen if we create a system where everyone has access to a system with unregulated cost.  We will bankrupt ourselves and our taxes will go to pay for this lunacy.   And do note, that the tone of the Consumer Reports article is written that this is the fault of physicians for not paying better attention to drug prices.  Guys, why did a generic off patent drug go from 6$ to 190$ per pill is much a better question to ponder?  And better yet, how is this legal?  This is simply criminal but no one is paying attention anymore.  Again, the best solution I see is educating the community about the lack of regulation and beginning to clean up the great depth of corruption that the unchecked greedy few of our healthcare system have been enjoying.  Once free from greed, healthcare becomes accessible to all.

https://www.consumerreports.org/drugs/pinworm-treatments-expensive-drug-mistake-you-dont-need-to-make/

It is time to start paying attention and speaking up.  This is the only way true change will come.

As someone who has walked deeply within the shadows of trauma and who has sourced immense healing in those scary spaces, I want to speak on the concept of safety.  As parents, one of our deep functioning instincts is to keep our children safe. Creating safety for my child has always been a guiding principle in my parenting. Specifically, I’m talking about emotional safety.  That kid climbs super high trees.  His physical “safety” is a whole other article.  Thanks to being human and my lineage of unresolved transgenerational trauma, I sometimes fail to create the emotional safety I yearn for.  I lose my temper. I have said things I regret. I have personally created an environment that was the utter opposite of an emotional safe harbor for my own child. And yes, thankfully this is the exception and not the rule of my behavior. I am so lucky to have had both the support and an immense personal bravery to step in and weed up and process the unresolved.  I do this process every single day through my mindfulness practice.  Yet, I am far from perfect.

Something I have learned very recently is this.  If I get emotionally messy in the shared space with my child, I get to clean it up.  The first step for me is this. As soon as I notice I am out of alignment, I stop. I force myself to actually fully stop and pause.  My child is very, very sensitive to space and young enough that if I walk away, it lands for him even harder as abandonment.  I have learned to be with myself simply in the space of the pause and still physically close enough to him that he knows I’m not going anywhere.  This has taken a lot of practice both on the dance floor and in the living, breathing Dance of everyday life. Next, as quickly as I possibly can, I release the ever present feelings of guilt and shame over my behavior, speech, energy etc.  Because I am a deeply loving mother, the ability to hold myself to perfection standards is always right there.  Sometimes this act of release from shame and guilt has taken me days, sometimes it’s only a moment. Finally, I get to help my child’s and my own neural system through his sense of safety, reset.  I have started teaching him the how to notice the difference between an activated nervous system and a resting nervous system.  A great place to start is to learn to sense adrenaline moving in the body. The up-regulation and the down regulation have the potential to be both conscious and unconscious processes.  When we big people freak out, our activated nervous system directly affects that of our children. They go with us. It is our job to notice and help each other come back to center together.  

We had a doozy of a morning recently.  I am proud to say that it takes a fair amount these days to get me to lose my sh*t.  But, we got there thanks to lost car keys and a tight schedule. My son magically made my only set of keys disappear.  Like truly disappear. As we searched for the keys, we quickly became late for school and the urgent care. Adrenaline poured out of my circuits and I started to freak.  I kept asking my child questions as I helplessly searched under the car, in the car, the yard etc… prodding his memory and this is what he said, “Mama, I remember opening the back hatch of the car (to load stuff in ~3 mintues prior) and then I just blacked out.”  What dawned on me, even there in the moment was that my stress response was actually causing him to drop into a freeze stress state. That is the “black out.” I didn’t hit him, swear at him, call him names, all the things that do happen to kids and yet, he was still in a sympathetic freeze.  My child is beautifully sensitive.

I bear the responsibility of my young child’s sense of safety.  Yet, I don’t have to be the Dalai Lama to raise a kid well. I simply stopped myself in my tracks and stepped into a big pause for us.  I created a quiet space for both of us to find a lower level of activation. It took less than 30 seconds to create this. I didn’t have to land him completely.  All I did was help him turn around from activation.   A healthy intact body actually has a tendency toward calm.  I took full ownership of the energetics.  I explained to him, I had lost it. It wasn’t anything that he had done. And again, it is so much easier to take full ownership when I let go of the old ways of beating myself up.  Blame, shame and guilt only drive the nervous system further out into activation. If we want to land, and if we want our child to land back in their body, their sense of safety, we get to let go of perfection over and over again. 

Pause, ownership and reset.  

Phew!  Big deep breath.

May my messy serve our highest good and our darkest shadows.  

 

-Heather      

 

Recently, my son and I were out standing in front of our home on the sidewalk and we met a young Mom from our neighborhood walking her dog and with her toddler backpacked along for the adventure.  We started talking and I immediately remembered the loneliness of those moments of motherhood. These three were such a happy scene to behold but the deeper aspects of suffering were right there for me in the mother’s eyes.  This super aware Mom and I actually openly discussed maternal loneliness and I told her to please stop by when she was out walking. If only for a few moments, I made sure she knew I was happy to hold her in an authentic space as she journeyed.

Although my child is now 6 years old and lovely to talk to, I still miss companionship with adult company. My husband is a surgical resident and gone a lot.  When he is here, he is exhausted and my child is better at demanding his scraps of energy and attention than I ever will be. And so again, the loneliness creeps in. It is so much better than it was when my own child was a toddler but still the weight of loneliness is there.

As a society we don’t often talk about the Shadow Lands of Motherhood.  All advertising dollars are spent to make sure that culturally no one sees any of it.  It took thousands of deaths for our culture to begin to even have a conversation around postpartum fragility.  And now, it seems that public conversation has simply turned lamely into Pharma “solutions”. What if the threat of isolation doesn’t end in the 4th trimester?   Today I am writing to say that maternal/paternal loneliness is real and there is no pill strong enough to mask it.  Loneliness deserves our attention.  It may sound simple but just realizing that my loneliness deserves my awareness and my tenderness has helped me experience and move through it.    

What I am wondering now is how do we better support each other in the journey?  How do we experience our loneliness so that we emerge stronger and healthier rather than it eating us or further isolating us?  How can we do a better job of forming community around ourselves and others? How do we ask for support when we need it?

I am journeying these questions myself and will write more as I discover.  Today it felt like enough to simply pose the awareness and the questions.

Much tenderness,

Heather Kim, DO