Amass

____________________________________

The nurse at the urology office is nice, super nice. Now that I understand the incontinence might be real, I’m trying to be an adult and gather data. In the tiny examination room, she chit-chatters and snakes a painful catheter up my urethra. My body retracts, suddenly remembers I had one at the end of Eula’s birth.

“Ow,” I say. “Ow, ow, ow, ow.”

It’s the only way I know how to say Please stop without being rude.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, and she pulls it out. “We can use a thinner one.”

After we sort out the catheter, she puts electrodes on my low hips, vagina, and anus and then hooks me up to a machine. She explains how to do a proper Kegel—imagine you are sucking a straw up your butt. This is useful information. I can do that. In my blue paper gown, I practice, and we watch the monitor together. The lines peak up and go down. We might be watching for an earthquake.

“Good job,” she says. “See, you’ve got some tone there.” She becomes my cheerleader but, since pregnancy, I don’t have much drive. I’m tired. I glance at my watch.

“Thank you for showing me this,” I laugh. “Now I really understand Kegels.”

We laugh together.

“Oh, I need to be home in half an hour to nurse my daughter,” I say as if I’ve just realized it, as if the thought of it isn’t the foreground to every minute of my day.

Once I’m dressed, we go over our findings. We’ve established that I have a low-grade cystocele (prolapse of the bladder) and rectocele (prolapse of the rectum). The word prolapse is familiar to me. One of my best friends has one from her first child’s birth. My mother has one. When I was in college, she told me about her upcoming surgery to fix the issue of a “bulge” protruding out of her vagina. I pretended not to be scared by this older-woman problem. She was never incontinent from it, though. A few years later, her rectocele relapsed. That’s the last I’d heard about it.

But what is the bulge? What is falling out of what? When the pelvic floor loses strength and suppleness, it can no longer hold the organs (uterus, bladder, rectum, and small bowel) in place. So one or many can get misaligned and fall into and bulge against the vaginal canal or anus. This creates pressure and discomfort. Sometimes an organ actually droops out of one of those openings. I’m not at that point. Thank goodness.

I learn the word prolapse means “to fall out of place.”

I try not to double down on the meaning.

“You know,” says the nurse, “we can try to fit you for a pessary. It will change your world.”

“What is it?”

“It’s like a diaphragm,” she says and pulls out a pamphlet to show me how it holds the cystocele in place so large amounts of urine don’t pour out of you due to impact, walking, any strenuous activity.

“I’m open to it.” I hesitate. “But I’m such a low-maintenance person, I don’t like extra things, or devices. I don’t know if it makes sense for me, and is it possible that it could prevent actual healing?”

“I think we should try it. You love to hike. You’ve said that’s really important to you. What can happen is a woman stops doing the things she loves because she is worried about peeing. And if she stops doing the things she loves, then she is missing a big part of who she is and that can lead to other issues. So let’s get you out hiking, and wearing your daughter, like you want to.”

“Okay,” I say, and smile.

I rush back home. When Eula latches to my breast, I wonder how it’s possible to be treated so kindly by someone and yet feel invaded, actually assaulted, by the process.

On our next visit, the nurse and I spend two hours together.

She helps me squat and put the latex cup inside my vagina. I’ve warmed to the idea of it. It could change my world. We jump up. I haven’t jumped since giving birth. I am sure I will split in half. But I don’t. One size is too big, the other too small, and by the end, my vagina feels sore, raw, done, done with this trying on. The nice nurse bends the office rules and lets me take both pessaries home. Try them out. Go on walks. Go wild, she tells me. Leap around. Bring the one that doesn’t work back. When she leans over paperwork to help me figure out how to make sure insurance pays for all these visits, I want to collapse in her kind lap.

Instead I utter Thank you, thank you, thank you until she tells me to stop.

“You’re such a beautiful young mother,” she says. “You shouldn’t have to deal with any of this.”

Is that what I am?

I don’t know what I am these days.

And, really, no one should have to deal with any of this.

“Let me know how it goes,” she says, and hands me the paper bag.

~

What I learn: Most women don’t know about the pelvic bowl. How is this possible? We use it all the time and have no idea we are using it. It is not part of our American education. We do not learn it in anatomy or sex ed classes. Gynecologists don’t talk about it unless something has gone wrong. Even birth classes only seem to mention it in passing: “Do a Kegel from time to time.” Our mothers don’t share it with us because no one shared it with them. No one knows. Or, no one speaks of it. I started to read about the pelvic bowl in my early thirties only because a friend gave me a book. It was a theory to me. I did a few visualizations. That was it. Pelvic-floor disorders are a huge unspoken global health problem for hundreds of millions of women around the world. In low-resource countries, women who experience prolonged obstructed labor end up with a fistula or hole between vagina and another organ, leading to fecal and/or urinary incontinence. Then, because of how they smell, these women are usually ostracized from their communities, seen as dirty, no longer accepted, no options at all.

So, women birth the next generation (if the baby lives) and then get ousted.

How is this okay?

Women’s pelvic health isn’t even a concept in most countries. In France, and other parts of Europe, though, women can go to postnatal vaginal toning class paid for by Social Security. I see a direct correlation between awareness and support for the pelvis and cultural body shame. Americans are behind. We recognize there is a problem, but our government sure isn’t going to pay for it. Private health insurance doesn’t either.

My American midwife was revolutionary for sending me to a specialist.

We should all be sent to specialists.

It should be a normalized regime during postpartum regardless of any birth complications.

Female anatomy, considered a nether region, has always been less studied. Pudenda means the external genital organs, especially those of the female. This Latin word means “shame.” Language reflects what we value and what we don’t. There is a mass disconnect from a part of us so essential to well-being. Our power source is on lockdown—a secret underused. What if, early on, girls learned about the pelvic bowl as a place to care for, a place to ask questions of?

I’m interested in body fluency.

Imagine if the world was made up of people fluent in their own bodies.

~

Now that Eula is no longer technically a newborn, are we no longer newborn into parenthood? I watch Chris swaddle her, tuck the muslin tight around her body, and coo into her ear. He seems generally unfazed. Lack of sleep puffs his eyes. But at night, he rises like a soldier on duty to change her diaper and place her back in the nook of my arm. He also isn’t lactating or going through a major hormonal change or healing process or recovery from pregnancy. But I can’t see that context yet. His ability to work with his hands translates into his new role as Papa.

He broke ground on our house the other day.

He plans to build it on his own, with occasional help from his brother or the hiring of a carpenter friend. It’s a small house but a huge project. Though we’ve never operated with prescribed gender roles, we are now—woman cares for babe, man builds shelter. I recognize the pressure on him. He needs to be all of it. It’s a new masculine for our generation: listener, worker, active parent, part provider, sensitive, but strong still, whatever strong means. Next to our bed, there are stacks of books from the library: plumbing, slab floors, how to wire your house. He reads them by headlamp before bed, this man who teaches himself everything. I try to tell him as often as possible that he’s amazing. My mother calls him the absentminded professor. He’s a problem solver who can fix almost anything but sometimes forgets to turn off the stove, close the refrigerator, or put the top back on an ink pen.

Our first sex since birth was slow and exploratory. It broke a new sort of seal, but wasn’t painful at all. We both wondered whether orgasm would happen for me ever again. It wasn’t my usual swift river current. It didn’t narrow and widen. It didn’t leap over an edge. Instead, it was everywhere—an ocean of small waves, then a settle down and then more small waves and then settle and more small waves.

