This piece is part of Womb Space, explorations of the womb space-- literal, energetic, theoretical + otherwise.
My bones are closed.
Recently I had the immense fortune to spend the afternoon amidst 25 healers, doulas, midwives, and wise women who held space for me to share my birth story in full — which started waaaaay back when — and then offer me the most beautiful ritual to mark the end of my initial postpartum: a Closing of the Bones Ceremony.
This ceremony is gorgeous, powerful, and has meso-American roots. It’s about literally putting ones bones back together after the expansiveness of pregnancy and birth; it’s about gathering up the frame of the body to seal in the vital flow of life energy; it’s about honoring the arcane and universal experience which is birth.
Putting yourself back together. Something life requires of us time and time again.
Soon after the birth of my son, who entered the world through a deep gash in my belly, I recalled the nursery rhyme, “Humpty Dumpty.” That is how postpartum felt to me at that time. Major Humpty Dumpty vibes. Calling in all the queen’s horses, all the queen’s men, all the queen’s postpartum doulas, and really anyone else, why the hell not.
Can we be put back together again? Should we be? And who is responsible for doing so? After a great loss, a great change, a great fall… what does “back together again” mean?
During a 3am nursing session-cum-Google rabbit hole, I typed with one hand: “Who Humpty Dumpty?” (subtext, who [am] I?)
The origins of the rhyme are obscure, and it possibly began as a riddle. While never explicitly stated, Humpty D. is most often depicted as an anthropomorphic egg. This is fitting because I was once just an egg, so were you, and my son was too. Then, fortunately for us, we anthropomorphed.
He has the bold idea, as a very round and delicate guy, to sit on a wall and of course he tumbles off. This is also very relatable.
But what struck me most was how H.D. has been used in the scientific context to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics — and the concept of entropy, or disarray. Yes, this is weighty territory to tread whilst sleep-deprived in the middle of the night. My nursing sessions obviously get intense.
If I understand thermodynamics correctly (lol), and it’s quite possible I don’t, the second law states that in the universe everything moves eventually toward greater decay, dispersion, and disorder, not the other way around.
Does this ring true for you?
Eventually hot coffee cools; vibrant, athletic bodies become decrepit; leaves turn and fall; even the most chipper person eventually hits an energy wall; my folded clothes explode out of my suitcase, and so on. Entropy, entropy, entropy.
So while Humpty *might* theoretically be put back together (although the rhyme’s like NOPE!) it’s unlikely. We know everything changes and everything ends. We know our bodies break down and our faces wrinkle and sag. We know we lose loved ones and at some point, usually when we’re not expecting it, we realize our strongest most virile days are behind us.
This is the gravitational pull of entropy.
It’s wild to sit with. Especially as we live in a society that otherizes and denigrates anyone or thing “broken” while pressuring us to “bounce back,” “forgive and forget,” “get over it,” and “move on.” There is pressure for a systematized amnesia of the many ways in which we break during our lifetimes.
So now I’m up at 3:30am thinking about entropy and the aches of my healing, aging body which will probably never be the same (which I’m largely OK with — or working toward that).
I’m up at 3:30am sitting with the concept of entropy as it relates to postpartum and the way my beloved son has completely upended my body and life which will literally and truly never be the same. My body had to break to bring him in, there was simply no other way. My life had to end for his to begin. I saw this coming, and yet I never saw it coming.
In the 4am Humpty Dumpty glow, I wondered - what would I go back to? What would putting myself back together again look like? Fully “back together” would mean life before him, which is inconceivable.
Our experiences of tearing, losing, shifting, and changing give us so much. Even as they ask more of us than we ever thought we had, or cause great pain, deep down I believe we recognize their value.
We know we cannot go back back, yet we yearn for a way forward - with some shimmer of that which broke us. We yearn for something between feeling broken and pretending that we never were.
The middle way between full resignation to entropy and cloying amnesia of it is perhaps something like the Japanese art of repair, Kintsugi. This approach welcomes and uplifts “damage” as part of the history of an object (or subject?). In the gold-gilded repair method there is no desire to hide the shatter — erase the scars, tuck the sags, etc. — but rather illuminate it.
While entropy may be a law of the universe, healing is a law of humanity.
We do eventually put ourselves back together again. Grief gets a hair’s breath lighter over the years, or we become accustomed to living alongside it. Cuts, scrapes, and gashes heal, at last. A reminder to be “grateful for the cauldron of alchemy that is in our skin,” as a dear friend recently put it.
We know we’re never the exact same, even when we appear as such to others or the world. Evidence of entropy remains with and within us.
The power in our return toward our previous form is not in an achievement of “moving on” or a perceived “bouncing back” — fuck that. Rather, the power in putting ourselves bak together again, cracks and all, is that it means we have trudged steadily through one more entropic blizzard.
That is something to ritualize and honor.
The skeleton, for all its rigidity, is also pliable and expansive. It’s amazing to me that seemingly innocuous hits can cause a snap or a fracture, and yet the beautiful violence of pregnancy and birth simply spreads your skeleton. Your skin swells, stretches, and tears, but your bones will never break. Every part of your body accommodates to make room, then your bones make way for what you’ve built to enter the world. Enter-opy, in a way.
But nothing stays. So healing is, to some degree, inevitable. Yet healing amplified through devotion, ritual, love, and support is… out of this universe. This is the Closing of the Bones, and this is postpartum healing and support.
My Closing of the Bones involved physical manipulation of my skeleton, jostling and wrapping the junctions of my body — my ankles, my knees, my hips, my shoulders, and my head — coaxing the organs to cozy up and the bones to move toward my midline. Putting me together again in a way that honors how I broke. Putting me together again not back to what I was, but as I am now.
The gold-gilded cracks are there: aches, scars, stretch marks, skin, fat, grief, memory. And with them, you are somehow now elevated, illuminated. Loved, even more whole. You’ve looked entropy in its face and said, “Stay awhile, I’ll take care of you too like you’re one of my own.”