Becoming hydrated.

Starting with 2 liters. Increasing my bathroom visits like crazy. I can actually start to feel the hydration under my skin like when they hook you up to IV and you feel the cool liquid start to absorb inside of you.

It feels like a thousand breaths I had forgotten to take. I think I am smiling more.

It feels like a return to a body that understood how to be nourished.

Dehydration was a life-line. A bladder that stopped working during a time in my life that was an emotional trauma, although a bladder that never really could hold much, even as a young girl.

When I met my husband 20 years ago, one of the first things I asked him to promise me was if we were ever in a car together and I needed to pee, that he would pull over as soon as he could. He agreed and always has. The little girl quite afraid of her bladder.

A bladder that in 2000 worsened after a surgery for a miscarriage. Urgency increased, it was constant.

And so my bladder wasn't working. So I stopped drinking water. I drank herbal tea and my morning decaf. I would have wine. But water. Water goes right through me. Bathroom becoming a full time job. I didn't have time. While I always have a mug of something in my hands I rarely ever finish any of them. Tea gets dumped out, coffee goes cold. (I usually finish the wine!)

If I held back my water I still over used the bathroom but the sense of constant urgency wasn't there.

The urgency is fear. Fear wasn't where I wanted to land.

Becoming hydrated was a huge decision. I am day 5. I feel fucking amazing. I look in the mirror and I feel like I am glowing. Dreams are full of water and waves and movement that only water can bring.

It came with the shift in my life that I set up over these next 6 months. Less stress, less computer and more movement. My body and I are falling back in love.

She was so desperately thirsty.

Each day I flow and sweat through yoga, I drink water, I take a nap. (I know. I nap.) Becoming hydrated comes with a practice far beyond water. Taking the kids out the other day to the mall for Pokemon cards I needed to go twice in a short amount of time. I yielded to the bathroom stops. It was fine. I was fine. I drank more water.

I had become so swollen and insatiable for salt. My rings didn't fit. My body was crying out for me to move through the fear of the urgency. I used to joke that I wished I could just be hooked up to an IV once a day, I was so terrified of those glasses of water.

Simple things we take for granted. Becoming hydrated.

So I will be the one in the restaurant that goes to the bathroom many times. I will be the one who has to time her long walks so they happen during a water break. I will be the one who trusts her bladder enough to hold her hydration.

And so I will drink. Because I am so, so thirsty.