“Strange, almost too much to feel,” I whispered.

“Just feel into it,” he encouraged.

It gave me some hope.

One morning, I explain to Chris that neither pessary works.

“Well,” he says, “I think you have to treat healing your pelvic floor like it’s physical therapy.”

“Yeah, except it’s my vagina, my bladder. It’s demoralizing.”

“But it’s like any other part of the body, Molly,” he says. “You have to do exercises and then it’ll get better.”

I can’t be so practical right now.

I stomp away to the corner of our living space with Eula in my arms. He continues making his oatmeal. As usual, he retreats and avoids battle. I stare out the window and, within minutes, come upon the best analogy. I’ve got it. Won’t threaten him. He’ll understand this way.

“So,” I say with a neutral voice, turning back toward him, “I have a great way to explain it. Imagine you’ve been working hard to build a house for us, just like my body grew and brought Eula into the world for us. Well, what if you fell off the ladder and broke your leg, except somehow it’s a body part as intimate as your penis . . . and it got so bad there was a threat of amputation and you had this potentially permanent wound from your efforts to do something for our family. That would be hard. That’s how I feel right now.”

“Molly,” he says, almost laughs.

“What?”

“That doesn’t work. You can’t use that. There are many factors you aren’t considering in our conflict.”

My body snaps to attention, starts to plate itself with heavy armor. I’m supposed to take a deep breath in a moment like this but I forget what I’m supposed to do. We have been in a transition. Over a year ago, he told me there had never been a safe space in our marriage for him to have an opposite opinion or a voice. I listened, felt bad about myself, and then jumped into action. We had the noble and impossible intention of sorting out these issues before parenthood—meaning, during what would be my easy pregnancy. Despite a pregnancy that felt like an illness, I found bursts of energy for therapy and setting intentions. Meanwhile, part of me scratched at my insides, wanted to scream, and then did scream, “But what about me?” Got desperate. Wanted the occasional foot rub. Wanted attention. Wanted to be seen and soothed. Wanted him to stop drinking his beloved coffee because the smell of it made me vomit instantly and, when he did stop, I swore the smell was still lodged in his pores, demanded he take a shower before he came close to me. I craved closeness. I created isolation upon isolation. It’s hard, he told me, to move toward a person who snarls.

“I know. But this is a specific moment in time,” I say now, my shoulders braced. “Can’t you just hear me out on that example?”

“It is impossible for me to be compassionate when you are angry. This is an old pattern of ours and . . .” he says with a voice so sterile it might hurt me more than what he is actually saying, “I can’t give into it anymore.”

I set Eula down on the bed and pull sandals onto my feet.

I don’t know where I’m going but I’m leaving.

I don’t know how to leave with a baby in my arms.

“It would help me, one day, in some far distant future,” I say, and let him hear my choke, “. . . if you were capable of saying, I’m sorry this is so hard. Thank you for bringing our daughter into the world. It must be so hard to feel your body suffering.”

He doesn’t have time to answer because I’m out the door with Eula.

We nestle down by the creek. Maybe the rushing water will cure me of everything. We are less than fifty feet from the guesthouse. I don’t want my parents to see me. I don’t want him to find us. He won’t come looking anyway. Eula stares up at the flick of cottonwoods. There is so much green.

“Sometimes parents argue, sweets,” I say to her. “It’s okay.”

She just watches me, watches the world.

For over a decade, he has said yes to me.

Now he is saying no.

I understand the need for this change.

But the timing is awful. Didn’t we deal with all that drama during my pregnancy? Wasn’t I done with being the angry woman? Wasn’t he going to engage me more, be a better listener? The creek wants me to remember simplicity. It knows I know it has the answer. Rocks and stones gaze up at me like a group of wet people. Cold water numbs my feet, blurry over my sandals. I want to pout, even though everything about this creek moment reminds me about the great circle, the ebb, the flow, the let go, that everything does and will wash away and become something new. Don’t give me your truth right now, nature. I want to dwell on the fact that I’m starting to see men as less than.

I cannot distinguish between what irritation is appropriate for me to feel and not.

I am a walking contradiction.

The next day we get together with women from our birth class—The Milk Bar. We nurse our babes on couches and share. I want to be honest. I’m not interested in pretend or saving face. Ha, ha, I laugh about my incontinence because that’s all I can do. No one else is peeing on herself. Are we all in a private vortex? I take Eula’s tiny pants off to change her diaper and say, aloud, “Let’s show off these thighs.”

What kind of mother says that? Sometimes I don’t know why what comes out of my mouth comes out of my mouth. I am always the strange one. I was never going to be a mother who cared about being like other mothers.

My black-haired babe stares up at me.

We are here together, she tells me.

You and me. Do not worry.

I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to put me in charge here.

~

During the last incontinence visit my health insurance allows, the nice nurse seems puzzled the pessary didn’t work. I hope it’s all a mistake, wrong fit, but no. She confirms it must have to do with the structure of my anatomy. My body is one of those bodies that just wouldn’t accept it.

“There are other options,” she says.

“I’m not into intervention.”

“I know you aren’t, but I want you to know about all of them. You have to be done having children to have surgery . . .”

The word surgery catapults me to the moon. It is cold up here, a calm blackness, black upon black upon black sky, and, far away, small spots shimmer.

When I descend, she is explaining something about a sling or net.

“Is this common?” I interrupt her.

“What?”

“Incontinence for mothers my age.”

“Most of my patients are older women, but, remember, you had a vacuum delivery. That can change things. Some young moms leak when they sneeze, but you have a few extra challenges. You need to take your Kegels seriously.”

“Here,” she says, and hands me a huge catalogue for incontinence pads with images of elderly women wearing khakis and smiling in landscaped parks. “These pads are thicker. They’ll be better than any pad you can buy at the drug store.”

I nod.

Maybe distraction is the best tactic here, but I’m not made that way.

Some of us coast. Some of us excavate. Some of us do both. I had been a shiny metal excavator my entire life: unearthed every small seed and gnarled root and then assigned meaning to them. I will not take anything, especially a diagnosis, at face value. I have to believe my body can heal without a quick fix. There has to be a way to retrain my pelvic bowl, my ligaments, my whatever. There is some lesson for me here. I will develop endurance for it. I can do endurance.

Must operate this way.

I cannot be a young woman who wears pads made for an old woman.

I cannot turn toward that reality.

“Also,” she says with panda bear eyes, “something told me to give you this poem. It might help. It made me think of you. It’s called ‘She Let Go.’”

She puts the photocopy into my hand.

I give her a hug and thank her.

It takes effort to ignore the start of my plummet downward.

Outside the brick hospital building, magpies hop and squawk on a nearby sidewalk. They call and respond to the bright day. I pause, tuck the poem into my back pocket, and toss the pad catalog into a trash can.

~

My mom and I decide to take Eula to the farmer’s market. It will be one of my first outings to a public place at about two months postpartum. On the long drive across the valley, my child turns into a werewolf. She wails and her little mouth won’t stop. I lean over her in the backseat.

“It’s okay, sweet love,” I whisper, but all I’m really thinking is I don’t know if I can love you if you are like this all the time. It occurs to me she might be screaming because her mother can’t fully relax these days. I want to discard some rhetoric in one camp of parenting, the one I tend to follow. It says Eula is imprinting on my every momentary emotion.

