By Christina Tang-Bernas
@ctbideas

The back pain arrives fully-formed in the middle of the night. I never know when it will happen. A week, a month, could go by without it. I begin to think that they have finally gone away for good for the first time since I gave birth to my daughter, and then I startle awake, 2 a.m., 3 a.m., already in its grip. My husband is quiet beside me. I can hear my toddler daughter shift over the monitor, restless but still asleep in her crib.

I shift with stiff incremental movements from one position to the next, hopeful that one will provide some relief, already knowing that none will. Fatigue from the long day lingers underneath my eyelids, deep within my lungs, but my mind won't allow sleep, not when there is such a clear threat dwelling within my body. There is nothing to do but swallow a couple pain pills and lie in place, waiting for whatever scant relief they will give me. I am used to insomnia, a byproduct of my college years. But, before, I could occupy the restless hours with various tasks. Now, I can only focus on the pain embracing me.

My eyes closed, my mind traces the amorphous wings spreading out and out along my spine, wrapping around my sides, brushing down my ribs, to settle in deep within my stomach. My hands cradle the roundness of my stomach, in an approximation of how they used to stretch over the tight skin of pregnany. They rise and fall with each breath.

Up. Down.

Up. Down.

There is a part of me that is always afraid the pain will never go away. Or that this is a symptom of something deeper and greater that will snatch me away from my family. My doctor tells me everything is normal, but it’s too easy to fall headlong into the abyss of what-ifs. My more rational side knows that if I can just sleep again, it will be better (it has to be). Perhaps if I let it spread out thin enough, it will become bearable enough. I picture the pain inside me and then mentally nudge each particle away from each other, my fingers twitching in empathy. I imagine the pain flowing down my legs and into each toe, flowing up my neck and along the curves of my ears.

Eventually, I sleep.

By morning, the pain is nothing more than a distant dream-memory. No matter how I try to replicate the sensation in my memories, I can't grasp it. I only know that it hurt, and now it doesn't, and that is enough for me. I have more pressing things to do anyways.

I push through the day, hefting my daughter up and down, bending to clear our small home of ever-accumulating debris, hunching over my computer, and making list after list trying to corral the messiness of life into some semblance of black and white, shoulders tight with worry and anxiety and all the things that come with staving off the bad things of the future. I can feel the banked fire in my lower back. It doesn't hurt, not yet, never during the day. But the seeds of it are being planted in the creases of my muscles. 

Still, it's easy to ignore for now, to mark it low priority on the constant triage of my to-dos. Each day is a constant exercise of procrastination, a series of decisions about which tasks can be put off just a little longer. My limited hoard of time, energy, attention, and care are doled out speck by speck. Yet, it is still not enough.

There are benefits to being able to work from home while taking care of my daughter: the money I save from childcare expenses, the precious time I’m able to spend in my daughter’s early years, having the option of wearing pajamas most of the day unless there’s a video call. But most days, it’s a delicate and guilt-ridden balance of work deadlines competing with my daughter’s needs and the never-ending cycle of household chores. 

It’s a moment of me replying to a work email on my phone while preparing lunch for my daughter (with a mental note to add bread and ham to my phone’s shopping list once I finish the email) as the laundry machine runs in the background and seeing my husband’s text pop up asking where the paperwork for the car’s smog check is and remembering that I have to do the household budget in a few days. 

I'm a Chinese acrobat spinning plates on top of sticks, adding one more, one more, until I run out of spare limbs. I consider whether it’s possible to spin plates on top of my head.

My daughter holds up a board book or raises her hands to play a game of peekaboo. And I find myself mentally recalculating what can be pushed back a little more so I can spend these fleeting moments with her.

My daughter likes to play peekaboo by covering only one eye, the other eye watching to see what I do, waiting until I turn my head away with a smile and say to the empty air, "Where are you? Where did you go?" She flings her hands away. I whip my head back, "There you are!" while she peals with laughter. She delights in this affirmation of her existence, that I see and acknowledge her. In that moment, only she exists in my eyes.

“Up,” she says.

 I bend my knees (always lift with the knees) and heft her upright, automatically settling her on her usual spot on my hip. She kisses my shoulder. I file that memory away along with the hundreds before it. She wiggles, and my arms strain under her weight. My knees bend as I set her back down. She wobbles. Then looks back at me.

“Up,” she demands. My knees start to ache.

Sometimes, it feels like existing as a woman is an exercise in adjusting to pain. From that first time I bump my head or roll off the couch as a baby and learn what pain means, the bruised knees and scratched elbows of childhood, to the achy lumps on my chest that become breasts followed by my first menstrual cramps. I've knelt in front of the toilet, my throat scraped bleeding-raw from unrelenting "morning" sickness, my stomach spasming, wanting to expel something but having nothing left to give. I remember the hot tight undulating waves of labor pains, and then the bloody throbbing sleep-deprived recovery afterwards.Tension headaches shoot up from the base of my neck on a regular basis, along with the twinges in my knuckles and wrist while I work as my daughter is napping interspersed with the bone-deep soreness of my feet after a long day in high heels for the irregular times I need to look professional at the office.

Each time I breathe through it.

"Stand back up," my dad used to say after a fall from my bicycle. "You're ok."

And I tell myself the same thing each time, "You're ok. This is just a normal part of life."

I adjust to each new pain, each new inconvenience that become rituals embedded into daily life, like a beloved beater car that has a trunk that must be unlocked a certain way so that it'll close again.

But there’s just something about this back pain I can’t push through or ignore. 

Sometimes, I think of my daughter, wanting to be reaffirmed, to exist in my conscious world. Perhaps this pain is the same, forcing me to stop for however long it remains. I can't relegate it to the bottom of my ever-lengthening to-do list. 

While my whole world is consumed with this pain, I have no other alternative but to concentrate on myself, on the mechanisms of my body. To realize that I exist, not as an extension of my relationships with others nor as an executor of responsibilities, but as a singular entity.

At least that's what I tell myself in the hushed darkness while I wait for its tight embrace to loosen enough for sleep.

Guest essay written by Christina Tang-Bernas. Christina has been published in Soft Cartel, DNA Magazine, and Brevity Magazine. When she isn’t writing, she engages a different part of her literary brain by editing engineering journals and academic manuscripts. Learn more on her website.