Miss Knobbly Knees
This morning in my dance practice my knees were very sore. As I have been feeling into them over the past few months, I just took my awareness into them, moving with warming and feeling what was happening .
I moved from the mental physical place of trying to move to figure out the what and where and how, to one in which I just softened into the experience of it as it was.
All of a sudden I remembered myself as a child sitting in the back seat of our car and looking at my best friends beautiful knobbly knees. Mine seemed fat pocketed and flabby and I asked my mum why we had such different knees. I was simply curious. She snapped at me about how my friends knees were knobbly because she wasn’t fat. I felt severely slapped in my psyche and body.
Now as an adult, moving in my dance, I understand my mothers own self hatred spat out at me and I feel the innocence of the child I was. I feel the pain of separation in the moment in which my mum couldn’t feel what her own body produced in giving me my beautiful flabby knees. I feel my gran who hasn’t walked much beyond 10 metres at a time, for the past 40 years. Her knees are entirely unacknowledged as well.
So I dance for all of our lineage of women who carry each others cellular genetics and memories. The puzzle of why a 38 year old women has such painful knees is no longer a mystery to me in these moments. Our own and others wounds settle in our being and I find the place of my own internal mother and God that can simply love these crippled little knobby things that carry me through everything. I can love them and fold them into my being with a very gentle way. The soft underbelly of the she animal begins to show herself.
I continue to move in this place - the women of my family let their knees breathe their tears and open as a painful blissful moment in time.