Let’s go ahead and blame the mother. Tell the pregnant woman she must eat, feel, and birth perfectly for the well-being of the fetus. She inevitably fails at this but still holds out hope she will be a glowing mother of her baby. Then, at the peak of her sleep deprivation, possible vaginal collapse, physical depletion from nursing, and isolation from a partner who doesn’t “get it,” she gets a little angry at the world. But do not feel your anger, honey. Transmute it with breathing exercises and yoga you can’t do because you either can’t move that way anymore or there is no extra time. Become superhuman, even though no one is meant to be not human. Whatever you do, do not expose your dear baby to your darkness. You are not allowed to have darkness.

Bullshit.

Sounds like a military operation.

I want my daughter to know we all feel a range of emotions.

But I do believe she’s imprinting on me. I do.

The farmer’s market is packed and loud. So much kale, lettuce, so many bunches of radishes, so many people. People skip along, tasting, laughing, cash in hand. I stroll and hope I don’t see anyone I know. Eula nuzzles into my wrap but I’m not sure how long she’ll be quiet and content without me bouncing. My mother darts in and out of stands, filling her canvas bag with vegetables. She is an expert at efficiency. She is food as healing. She practices Ayurveda. Around her, I become more a girl, less a woman and less capable. Is it because she is so capable? This is the gold, a friend told me, to be living with my mother while becoming a mother. I know it’s true. I know this is how humans have lived for millennia. But I don’t want to lean on her too much.

Maybe it’s okay to be less capable.

She wants to get Korean food.

The line is long.

I tell her if Eula starts to cry I will walk back to the car and wait there.

I tell her if pee breaches my pad I will walk back to the car and wait there.

“Are people looking at me?” I ask her.

“No, why?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Are my pants see-through, did I already pee on them?” I whisper. “I feel like everyone is staring at me.”

“No, Moll,” she says. “You are just a beautiful woman walking with her newborn.” Some days I want to marry my mother.

~

At home, I borrow my mother’s Caroline Myss books. Mine are asleep in a cardboard box with my other books in storage. We have shared her work for years. My mother relates because Myss, like her, is a Catholic from Chicago. As a self-described medical intuitive and mystic, Myss is no-nonsense, direct, a kind bully.

“Your biography becomes your biology,” she writes.

I don’t need to be coerced into believing so.

It’s tricky, though. It’s almost offensive. It could border on self-blame. It puts illness right back into the person’s hands, encourages a deeper look. Chris always speaks up on this conversation; he says sometimes people get sick just because they get sick, it doesn’t have to be some trauma from childhood or some unreleased emotion. He recognizes the wormhole for people like me.

I agree and don’t agree with him.

I believe in agency.

In the early night hours of Eula’s sleep, I read and scribble notes in my journal. We have begun a slow dance—my health data and me. Sometimes I want to clutch it close and accept its flaws so we can move beyond with grace together. Other times, its stank breath makes me lean far back and avoid eye contact. But we can’t leave each other and so the push and pull unfolds. It is time, again, to become a geographer of my body. Isn’t it what I’ve always wanted?

Become both the traveler and the map.

Become both the traveler and the map.

It is the only way.

~

The early summer rain streaks the sky purple. Eula and I sit under a cottonwood tree by the creek. Leaves rustle. She smiles at me a thousand times, burrows into my chest, and falls asleep for two hours.

It’s never happened before—this easy sleep.

I want to be nothing but her mother. She has learned to fall asleep without motion. My energy rises. Everything will change for the better now. I don’t yet know that babies are like adults, full of moods and impermanent actions.

I’m so glad I eat two bars of chocolate.

Later that afternoon, Eula spits my nipple out. Over the bathroom sink, I hand-express it out, watch white beads of milk form on my nipple and drip down and away. Go away, chocolate. It takes trial and error to figure out what food passes through me and upsets her stomach.

At night, we draw our wool curtains, turn on ocean sounds, and put Eula to sleep in her co-sleeper next to our bed. Because the guesthouse is one room, we are held hostage by this rhythm. If we click on a stove to cook, she wakes up. If my toes crack, she rouses. Somehow she tolerates the sound of our quiet voices. We exist in whispered dark from eight o’clock onward.

My mother brings roast chicken and salad over to us for dinner.

Again.

My incontinence, though I haven’t fully shared the degree of it with my parents, has ratcheted me into a sort of invalid. I’m unable to do anything but care for Eula. Not cook. Not clean. Not even put a respectable outfit on my body. I eat crackers all day long. Some might call this a depression, but I don’t go there. During one of Eula’s short naps, I ate bread so quickly and spilled an entire bowl of olive oil on my computer and now one-third of the letters don’t work.

I have no idea what Chris eats.

“Here you go,” my mother says to us as we huddle together in the kitchen.

“Thank you so much,” I whisper, and continue to pace around, telling them both I need to tend to my eating habits, maybe this is step one of healing.

“Cooking has never been your favorite thing,” Chris says.

“That isn’t true. I spent a whole summer growing, harvesting, blanching, and freezing Swiss chard and kale.”

“I know,” he says, and plays it safe by saying nothing else. Everyone in this room knows food can be a complication for me. I grew and cared for all those vegetables but never ate any of them.

“Maybe I can help you stock your pantry,” my mom offers.

This is her domain. My cells are made of her green soup, her spicy rice dishes, her love put on the table for all of us. As a young woman, I made a choice to be less domestic and more intellectual: toast and salad all day long so my mind could explore. It never occurred to me that they could coexist. I don’t want to pass my food issues on to my daughter. Colorful food actually brings me deep satisfaction and joy. I have to change now. My mother rocks in the rattan bamboo chair and listens to me say nothing.

What is motherhood even?

I don’t want my mother’s exact version.

I want my own.

I stay awake that night. Flat on my back in bed, I watch the trees beyond our window reach up to a dark sky—one hand on my daughter to check her breath, another hand on my man to feel his chest rise and fall, my ears listen for my dog snoring beneath our bed. Then a great wave washes over me and we float on the sea and move together, and all because I am an octopus with a limb on everyone, my eyes wide now to the ceiling, to be sure of everyone, because someone has to be, because someone wants to be, and that someone now is me.

~

Sleep becomes a state of the past.

Chris reminds me that lack of sleep affects mood. I don’t have the presence of mind to connect that sleep deprivation also affects my ability to muster the gusto to heal myself.

I cannot sleep because I cannot stop listening to my daughter.

On the days Eula falls asleep under trees on my chest, I am a complete mother. But to walk with her on me for every nap hurts my pelvic floor. Usually I have to swaddle and sing and bounce her for an indoor nap. When she eventually goes down, I collapse in a chair to decide what to do with my time: change my pad, eat an entire container of dates, write emails, read a book from the stack, pick my new toe wart, stare at the wall, or do my Kegels. My Kegels come and go. They aren’t hard exercises. But I may as well be hauling my heart up a frozen mountain.

She never sleeps long. Half an hour max. On the rare day, she dozes for two hours and, despite my laments about no self-time, I spend those extra minutes sitting next to her, watching her sleep, willing her to wake up because I miss her.

~

What I learn: In pregnancy, you spend almost ten months opening your belly and pelvis. Afterward, they still feel open. Come back in; contract back in. For thousands of years, indigenous people have had traditions for helping a new mother seal her body back together and tone stretched abdominal muscles—sarashi in Japan, fajas in Latin American cultures, rebozos in Mexico, and the Malaysian Bengkung are some. Long strips of cloth are wound tightly around a woman’s midsection after birth. This is not cosmetic. This practice knits muscles back together (can heal a diastasis recti) and helps a woman feel emotionally contained again.

