TUCSON, MAY 2020, 95°
QUARANTINE WEEK 9, GESTATIONAL WEEK 26
As spring stretches toward summer and I grow more and more pregnant, new discomforts appear in my body: deep aching throbs in the creases of my hips, hot acid churning in my stomach, tenderness in the large erector muscles of my lower back. They are human pains—normal human pains. Small and contained and knowable, pains that can be described and ignored, pains that can be taken to bed. My body is free, for now at least, of the kinds of pains I used to inflict on myself: hot and searing, fundamentally violent even when they were slow and silent, chaotic in sensation and difficult to distill into words.
I used to hurt myself so much in private that my relationship with myself became a cave of pain, interchanging mental anguish with the harsh stabs of neglect, abuse, and deterioration. Not until my body became a vessel to care for another human did I begin to understand the depths of how terribly I have cared for it, and for myself.
When I was training for marathons I thought of running first thing upon awakening. How many miles? Which route? Would I eat? If so, what and when? Would I allow myself any breaks? I thought, too, of running when I creaked into bed at night with a round swelling of self-satisfaction if I went far enough and fast enough, the sour clang of self-loathing if I did not. And if I skipped my run altogether? For that I would earn a degree of hate for myself I have never experienced for another person, feeling undeserving of my existence and choked by a deep fast gloom that occupied all of the horizon.
I don’t run anymore, not now at least. N and I ran some when we first met, quick shirtless miles looping around the streets of our neighborhood and the dusty snaking trails in the hills west of town. I loved running with him—it is not his sport and never really was, but he did it with me, often better than me, his bare sunbrowned back ahead of me on the trail blocking the glare from my eyes, his strong legs moving with patience and efficiency, his stride steady and free of the erratic accelerations and decelerations that mark mine, his footfalls sounding like unshod horses. We would hug, sweaty, as soon as we stopped, our bodies hot and slick and sometimes heaving. We tried to enter the New York City marathon together, even though he’s never run farther than seven miles and I was once firmly convinced I would never want to run a marathon with another person. It felt like an intrusion of the best kind, our running together, taking a thing I had initially thought was about liberation, but that turned out to also really be about self-abuse, and bringing it into the light, a thing to share. Running didn’t mean so much with him—it didn’t mean I was or was not valid as a person, or that my body was or wasn’t acceptable or that I did or did not deserve food and sleep and rest. Running was just moving our bodies.
It started to feel heavy and awkward to run about halfway through my pregnancy, but I kept trying for a while. One afternoon early into quarantine, hiking on a trail east of town where we went to escape the confinement of the apartment, I felt so moved by the air on my skin and the beckoning path in front of us that I looked at N and asked Do you want to? He looked at me and said Sure, and I pulled my shirt off, wrapped it around my wrist, and broke into a trot. It was briefly thrilling to be moving faster than a walk. My legs felt strong. Nothing hurt. But after just a few minutes I was so out of breath that I had to stop. It felt like my lungs were trying to expand but were being held in a vise. Pulling the thick elastic band of my sports bra away from my sternum, I sucked in air and gestured wildly at N. Can you cut this? I can’t breathe. He steadied me at the edge of the trail, took his knife out, and pulled the band away from my back. Are you sure? It’s going to be ruined. I didn’t care. As soon as he sliced through the band, leaving me with just the looser top fabric intact, I felt normal, my lungs, unfettered. We ran the rest of the trail, me gulping big heaving mouthfuls of air with the thirst of the dehydrated, my feet moving faster than they had in months, dusty pebbles spraying from the soles of our shoes.
When we got home, I pulled the bra off and took a good look at it. I didn’t understand why it had gotten so tight—my breasts had grown a lot, yes, but the band that was compressing me into hyperventilation fit below them, over my ribcage. I went to the mirror in the bathroom, to inspect myself and see if somehow my ribs had become covered in a new layer of flesh, but no, there they were, protruding visibly as they always have. On a hunch I pulled out a soft tape measure and measured their circumference. This is a measurement anyone who wears a bra knows offhand—it’s the “34” in “34C.” Mine had always been 30 inches until I started weightlifting and my lats got strong—since then, 32 inches. The tape measure read 35. I smoothed it out and checked again, certain it had been twisted, but again it read 35. I felt all along my ribcage, probing for pockets of excess skin or fat, but there were none. If anything, the skin felt spread very thin, the way chicken skin stretches over the knobby bones of the wings.
On the internet, I learned that my ribs had expanded—that they had done so to make room for my organs, which were being squashed up into the crawl spaces of my abdomen to make room for my growing uterus, placenta, and baby. I learned, too, that my uterus was likely pressing on my diaphragm, making it impossible to get a full deep breath. Hence the gulping, the thirsty-for-air feeling. I found this information oddly stunning—that I could grow and spread so much without feeling it happen, that only a garment clued me in to these measurable changes in my body.
Now that I am in my sixth month of pregnancy, it feels distinctly shitty to run. I lose my breath almost immediately and struggle to regain it even at a very slow pace. I think it is not great for my baby for me to be so out of breath, so I take breaks, which feels oddly fine. This is a body I can listen to, now. This is a body that can speak its needs. After even a short jog I feel a prickly cramping weight in my abdomen and pelvic floor for hours, as if my bladder has been punched and pummeled, which in some ways it has been. I watch, on the internet, equally pregnant women working out much harder than I am working out and I feel mild anxiety that I am letting my fitness go, that I am getting weak, that I need to push harder, but the thought passes every time.
I ask N if I am being lazy, if I’m losing my grip on my strength and conditioning. I trust him as my coach not to lie to me. I trust him. He tells me that I am fine, that I am fit, that it is okay to hear my body and be easy sometimes and that fitness doesn’t vanish as if it never existed, not this fast anyway. He tells me, though not in these exact words, that my body is good enough and strong enough and I am working hard enough. He tells me, though not in these exact words, that I am enough.
Once a week I drive twelve miles north to the twenty acres of desert land where N’s mom lives. I swim in the pool with N and his three-year-old son, trying to stay close to this little boy despite the complicated logistics of a rapidly blending family in a pandemic quarantine. N’s mom makes us brunch and it is in many ways the highlight of my week, the only moment of family or community that exists outside of the internet during my quarantine. His mom is wonderful—warm and kind and honest—and I understand, when I am with her, some of how he came to be so good.
On my drive up I pass the same woman every time, running. It is usually about ten in the morning, the sun hot and high and only getting hotter and higher, the temperature edging close to one hundred degrees, the UV searing. This is death heat, hell heat, punishment. Everyone sane is indoors or by a pool. But this woman, she runs, her spindly limbs pushing through the blanket of heat, her visored face smeared with white zinc. I know her. I see her. I have been her. I suspect that she has a comfortable home she could be sitting in, that she is out here for bad reasons, hateful reasons, that she does not feel like enough until and unless she pounds out these hot awful miles, that they are the only things that make her feel alive and also that they are absolutely wrecking her body, that she creaks and aches and crunches, that she sits in the bath so long the water goes cold trying to eke as many moments of relief as she can out of the tub. I feel, every time I pass her, deep gratitude that I do not have to do that today, that I can sit by the pool and eat eggs and avocado and feel my baby wriggle around and hate myself in a small enough proportion that I can hold it in my hand, crumple it like paper, and toss it aside to be dealt with another day.