Tiny Hands and the Mothership

Last year I took my first solo trip with my only child. I had to go to central Texas for work, and it was her spring break from school. The timing seemed right for an adventure.

We were there for a meeting of network weavers, where the goal was to articulate and visualize the ripple effects of our collective efforts over the last few years. There were many children at this gathering because if you invite parents then you must invite their children. Children, with their spontaneity and curiosity and ability to notice the tiniest details, should really come to more meetings - especially meetings of social movements.

I was already looking forward to the next opportunity to travel with her and bring her into more social movement spaces, to let her shape the work of the world she is going to inherit.

Then, there was a storm.

It started as a warning: dark clouds and ominous radar readings. As I pulled my rental car into the parking garage at the Austin airport, I got a text from the airline: YOUR FLIGHT HAS BEEN CANCELLED. Within the next hour, I would learn that there were no flights going to Kansas City (or anywhere else I’d want to go) for two freaking days.

My daughter sat quietly in the backseat while I tried not to lose it, and my mind flooded with panicked thoughts. My entire body was seized up with feelings of anger, worry, and an overwhelming urge to go hide in a corner or maybe punch someone in the nose. But there was no one to fight, and clearly nowhere to fly.

My assistant helped us get rebooked flights, an extended car rental, and a place to stay on Congress Street. We stopped for groceries and takeout, and just as we pulled into the parking lot of the apartment complex where we were staying, the storm began.

Fat drops of rain landed on our car, falling from an impossibly dark afternoon sky. I knew that any minute the sky would open up and figured I’d have one good chance to get my luggage, my work bag, a sack of groceries, $80 worth of Chinese takeout, a 5-year-old, and her stuffed bunny from the parking lot to our apartment. We loaded up and started walking through sheets of rain toward the front door.

In the cold and chaotic wetness, I felt it. Her little warm hand found the top of my thigh.

That touch was a lightning bolt. It jolted me.

I am her person. Her home base, her safe haven. She was touching down on the mothership, an alien in unfamiliar territory, anchored in for the ride.

It reminded me of another time in my life when I felt that jolt on the regular: the weeks and months after she was born. In those days I was “touched out”, which I felt often and rarely said out loud, choosing instead a kind of dissociation to endure the seemingly endless encounters: A gummy mouth on my breast. Warm tears and spit up streaming down my back. A tiny foot pushing into my belly as we slept. Each touch so shockingly intense because it reminded me of who I am to her: the mothership, the safe haven, the secure base.

No one to fight, nowhere to fly. Only presence, patience, and courage.

These days, I’m realizing how important the touch is for presence, patience, and courage to show up and cut through the chaos of living in this world. I’m thinking about all of the people who would love to be “touched out” or touched at all. So many experience “skin hunger”, which is one of those phrases to me that is as devastating as the phenomenon it describes.

The benefits of healthy, consensual touch include: slowing the nervous system and helping to reduce stress, heart rate, and blood pressure. Touch helps you to focus. It coaxes your sympathetic nervous system out of fight or flight mode and into some kind of certainty that you will be okay because someone else is here. To be without human touch is to drown or be washed away by the storms. Tragic.

Here’s the thing: we are feeling beings who have been taught that we are thinking beings. Our feelings have so much information to share with us and yet we’re constantly looking for ways to logic ourselves into and out of our experiences.

That’s not the only way, my friends. Give the body the attention it wants and deserves, and it will teach you how to feel your way in the world.

Here are a few things this eager student of the body is learning:

To start, I have been slowly digesting My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem for the better part of two years. The first time I read it, just the forward and the first few pages of chapter one, my body was overcome: deep tremors and constriction from head to toe, like I had just run really fast and far and was finally able to pause and reckon with what had been chasing me. I wasn’t sure what was happening or why, I just knew how it made me feel. The brilliance of Resmaa’s book is that it actually gives me words to explain to myself what was happening. More importantly, it gives me tools to help me settle this body that remembers things that happened to me when I was a child, when my mother was a teenager, when my grandmother was a young woman in the Jim Crow South, when our ancestors were captured from their homeland and dispossessed of their identity and enslaved.

Then, there’s a deep well of theory and empirical knowledge about this thing in our bodies called the vagus nerve, which is essentially the body’s own version of a mothership. It runs from the amygdala - the part of the brain that activates us into fight or flight and connects to the throat (where we speak our truth), the gut (where our bodies process a bunch of stuff from the outside world), and several other major organs. The vagus nerve takes messages to and from the amygdala to the rest of our nervous system. The nerves on our skin have conspired with mechanosensory neurons (“touch receptors”) so that when the skin receives a message from the outside world (like a touch from another person), there’s a literal electric reaction that tells the rest of the body to PAY ATTENTION.

Her touch was a lightning bolt. It jolted me.

Last one: touch is one of the body’s most ubiquitous methods for storing memory, adaptation, and emotional information. The body remembers. As Resmaa writes: “Events don’t just happen. We experience them in our bodies, which means we need to metabolize them in our bodies as well.” Basically, when I was white-knuckling my way through post-partum depression, some trauma got stored in my body. But that was a different time, one that I survived, so I know I’m equipped to handle being stranded in Texas with a kid. That same tiny hand has touched this very same skin so many times that the message was crystal clear: “Be here, my dear. You got this.”

If each of us received a healthy dose of consensual touch each day, I’m guessing the chaos of this world would begin to recede. Our current public health crisis of loneliness (which, according to the U.S. Surgeon General, is as unhealthy for the body as smoking cigarettes) makes me want to prescribe a daily hug to everyone who needs and wants it.