I am not indigenous to anywhere I can name. Neither are most of my people. My people have no taproot tradition around pregnancy, birth, or motherhood other than passing on tips about sleep and work-life balance. My people live in small houses with small nuclear families, almost never in a shared-housing situation. My people cannot walk down the road to the comfort of an old friend’s porch because my people don’t live where they grew up. My people usually don’t have time for a spontaneous conversation because there isn’t much spaciousness in life. They can’t linger much. They are scheduled down to the hour by work, family, and self-improvement, even when they freelance life. My people want to be good. They don’t want to get trapped or weighted down even though they sometimes are. My people are obsessed with finding balance, the very thing once embedded and foundational and therefore once not in need of a name. My people are aware of the rhythm they live by. They feel it’s necessary. They don’t want to be limited by old ways, though they recognize a loss. Maybe we respond to the needs of our era. Maybe we are all some form of the ouroboros—a snake on the grand chase for its own tail.

~

Almost every week, we have walked in the woods with Holcomb. Sometimes we meet at a gas station, put the babes in one car, and hope they don’t cry on the way to the trailhead—her daughter bleats like a lamb; mine wails like a banshee. When we hop out, the scent of living plants knocks me over backward, right into the skin of my old self. We enter the forest and bow. The forest bows back. It will all be okay. I know myself here among trees. But am I on the ground yet, after these months? Some part of me hovers, tethered still to that astral plane of labor and birth. Green cottonwoods and dark firs lean in and flutter, Hello.

“I love nature,” I say with no other vocabulary for what I mean.

“It’s essential,” she says back.

We walk and discuss.

What would it be like to keep on walking and never return to this mothering life?

What would it be like to be a father instead of a mother?

What would happen if our husbands could spend just one day in our bodies?

What would we give for a week of full nights of sleep? Really. Make a list.

What is going on?

What is going on?

Where is the tribe?

Why do people live so far away from each other?

How are we capable of so much love, it hurts almost, doesn’t it?

How many ounces come out when you pump? Does it even work?

Isn’t it brutal that we can’t eat the chocolate that soothes us because it upsets our daughters?

Do your dreams alarm you?

I make a conscious decision to ask Holcomb almost no questions about my body issues right now. She is my doctor and she’s on maternity leave. I don’t want to saturate our friendship or her postpartum time with work talk. She senses though and asks me questions. I give her the gist, downplay, and redirect. A few years ago, pre-babes, when she did her first women’s exam on me, she asked me to squeeze around her finger.

“Whoa,” she had said, “that might be the strongest vaginal tone I’ve ever felt.”

The irony.

We sit on twisted logs in shade to nurse our babes. Holcomb’s nipples are shredded from her daughter’s lip-tie; every single latch sends searing pain through her breast. But she is determined to continue and will. Most mamas would have stopped. I probably would have stopped. We wonder at our own woman-ness. She tells me she sneezed once and leaked and can’t believe that is a constant experience for me. We woman each other up as best we can.

We strap our daughters back into the front carriers.

Eula won’t face my chest and be legal according to the safety rules of carriers. My rebel child. I accommodate and flip her around so her eyes can steer out to the world. Face out. I hold the neck she can’t fully hold up yet and watch my feet as we continue.

Don’t fall.

Don’t fall over a root.

By the end of each walk, my legs are sticky with urine, despite my tactic to drink almost no water. The downhill makes it hard to avoid. It becomes a situation I start to accept and prepare for with a plastic sheet already placed on the driver’s seat. When we say goodbye to Holcomb in the hot dusty trailhead parking lot, I laugh about my wet pants, a mere annoyance.

I cannot let the shock in.

It would swamp me out of being able to drive my car straight on the road, arrive home, take my daughter out of her car seat, unpeel my clothes, rinse off in the shower, put her down for a nap with patience, do dishes, prepare for returning to writing work with clients, and try to be a decent partner to the man who made her with me.

~

But sometimes, at night, fear flaps awake in my chest again. Don’t be in denial. Don’t. I email my midwife to ask for a reference to a pelvic therapist, someone who can give me a range of concrete exercises and see me through to an end. I need to amass more information and prepare for some kind of future with it.

At the pelvic therapist’s office, I sit in my car and tell myself this is it. Get serious now. It’s like healing any other body part. Freedom will be delivered to me in a package of three to five exercises. I walk into the gym-type physical therapy place for the first time. Other people are here to tend to torn hamstrings and sprained ankles. Not vaginas. Maybe that normalizes it.

She is so perky. I get intimidated by blond perky people. Be open. Act open.

“Let’s go to the back room,” she says, and I follow her, stare at her tan legs, and start to make up all the reasons her life must be easy. By the time we get to The Back Room, I’ve coached myself down from acting like an insecure seventh grader.

She gives me a tampon-sized sensor and I joke that I don’t need to walk down the hallway to the bathroom to insert it. I’ll just do it here. I’m past the point of privacy. But when she breaks eye contact, I realize I’m breaking a rule and she’s uncomfortable.

When I return from the bathroom, the little monitor clues me in to how strong my pelvic-floor contractions are.

“Good job,” she says to me, as I lie on the massage table and watch green lines go up and down, another personal seismograph.

I start to like her. She’s here to help after all. I want to believe that someone who has never given birth or had pelvic-floor issues can help me with my pelvic floor. In theory, this should be easy to believe.

I come back once a week. My contractions improve slightly. But when they don’t improve for a few weeks and she seems aloof and sort of not in it anymore, I explain that I’m overwhelmed and sometimes I get angry about the whole thing and sabotage myself and don’t do my exercises at home, especially when I haven’t slept more than two hours at night. We are past her realm of expertise, but it doesn’t stop me from sharing. She can see the wild in my eyes, and I can see in her eyes that she has never experienced the wild for herself.

I know it’s not nice but I decide she’s too vanilla for me and I’m too volcanic for her. It’s the easiest feeling to feel in that moment. Chris will plant a gentle question: do you think you are sabotaging yourself even more by not going back? Nope. No more visits to the The Back Room for me.

~

Because I can no longer control my urine, I try to control the person who loves me the most. My mother tells me I’m a great mother one day. The next day, I rip her apart for her mothering of me. The smallest infractions create a tornado within me. I don’t know who I am.

“Eula sure does frown a lot,” she says as we stand in her kitchen.

“It’s not a frown, Mom, it’s a furrow of the brow,” I explain.

“Oh please, Molly.”

“Language matters,” I snap back. “I know you don’t think about language, but it does matter. Eula isn’t expressing distaste or upset with that look. It’s her look of curiosity. Chris does the same thing with his brow. It would be helpful if her family would actually take note of what she is trying to communicate.”

There is a deeper layer about me feeling unseen and unwitnessed when I tried to communicate as a girl. We don’t talk about that.

“Okay, whatever,” she says, and she sighs. “I’m sorry.”

My mother comes from the land of Deal-With-It. She spent her early motherhood schlepping three children (alone, usually) around the world, boiling drinking water, and negotiating for medicine in second-world countries without getting to process her feelings. I come from the privileged land of Question-It. Please put me in the murky water so I can know it and taste it and become more textured for it and push an edge so others can push the edge one day too. I don’t know where our territories overlap.

