there's a hole in my bucket

When I was in my thirties I had three kids relatively close together.  They were all good-sized kids: 8 lbs 10 ounces each for the first two, and nine-and-a-half pounds for the third. That's a lot of baby for a person my size to carry (I'm 5'5" but most of it is leg. I've got a short torso) and I ended up with damage to my abdominal wall in the form of a sizeable diastasis.  It's a separation between the two major muscles of the abdomen, and the only reason it's not a true hernia is because of faschia covering the gap. I put up this picture right before I had surgery for it.

Yick, right?  I couldn't afford a tummy-tuck to repair the muscles, so the NHS put in mesh. This is a patch over the hole.  I have better functioning of my abdominals than before, but there's still a sensation of a missing piece.

It's an odd feeling, because it's right in the center of my body.  The abdominals are essential for coupling forces between the legs and the arms. For most normal activity it's not noticeable, but when I have to make an awkward stretch or reach and I go to use those muscles, I get zero. It's a feeling of reaching into empty space, looking for a step that isn't there. 

Everything I do has to work around the hole.

I'm up in the middle of the night for the second night running, and I'm in that state of not being functional enough to really get anything done but not being able to sleep, either.  And I'm thinking about work.

There are two things going on with me right now.  One, I'm trying to write something that's making me feel like a fool on a daily basis.  Two, I'm studying for the first time in many years. By going back to mathematics I feel like I'm addressing the intellectual hole in the middle of me.  

I have felt for a long time like something is missing, incomplete, in my ablility to perceive.  I've worked around it, just like I work around the abdominal defect--and this requires a certain creativity, I guess. But to address the hole in action on an almost-daily basis involves recognising how little I have in the way of muscle, because when I reach for that mathematical thinking there's practically nothing there.  I'm repeatedly stressing this mental muscle to burnout point, crawling away, and then coming back for more.

I started this course with the OU because I couldn't get a job as an English teacher without British qualifications, and I didn't think I'd find work even if I picked up a PGCE in English.  So I decided to go in for physics 'for the bursary.'  A year into the preliminary coursework I'm realising that I really want this. It's an opportunity for me to fix the damned leaky bucket.

The exertion is waking up the dormant bits.  I'm aware of this inchoate...material that I have floating around in my headspace, waiting to get out.  I think its fundamental basis is probably musical; I don't know how to express it in narrative yet.  I know that when I was working in music, when I was 20, say, there were no issues about 'productivity' or 'goals' or 'professionalism'.  I'd have laughed at that. There was only intrinsic interest, the need to explore for its own sake. I grew like a weed during those times.

This mindset seems to be waking up, growling.  Maybe that's why I can't sleep.