Hip openers

My pelvis is not for babies, it's for rage and sorrow (and sometimes dogs)

My weird shape.

Take a pear and move the bulbous part down so there’s a long waist between it and the stem. Maybe it’s more a spoon. No, Mrs. Incredible, who is middle-aged Elastigirl.

Owing perhaps to this disproportionate shape in which my core muscles have to yoink my unruly lower half to my spine, my hips are screaming. All the time.

As a writer, I sit A LOT. And I become so rapt with whatever I’m writing or editing that I don’t even notice how long I’ve been sitting on a hard cafe bench or sinking between the cushions of my floppy old couch, until I stand up and morph into the Tin Man.

In yoga class, the teacher starts by asking what we want to work on or pay attention to. I’m Captain Hip Opener—give me pigeon, give me lizard, stacked logs. Oof, hurts so good. Throw in revolved triangle because fuck you, IT band.

Hip openers: I hated them and then I loved them while also hating them, and now I need them and love them and sort of hate them but mostly need them. This is a rough diagram of my relationship, over the last 20 years, to everything that’s good for me.

And it’s not just me — everyone in my class asks for hip openers.

You might have heard that hips are where we store anger, trauma, and/or connection to family. That tracks. My family was always so angry; I was always angry at them but I couldn’t do anything about it. So we just all stayed in our corners, fuming, waiting for someone to say the wrong thing, then we would let decades of resentment out in a volcanic burst. Now some of us are gone and those who are left are older and tired. What to do with the anger? Send it down the elevator to the basement for storage.

Was it Freud or Shakira who said, Hips don’t lie?

My massage therapist, a wonderful earthy hippie somewhere between my age and what would have been my mother’s age, pointed out how much the pelvis endures—period pain, digestion issues, life-making, baby-growing. I refused the services of my pelvis to human children, but I did once give birth to a dog.

After my mom died, my mom’s dog, Chloe (whom I picked out at the shelter and bonded with before giving her to my mom—dog I loved and worried about for years) came to live with me. For the first few weeks, I’d lie on the couch with her between my legs and imagine birthing her. I did this kind of a lot. I’d put the blanket over us and roll it back so I could see her pointy brown head coming out of the tent and I’d feel like she had just slid out of me.

Email that one to your Jungian podcast.

Years later I finally acknowledged the grief I had packed away in my cavities. And even later, I acknowledged the rage. But my hips… they knew before I did.

Would you believe? My massage therapist shares my mother’s name, a name that’s in danger of passing out of existence when all the Boomers are gone. I swear that’s not the biggest reason I need her to lay hands on me once a week, but it helps.

It’s the psoas (so-az) muscles, says the internet’s relatively new wealth of trauma resources. I’d never heard of a psoas muscle until a few years ago, and now it is (like trauma resources on the internet) everywhere. Apparently this muscle, which holds my (large) ass to my (small) torso, is where we keep a lot of stress and trauma. To release the hips, you have to also release this muscle, which for me is tight and contracted from sitting like a shrimp and being shaped like a cartoon.

Recently I have been thinking of cord-cutting. Letting go of the family I love and need and am hurt by over and over, family who never calls, never asks me how I am. We’ve had our moments—when badly wounded, I’ve loped back to each of them for nourishment, but it’s pretty much stone soup. You know that children’s story? Or like getting blood from a stone. Something with stones. Or a well. That well is dry. I keep going back to that dry, stony well, like a good and codependent child. Or one who believes in magic and is thirsty enough to try.

But now I have gut stuff. I’ll get into that another time. And the guts in my pelvis are screaming and my hips are screaming and my navel keeps me tied to something that isn’t there, rolling me inward when outward is the way I need to be.

Read my interview with The Sun about my essay, “And These Too Are Defensive Wounds” to hear about some of the things that really tighten my psoas.