I also know how to deal.

I take Eula for the first time to one of my doctor’s visits. The flowing waterfall in the waiting room keeps her attention for our long wait. It’s my toe, some strange cyst/blister/wart thing that apparently comes with pregnancy. The dermatologist asks me how we want to do this.

“Just give me a sec,” I tell her, and I sit upright, in a half ab-crunch, to latch Eula onto my breast. I am proud for being so calm, for wearing a pad and not worrying about pee. When the needle goes into my foot, I gasp and squeeze her diapered bum and she smiles up at me.

The cauterizing takes longer.

The room smells of burnt skin.

“Do you smell your mama’s skin burning?” I ask Eula.

Later that night, we put Eula down, hook up the monitor, and walk from the dark guesthouse to a cabin full of light for dinner. I tell my family I want to wean Eula from the pacifier during her nap. My mother tells me not to fret.

“I’m not fretting,” I say.

“Yes, you are,” she says.

“No,” I counter, as my father and Chris scuttle to the other side of the room, “I’m paying attention to my child. I’m watching her spit her pacifier out routinely and making the assumption this means she might be done, so let me seize that moment. I’m actually super aware of her responses and setting intentions for how to move forward. And if you think I’m trying to control something, yes, I am. I’m trying to control some part of my chaotic life right now. I’m trying to prevent further disaster. I’m trying my best.”

I know I sound mean. I don’t care.

No one continues the conversation. It doesn’t elude me that I can express my rage here only because my family culture has created a safe space. My mother, if she had anger, never had that space herself. So few women do. My people have not shut my vocalization down. I can speak my truth to Chris because I know he won’t beat me or leave me if I do. This creates a watery moat of allowance around me. But that doesn’t make it fair for them. I know it’s not bad to feel what I feel. I will stand up for the importance of actually feeling it and expressing. But I recognize that my irritation is mostly misdirected; this compounds my remorse; this release in the wrong direction is hard for me to change in the moment, even when I try, because it begs to land somewhere and I don’t know where else it can land.

Loved ones surround me but I feel like an island, unsupported.

They are all against me.

They are all against me.

When I slink back to bed that evening, sobs move through my body. Chris spoons me. When he cannot settle me, he starts to climb onto me, to get close, as close as possible, as if his wife is a bull who has lost her compass. My mouth takes the shape Eula’s does when she cries. Because I feel tenderness for her in those moments, I am tender, for a moment, toward myself. It’s a strange new relationship.

~

My friends ask whether it was love at first sight. When the nurses took Eula from me, I followed her with my eyes but didn’t know this creature who had just slipped from my womb. I loved her in the way a young wolf loves her pups—heart kicks into instinct and she protects and nurtures without having known how to do so beforehand. It took us a few days to master our latch. I was her food. I wanted to be her food. We grew into a rhythm with each other, with her arm flung over my breast, her eyes closed, sometimes open and watching me. Any time I tried to remove her for any reason, she would ninja block me with her tiny hand.

Now we are old pros.

Eula makes a certain whimper, paws at me, and I lift or unbutton my shirt. She is still part of my body. We are of one body. My mother breastfed me for six weeks and then had to stop. I was losing weight. She couldn’t get the proper latch and no one showed her how to latch. The nurses also told her some women aren’t successful at it and didn’t encourage her to continue. I don’t think I knew this until recently. But it comes up often these days. She is reliving her early motherhood as she watches me live mine.

One of my mother’s close friends comes over.

We sit under cottonwoods for a splotch of shade on this bright summer day. These older women gurgle at Eula as she nurses.

“Look at her,” they both murmur.

“I know,” I say, and smile back.

I start to tell them about what I’ve recently learned about mother’s milk because it’s new to me. I never read books about it while pregnant and had rarely been around mothers and new babies.

“Mother’s milk is about way more than food. It’s about connection and safety and bonding. It’s obvious but isn’t that amazing?”

“Yeah,” my mother says, with sunscreen smeared and sweating in white lines down her face.

“Well,” she adds, “when we moved across the world, my milk dried up.”

It was the stress. She moved from Australia to the Dominican Republic when my younger brother was barely a month old. He went on formula too. She wishes someone had been around to encourage her to keep trying with my brother, with me.

Two opposing thoughts emerge for me.

She is a badass, far stronger than I will ever be.

She could have made an effort to find someone to help her.

“I feel grateful that it’s been so easy for us,” I say.

“Breastfeeding sets the tone for the relationship,” my mother’s friend adds. Maybe she is saying that to make me feel good, but I don’t like it. I think of all my friends who haven’t been able to nurse, and what I become is a woman with a sword ready to defend my mother.

I am starting to understand that what women say they do as mothers is a thing.

In that silent space between sentences, a bird lifts off a branch, a creek stone dislodges and rushes downstream, a coyote somewhere stalks across a field, and I can feel my mother feeling me and me feeling her and then almost at the same time, in one swell, we all say the same exact phrase, the only true phrase out there.

“But mothers do the best they can with what they have.”

~

In my mother’s bathroom, I find her Mason Pearson hairbrush. It is sleek and black. I’ve just taken a bath and she lounges in the living room with Eula. She has always told me that it’s the best brush—no hair snag, gentle, made from some amazing material. Yeah, whatever, Mom, I’ve thought. I don’t need a fancy hairbrush. I don’t need to pay that much for my hair. But now, standing naked on the wood floor, I want this brush. I want all of my mother’s beauty tips. Not because I fear I am aging but because she is aging. And I haven’t listened to anything. I haven’t listened to anything. Oh god, I haven’t listened to anything about anything from her.

~

“Remember when we went to church?” I say.

“Yeah,” my mother responds, wistful.

Really, my mother has been so motherly with me. She decided long ago that she would parent her children with discussion, instead of the dictatorship style her parents had used. Her mother had rarely expressed love with her. Because Pat-Pat had a long unspoken list of frustrations about what having four kids had prevented her from doing. Beneath the veneer of her life was anger, a whole lot of anger. Later, before she died, it was if her Alzheimer’s had softened her back, wiped away her memory, and given us her essence, a woman who cried and hugged us often. But in my childhood, she was not cuddly. She was a devoted grandmother who read me stories and laughed a big loud laugh. She praised me for doing my homework. In her presence, we always sensed that right and wrong were hard lines etched into concrete. She wore a gold cross around her neck. As a girl, I begged to watch her unscrew the small lid and open it to reveal the tiniest scroll and a piece of the Cross, the real Cross of Jesus.

I couldn’t get over that.

“It’s really the real Cross?” I would ask, and she laughed and told me yes as I inched closer and grazed my small hand against what looked like a grain of big sand.

“You can touch it,” she would say, knowing that we all want to touch a part of ancient history.

He had been so wounded and so strong.

For all the supposed sins of the body (sex, sex, masturbating, and sex), there was so much Body in the Catholic Church despite most religions’ distaste for the earthly body. We ate his body every Sunday. My mom and I would stand in church, holding hands, me a girl, she a woman, no inkling of the divine feminine, not yet at least.

What I am needing now is a sort of church.

My daughter is three months old.

Some days I don’t know what is up or down.

I can’t believe most women go back to full-time work at this point.

I don’t know what is happening.

My body has fallen apart.

