Touched

Eva is all wonder and curiosity these days. Touching, grabbing, gumming, and inspecting the world before her. Earlier this week as I was holding her she reached out and felt my face for the first time. Staring in awe as she touched my lips, felt my cheeks, and grabbed my nose. I quickly slapped her hand away and told her not to invade Mommy's personal space. Just Kidding. Who do you think I am? It was actually my favorite moment of the week, watching her smile with delight as my lips puckered and kissed her little fingers.

It is funny how weird adults can be about touching when it is so natural for children. Adam and I cashed in on a gift certificate we had for two massages this weekend. My incredible parents came down from LA to watch Eva while Adam and I had an informal day retreat. We spent the morning journaling and talking through our priorities, values, and long-term desires. Over lunch we talked through our weekly schedule (I'm supposed to be running now on Mon, Wed, and Sat mornings... Laundry and blog updates on Sunday evenings...And an daily bedtime of 10:30....let's see how long this lasts.) After lunch... massages.

Now we got the gift certificate for the massages through groupon.com (A daily email with one killer deal on something in your town.) Our deal was for two massages at a massage therapy school in Pacific Beach for the price of one. Great deal... until you drive up and park off Garnet and remember that parts of PB smell like left over spring break and make you want to avoid touching anything. The outside of the building was dirty and faded. Adam and I spooked ourselves out walking up the dark staircase to the school. I felt like I was in an abandoned building from a Scooby Doo episode. But we got inside and the place was clean, definitely odd, but decent. And as I told Adam earlier, "A massage is a massage, even if its from a toothless meth lady."

Luckily my masseuse was less the toothless-meth type and more the patchouli-I-rode-my-bike-here-and-got-a-deal-on-these-sensible-brown-knit-pants-at-a-thrift-store-in-1998 type. The massage was great, despite the fact that I was creeped out that she had a back pack and a duffle bag sitting on the floor of the massage room. And despite the fact that for the first 20 minutes I kept obsessing over what I would do if I got a massage from someone with a wart on their hand. Now she didn't have any warts. (I inspected her hands as soon as the horrid thought popped in my head.) But even though I was in the clear, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I finally had to give myself a serious lecture to snap out of it or I knew I would ruin the whole experience. In the end I left relaxed, refreshed, and grateful.

I remember my intense and passionate modern dance teacher in college required all the students to get massages as part of their grade in the class. She also would come around during class and touch each of us on the face as we were warming up. She felt strongly that human touch was essential to health and to being a dancer or any kind of artist. People that are held and touched more as children are 75% less likely to end up in jail. I actually just made that statistic up, but I bet something like that is true. Being touched lets us know we are okay. We are human. We are connected. So if you need some peace, go get a massage from patchouli-pants in PB, or go give someone a hug, or come over and visit and let Eva honk your nose.