May - Body full of stars: female rage and my passage into motherhood

Body Full of Stars

Copyright 2018 by Molly Caro May

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-61902-489-2

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

Jacket designed by Donna Cheng

Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For

Mare and Eula and our shared body

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation,

and that is an act of political warfare.

audre lorde

What we profoundly need are rituals that take into regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body.

louise erdrich

contents

~

~

The fracture appears. You fall to your knees and wonder: is it situational, historical, chemical, ancestral, physiological, mental? It may be all of these. It may be none. Is it just who I am? Well, it isnt you and it is you. It is an energy you are meeting. Maybe for the first time. Maybe for the thousandth time. But now in a new way. It has a message. It wants to tell you something important. The last thing you want to do is listen. You want out. Get me the hell out. And if you cant get out, you want it gone, exiled, extracted from your essence. However, thats the basic Physics 101 truth about energy. It cannot be destroyed. Yes, you are responsible for how you manage it. But you arent necessarily it. You are in relationship with it. You start to hear it, ask questions of it, even love it. This can be hard. This can also be easy. Then you ask it to reroute. Please and thank you. You are in a process of birthing some part of yourself. Your whole life is a series of births. We only learn and relearn this by living it.

Labor

____________________________

I wonder what the wind is bringing, I say.

Who knows? he answers, and grabs my hand. We are walking a long slow walk in late April. Snow edges around tamped-down grass. Small green buds have begun to surface. The wind almost blows my straw hat away and the moon was full last night. I have told my midwife about how it has always affected my cycles, but she says first babies often come two weeks late.

Well see.

Because it is five days before my due date and I can feel the new mother-me nearby. She speaks to me already. She will walk through the forest for hours with her newborn tucked against her breast. As years unfold, she will pass on some necessary truths: cross many borders, language matters, dont forget to talk to your own body. Maybe motherhood will give her a reason to become a great human.

We duck under some trees and I lurch back down the hill, one hand on my belly, one hand on Chriss shoulder. A few weeks ago, at my yearly haircut, the same two-inch trim because Ive never adventured much with my brown locks or my physical presentation, I told my tattooed hairdresser that my husband had started to go gray, a remarkable even blend with his dark, and she said, Well, what youve got on your hands now is a salt-and -pepper fox.

And shes right, only, he is, of course, more than that.

Weve been together for thirteen years and, despite our recent murky distance, he still does it for me on all levels.

When we reach flat ground, a great blue whale urge to rest comes over me. I curl up on the bed. Chris stays outdoors in the wintery mix of spring and rearranges rocks from our garden into a pile for a different garden. Ive canceled all my plans for the next few days. My friends near and far know Ive entered what I call the cave. My mother walks in from her house next door to where we are living, in her guesthouse, and smiles at me. We are all waiting.

How are you, sweetheart? she asks.

Good, slow, ready. But this babe might wait until May.

Well see, she says. Im making a smoothie, would you like some?

Sure, I say, thanks, and I watch my graceful mother walk out the door. She lived across the globe, away from her community, when she gave birth to me. As afternoon sun streaks through the window, I scroll through boy names on the phone. Hard to find one we like. We never had an ultrasound but my intuition knows this babe is a boy. We may never get to use the girl name we chose. I glance out the window and whisper it aloud anyway. Then my bladder calls out.

Its hard to remember what it felt like to inhabit a non-pregnant body. I barrel-roll off the bed and stand up. Pop. Water starts to spill from between my legs. It is clear but pale green. I freeze, as if any more movement will cause a baby to drop from between my legs. Drums pound in my chest. What do I do now? My mother walks back in with my tiger dog Bru.

I think my water just broke, I stutter.

Looks like it, she says, and for a moment we look down, then a long pause, even Bru investigates. She has told me what her mother told her. My body will know what to do. It is a natural process. Ive spent most my life in an intense conversation with my bodythis will be one more part of that.

Water broke.

Water broke.

Water broken.

What does that even mean?

We stare as it pools on the concrete floor.

~

I come from brothersso do my mother, my father, my husband, his mother, and his father. We have only brothers. There are no sisters and no girls, other than the ones who brought the boys into the world. I didnt care about the sex of my baby. Even so I dreamt of my son riding in a lime-green backpack, and of losing him, leaving him somewhere, and the panic. Did he know what a crazy lady his mother had become while he was in utero? At six weeks pregnant, I had perched on a chair in the office of my doctor and friend Holcomb.

How do you feelany nausea? she asked.

Not a bit. I feel great, excited, I beamed as my hand fluttered over a flat belly. My mother had only one whiff of nausea during her three pregnancies, so the forecast looked good for me. The next week, though, my stomach turned. I began to vomit into toilets, mason jars while driving, bushes behind the hardware store, kitchen bowls, snow, and my own lap. Multiple times a day. None of this is unusual. But it didnt go away after the first trimester. It tapered but stayed my whole pregnancy. My baby was grown on chicken, whole milk yogurt, and oatmeal. I ate nothing green. I took no prenatal vitamins. I pressed my face into grass to get away from offending smells: toast, coffee, forest fires. Holcomb was also pregnant, a month behind me. Her nausea never shifted into vomiting. She explained she had to hold it down, just could not let that lid off.

But my lid had blown off.

Part of me knew it was an initiationto what though, I wasnt sure yet.

Even daily body maintenance became impossible. I stopped brushing my hair or wearing sunscreen. Someone told me metal near my body was bad, so I cut one underwire out of my bra, forgot about the other, and walked around with uneven breasts for months without realizing it. My exuberance about life would kick in from time to time. Id always been able to get up and try again. But then something would backfire, like moving too fast too wide and long on cross-country skis and ending up at a chiropractors office with seized muscles and ligaments around my pelvis.