~

The week of my birthday, in July, I want to destroy everything. My arms shake, shake, shake, accumulated energy, want to windmill them, see what happens. My strong creature jaw could bite through anything. I want to destroy my marriage. I want to destroy my husband, my parents, my health, my skin, the salad staring back at me, my hair, my dog, the fucking Oriental rug. I want to destroy myself. I spot a pair of my balled-up socks and want to hurl them against the wall. They are too soft. I need something hard. There is nothing hard anywhere. I don’t pause to wonder why the sudden surge. It came unannounced this time. It didn’t start with any person. The rage just showed up. I want to disassociate from it, remove it from my system. Not mine, not mine. I also justify its expression; of course I get to say and do whatever I want. Don’t hold me down. Don’t silence me. Get out of my way, everyone.

Somehow I don’t want to destroy Eula. I thank the moon for keeping her safe. I don’t feel safe from myself. At night, I thrash around in bed. I haven’t slept in weeks, months. I need to sleep. I can’t sleep.

“When’s the last time you meditated?” asks my mom.

“What kind of question is that?” I say.

“I want to destroy everything,” I tell my counselor, Janice, over the phone. She has known me and guided me on and off for eleven years, watched me evolve with my fear. I’m a shit-pile now, though. She can feel into most anything I am feeling, but she isn’t a mother to a child herself. How did I end up on the muddy opposite bank of a wide dark river from her? She calls out to me from across the abyss. I can’t hear what she is saying. I stare at the moon again. It tells me Eula is here for her own reasons, but also here to purify me.

“I know,” I yell, “I’ve already figured that out.”

A week later, blood.

My menses floods red out of me. Exactly a year ago, I bled for the last time before conception. When night falls, I grip my chest and feel a release, great tide flows away away away, and with it goes so much of the rage. I know my body is not supposed to be bleeding yet, not while nursing.

It’s probably a sign of something bad.

But I don’t care. I welcome the blood. I welcome coming back into a cycle.

~

What I learn: In ancient Greece, people used menstrual blood to fertilize fields. Thor, the Norse god, reached enlightenment by bathing in a river of menstrual blood. In Celtic Britain, a king could become divine if he drank “red mead” from the fairy queen Mab. That women could bleed without dying was magical—not as much to women, who knew it as a monthly experience, but to men, who could not bleed this way. The Babylonian word Sabbath comes from Sabat and means “heart rest”—it was considered a day of rest for everyone while the goddess Ishtar was menstruating. It was a time to restore. It was a retreat. It is often known as a blood mystery or blood bonding. Women themselves often went away during menses, not because they were considered impure, as is often thought in modern conversation. The separation from everydayness was an honoring of how the womb sloughs blood—lets go of grief for the woman and her community. She would enter a place of supreme internal darkness, often in the company of other women, and use her body’s wisdom to tend to the natural emotional upheaval that surfaces for any human.

I start to see an unexplored alchemy.

Most of my peers have grown up talking about the major inconvenience of periods. We even have birth control pills to eliminate bleeding altogether. I started to value my cycle in my late teens but never knew it could be a monthly flush and tool for deep release, for me, for others.

~

Okay, I must take real steps toward healing: more internal work, more kindness toward my mom, more self-care, and more sleep. Especially since I’m going back to part-time work in a month. Chris suggests that adding more pressure (or anything) may not be the best approach during this transition. I respond with apologies: “Thank you, babe, thank you. I’m sorry, I’ve felt so uncontrollable, I’m sorry for everything.” But it does require more effort to get Eula to sleep so that we can sleep. I want to be done with “working hard” on naps and I’ve only just started. Some of my friends had major sleep issues with their children and have told me that the earlier you corral the nap thing the better. I’ve let my fear be my guide.

We cover her co-sleeper with a tight gray blanket for naps. It’s the only way to darken the guesthouse completely during the day. My father teases that her bed looks like a sarcophagus. We have to hide the world from her, otherwise she finds a pattern—shadows, fan, window, blue checked blanket—and her eyes don’t close. Still so much bouncing required. I do what new mothers do and make it a positive. She must simply be off-the-charts visual. She won’t let any texture go by without a dialogue. Who wants a placid child anyway? I use the fact as currency to keep me functional. Every day I remind myself I’ve done well as a parent: shown her the dark green of a zucchini, smooched her belly a lot, laughed with her, held her against my breast, observed as best as I can.

When we go to our next Milk Bar gathering, I plan to ask about naps.

We never get to that conversation, though.

One woman mentions how her thighs rub together now.

“Me too,” sighs another woman.

“Me too,” sighs another woman from the hallway.

“I mean, whose thighs didn’t rub together pre-birth?” I laugh.

But no one laughs.

They go back to tending babies and I choose to hear what I think their silence says but really doesn’t: Mine didn’t, Mine didn’t, Mine didn’t.

“Well, mine did,” I say.

I have self-doubt around my legs. Have for a long stretch now. These days, they move like two logs. They keep me steady but barely hold up the heavy hammock between them. The only way to love my legs again is to let them out. They’ve been hidden. More love for my legs. More. My mom takes Eula for a few hours and I drive to Kohl’s, where I never shop because I never shop and because everything is made by child laborers. I tell myself this is okay; right now, it’s okay. My mission: shorts, maybe a skirt, though I’m not a skirt person. The mirrors must be slimming because I don’t think my legs look that bad. I leave with $132 worth of shorts, and one skort.

~

Part of my “more” is making space to go within every single day.

It happens once a week.

For one, I imagine a huge heavy yoke fastened around my hips, like a skirt with metal hanging from it. It weighs my pelvis down. It is knotted thousands of times at my belly button. This yoke can represent whatever holds you down. My women hold me up, but these days I make the yoke my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother, the women. I pretend to stand on a dock. I start to undo the knots, one by one. My face heats up and tears flow freely. I let it happen and lower the yoke down, the whole carcass of it, the part that hangs on my sacrum. Then I lift it and walk toward my mother and her mother and her mother and her mother and lay it at their feet.

“This is yours,” I say. “I don’t need it anymore.”

They don’t respond.

They vanish. Where have they gone; where is the yoke? Suddenly I want it back, to swing it over my shoulder, so I don’t lose them.

But, wait, pause, I feel light, consecrated. I dive off the dock backward into cool water and swim to an island. Alone. I am alone in the loneliness without my yoke. It’s an awful sick necessary feeling. Maybe my mother can give the yoke back to her mother, who can give it back to her mother, until we reach original woman, who will bury it in the dark, dank, deep earth.

We women carry each other—whether we want to or not, whether we plan to or not. Our legs carry the pelvis and carry us across the earth. If we stacked pelvis upon pelvis upon pelvis, would it become a backbone? Everyone originates in the pelvis. Do you know that, Eula? You were an egg inside me, who was an egg inside Mare, who was an egg inside Pat-Pat.

~

My women friends are far-flung. My cousin Lauren, though, comes to visit. She will be part of me helping myself. She wants to meet Eula the warrior goddess (what she calls her) in person. When she steps through the airport door, she marches toward me like a queen—fresh from New York. She knows how to move.

“Ahhhhh,” she says, and shakes her hands by her face, wipes the tears, and strokes Eula’s cheek.

Eula is too much. Too much. This whole thing is too much.

“I know, Lo,” I say. “It’s crazy.”

I grab her hand and we go.

Her hands are always warm, even hot. They’ve been that way since we were little.

