Tender Body, Tender Heart

This month explores

Your body carried life. Your body carries this loss, and sometimes the memories of more than one season of loss. Both deserve gentleness. The aches that linger. The fullness that emptied. The milk that came when there was no baby to feed. The hormones shifting quietly under your skin like weather you cannot see. The first period after. Or the periods that followed, carrying memories you did not expect to feel again. The exhaustion that has nothing to do with sleep. The way your body sometimes feels unfamiliar now, carrying things nobody else can see. None of it is small. None of it is in your head. Bodies remember differently. Some carry one memory. Some carry many. Neither is too much. Your body is grieving in a language the world rarely teaches us to listen to. This month is an invitation to bring the same softness to your body that you would bring to a friend in pain. Not to fix it. Not to push it back into the shape it had before. Just to be with it. To say, quietly, even if you don't fully believe it yet: you did not fail me. You did your best. You are doing your best. Rest is not weakness. Eating something warm is not weakness. Crying in the shower is not weakness. Going to bed at 8 p.m. without explaining why is not weakness. Your body is not the enemy of your healing. It is part of it. It is the place your love lived. It is the place your love still lives, in ways seen and unseen. This month, let your body be a tender thing. Let it be held with the same tenderness you would offer the babies, dreams, and love your body has carried.