Lauren dyed her hair black a few years ago. People take her more seriously this way, she says. She is the most glamorous person I know, a confidence in her body no one can even label, a size 10/12 like me. When men used to grab at her armpit hair in bars and call it sexy, she would shove them away. Almond eyes. Closets, I mean closets full of clothes. I fit my wardrobe in two drawers. She embodies some art of modern womanhood I chose not to learn from my mother. I help her troubleshoot how to take her trash out every week and how to believe in her deep self-worth. We once stood in front of a mirror at her father’s lake house, both lean from summer and outdoors, me freckled, her tan, my hair short as a boy’s, her hair long and blond, and we marveled at our different creature-ness.

Our fierceness is our sameness.

When Lauren leans over the bed, her long necklaces dangle out and Eula grabs for them. At dinner, my parents, Chris, and I can’t stop laughing at Lauren’s everything. She is still entertaining us—talks about the phrase “big-boned” and what does that really mean, that her bones are this big, just big around, like trees. We laugh so hard we think we might pee and I do pee right into my Always Extra-Long Pad with Wings. Later, when we are getting ready to sleep, she lifts her shirt and grabs the extra fat on her stomach. Squeezes it together. When she did that in front of her boyfriend and made talking sounds from her stomach, he scolded, “Never do that again.” I grab my stomach with her and there we are, two women grabbing our stomachs, making them talk.

“What the hell,” I say about her boyfriend.

Chris is laughing at us, at the whole thing, in the kitchen. I appreciate him siding with us. He is that sort of man, usually.

The next day, Lauren and I lie in bed on our backs, hold Eula above us, and pass her back and forth as she gurgles and smiles.

“I feel like we are fourteen and babysitting someone else’s child,” Lauren says.

“I feel the same way,” I agree, and continue, “actually, sort of. It’s very real. This girl has exploded my heart open. Words are stupid about it. No words for it. And there is the minor detail that I haven’t slept since she was born.”

“Oh gawd,” Lauren says, calling up our grandmother’s safe version of Oh God.

“Where did you come from?” Lauren says, cooing at Eula.

“Did you know Pat-Pat over there?”

We smile, wondering at the eternal reincarnation cycle.

Then, Lauren looks at me with wide eyes and looks back at Eula.

“Are you Pat-Pat?”

~

The wheat fields have turned shocking white. This is how summer ends here. Green to gold to white and days shorten and air cools. That cooling of the air against brittle leaves reminds me of nausea, of what it felt like to be pregnant.

Our local hot springs can help me heal.

It’s ten minutes down the road. Some people are turned away because it doesn’t evoke the spiritual aspect of what we think of when we think of hot springs. I was repelled at first too: loud echoes of the indoor pool, crumbling edge of the outdoor pool, and a candy stand in the entrance. But I go at dawn, when few are there. Sweat in the wood sauna, plunge in the cold pool, and float in the outdoor pool beneath tall fir trees graced by nesting hawks.

The earth here in the American West produces hot blessed water.

It has helped others heal. It can help me heal.

More, yes, more.

Thank you, water.

My brother Alex comes to visit and I take him and my parents to the other hot springs, the open-air one farther away along the Madison River. I haven’t properly introduced my mother to this new place. She uprooted her life. She has few friends here. She knows so little of the geography. I’ve been unable to be her guide and want that to change. My father doesn’t require the same sort of settling into a place. He won’t go in the water because he doesn’t like hot water, but he’ll come along. Chris cannot come because he is framing the house.

“You sure, babe?” I ask.

“I’m in the flow,” he says down at the site, stacks of wood around him, three different measuring tapes in his tool belt. He smooches Eula and tells us to have fun. I watch his eyes and recognize how much he loses from everyday life by giving us the long-term gift of this house. Can that even change at this point? I don’t know. This is the start of the middle of his trauma. We don’t recognize it yet, and he won’t have words for it until much later: the hurt of watching me hurt and then of me hurting him out of my hurt and of us hurting each other, the pressure of making our home with his hands, the stress of how to make our life and jobs sustainable. There will be a moment where he tells me he needs space for his own darkness and needs to trust I won’t “just walk out.” Then the cascade of moments when he understands he has been silent, with his parents and brother, with me, with himself. We talk to each other but cannot grasp what the other person feels right now. I talk to my friends about motherhood and womanhood most days. But his intimate conversations with men come at intervals, out of happenstance, at a dinner where people go around the table and answer a life question and he says something profound and his tears well up. He doesn’t reach out. Not because of shame; just because it doesn’t happen. Our focus with one another will shift then, but we aren’t there yet. We aren’t even close. I’m not even close. Right now, we fall into a hug, his tired body, my tired body, our family.

Surrounded by sagebrush and wetland, my mother slips into translucent green water. It’s an outdoor wooden communal tub. The way she folds the towel carefully around her reveals her reserved way, a way she’s been as long as my life. She and Alex dunk their heads and arc back up to sun. A cold sprinkler sprays into the pool. Somewhere a flock of blackbirds balances on the fence. Somewhere other people, just a few, soak. Somewhere steam is rising.

My mom takes Eula while I go to change.

I emerge in my swimsuit. I’m chest out, like a rooster. Ready for water. Eula is smiling as my mother whooshes her in and out of the water, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, this wise baby of mine, of ours. Once I’m in, once the hot water warms my thighs, my mother seems like a girl to me, and my ache for her is so strong I have to hold on to the concrete pool edge. I don’t understand how we can both despise and love our mothers so deeply—as if they are nothing to us, as they are everything to us.

“Look at her feel it with her hands,” I say, and lean my nose to hers. Eula touches the water, watches it drip from her fingers, watches it swallow her hand again. I don’t remember when or how I learned to swim, only the knowledge of my mother nearby, reliable, present, with her children in cool pools in hot tropical places.

Alex is doing his Alex thing, face up to the sun, deep breathing.

I notice people looking at him. They are wondering. They always wonder whether he’s famous, which he’s not, at least not yet, he would say. He looks famous with his tall tan body and black-rim glasses. So many people in my mother’s family look famous. My mother did when she was young, but she didn’t know it.

I have never looked famous.

I don’t want to look famous to others. I want to feel famous to myself. They might be the same thing. I am starting to understand that looking famous comes from feeling famous, which comes from inhabiting a pose, which comes from honoring yourself, which comes from loving your body, which comes from accepting that the sun is delighted to shine on your own holy face.

~

Eula is four months old and I am going back to work. It’s my own schedule, a few mornings or afternoons a week. Teaching writing workshops and helping individuals find voice is my true vocation. I don’t dread it. I am lucky. The hardware of my transition is in place: breast pump works; two glass bottles purchased; child did not, thank goodness, reject the plastic nipple.

But what am I really prepared for here?

Welcome back to the public. Put some clothes on. I’ve forgotten so many real-life details. The medical bills from Eula’s birth have started to arrive. We’ve stacked them in a pile near the sink. They flash at me like strobe lights. At least we’ll meet our high deductible. Maybe we should go see all the doctors we don’t really need to see just to take advantage of this situation: get my moles and freckles checked, go to a podiatrist for that foot pain, ask an eye doctor about that spot in my eye. Really, though, none of those should be extraneous visits. Blue Cross Blue Shield covers so little, never covers much for anyone, especially women, especially the self-employed. Every medical expense we have, with the exception of one yearly doctor checkup, is out-of-pocket for us. No small co-pays. Nothing “free.” We are, sadly, a common situation in our country. Here’s where I check my privilege, again—because I did not grow up poor, because I did go to college, because I am white, because if I was desperate for one hundred dollars to pay a bill, I could borrow it from someone in my support system. And I can trade with Holcomb: my writing help for her doctoring. We will need to ask the hospital for a payment plan. It’s the only way. But first start by being consistent about doing your pelvic-floor exercises. My mind is a foot soldier with me—do them, do them—when all I want to do is lie on the couch. Even though I’ve vowed off surgery. The push and pull. As Pat-Pat used to say, you can’t help someone who isn’t trying to help herself.

I am trying, but I get deflated.

I also don’t know what’s happening in the world. Haven’t been able to follow the news. The other day in town, I saw an older woman friend for the first time since Eula’s birth. She asked how I was. I seem normal to everyone because I’m good at appearing normal. With my friendly smile, I told her about incontinence.

“We all pee on ourselves, all us mothers,” she said. “Welcome to the club.”

I think she means she pees a little when she sneezes, not gushes urine when she simply walks downhill. But here is what I wanted to say: I don’t want to be in this club. Why are you okay with this club? Why are so many women okay with this? Why are they quiet about it? What if men were the ones who suffered loss of urine control after pushing the next generation of humans into the world? Would we have federally funded programs to alleviate the problem?

By noon, I need to be functional and presentable for a client. That means I need to brush my hair and tone down the viper. She is stomping around the house. Look at her bat at her husband’s dirty socks. Look at her want to run away. Look at her know she can’t because she would never leave her daughter. Look at her feel trapped. Look at her slam the fridge door. Look at her eat half a quesadilla and then pitch it in disgust. Look at her dog watch her, unsure of what is happening. Look at her pick up her daughter and walk next door to ask her mother to please come over because she needs to shower and doesn’t think she can do it while managing her baby today. Look at her stoop in shame at being dependent. Look at her cry in the shower. Look at the way her face opens and sustains a silent scream.

When I emerge from the shower, the air is fresh. Out the window, yellow leaves flutter on trees. My mother and Eula are reading The Runaway Bunny, one of my childhood favorites. They glance up at me and both smile with big kind blue eyes.

~

Our sleep ritual of shades drawn and ocean sounds is a hardcore routine now. I wonder if the lack of light is part of what is getting to me. I don’t know whether this feeling is a normal part of new motherhood or living near my parents or trying to heal or what. When we want light, Chris and I sneak into the tiny bathroom to eat dinner and talk. We’ve had sex here, in the light, twice. Unlike many of my mama friends, I’m not repelled by it. Somehow my body hungers for it more. But something has recently changed—a disassociation with men, like they, like he, is foreign to me, like I get what I need and then detach.

With our bowls of food, we sit in the bathtub or on the toilet lid.

“Babe,” I say to Chris, “I think I’m grieving about my body.” I’m proud of having said it with my sadness instead of my rage.

“Okay,” he says, and that’s it. He doesn’t ask me about what. I don’t know how to respond to his non-responses. He has never been so inadequate to me as he is these days. We are far from the days when he used to ride his bike down a dark country road just to kiss me good night before going back to study for a chemistry test, when we wrote poetic missives to one another on recycled paper, when we stitched pillows and pressed leaves into books, when he would massage my feet and I would stroke his head. When did we become these jaded people? I never thought we would follow the standard trajectory of what society tells us happens to new parents. Like he requested, I try to show him my sadness instead of anger but it doesn’t matter. I know this isn’t his fault. He is in the process of becoming a father, along with the pressure of building our home, tired hands, tired body, tired soul, all day on a roof. But I want to blame him. I want to blame someone for how I feel, who I have become, and what is happening, even though I can’t put a name to what is happening.

I’m not depressed.

I’m fractured.

I’m mad.

~

More nature. More movement. This will help. My mother and I go walking, down the dirt driveway and onto the dirt road with Eula sleeping in a stroller meant for places like this, wheels as big as wagon wheels. An overcast September sky floats over us, thick and low and gray in the west. We walk toward it. Here is my mother, so willing always. When I bled through my pad as breast milk dripped down my chest, she laughed, “Well, this is motherhood,” and suddenly, holding my Eula, I was aware of being part of a vast underground network. I wanted to stop mothers on the street and ask, “You do this too?”

We pass by the yellow farmhouse and walk toward a haystack.

The sky turns black.

“Let’s turn around; look at that squall line,” she says. Squall line sounds like something my father, the man of sailboats, the son of people of sailboats, would say.

“No, let’s push it,” I reply.

A few minutes later, the dark sky wakes up. It comes at us fast, wisps of black reaching for the white sky, consuming it. The white sky has no chance.

“Let’s go,” I say.

Now we are running.

But you can’t run away from this. You are in it. The stroller bumps along as my feet pound on dirt, as my vagina falls out, as my pelvis absorbs the mass of me. Go, go, go. Black clouds, you are pure. Black clouds, you are fast. We run from what could become heavy hurtful hail. But we laugh, we are laughing so hard that pee runs down my legs into the earth.

“Here comes the wind,” she shouts with her arms up in the air, an openness from her mouth. I haven’t seen my mother like this before, so aware and amazed by nature. She stops, heaving breath. So I stop. She says, “Keep going, I’ll catch up.” I don’t keep going. We stand together and wind whips through the cottonwoods. We start to run again. We have two hundred yards to go. We are running. Don’t let a tree branch fall because that could actually kill us. Keep the hail away for a few more minutes. Keep the dark from swallowing us.

The gravel crunches under our feet.

Women have always known how to run.

Women have always been in conversation with the dark.

I had no idea that I had no idea about my mother.

I had no idea how hungry I would become to align with her and away from man.

“Almost there,” we shout together, as wind and cold and black push at our backs.

And this is it. We live in the storm, and we are laughing and we are moving away from it, but we are okay in it too. We are okay. Eula wakes and starts to hum along with the storm. As we bump and run home, she recognizes its blackness, its wildness as kin.

~

Eula, at five months old, wakes only twice one night—this feels like a miracle. We’ve been doing the “flip and shush,” and she prefers sleeping on her belly. Maybe that has helped. A gray dawn filters though windows. I am so electrified by the possibility of consistent sleep I can’t actually sleep. I try to do pelvic-floor exercises but the reality exhausts me. Chris reaches over to me, acknowledges we’ve actually slept some. We start to rub each other, to rub up against each other, and maybe this is what happens with the balm of sleep. Bru feels the calm wash over him and inches closer to our bed, crawls in with us. We are limbs over limbs over limbs over limbs and nothing has ever been so cozy. We stare at Eula and whisper that maybe this is a new phase. Maybe we’ll have to wake only a few times each night from now on, or maybe not wake at all. Maybe this is the beginning of ease. But maybe it’s not and I should know better. I should know that nothing is permanent. I should go with whatever flow. I should know that she’ll hit her next growth spurt and she’ll be awake and uncomfortable and then so will I because that is what we do, isn’t it, help each other grow? Because though growing is necessary, growing is hard.

~

These days my mood veers into a ditch with the slightest gust of wind. Is this who I am, have always been? Where is the good me? She expects consistency from herself. The other me’s know consistency is a fallacy. Nothing in nature and humanity is consistent and there’s a reason for that. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid doesn’t occur to me yet. Without physiological basics—sleep, excretion, homeostasis, breathing, food, shelter—a person can’t function well in any other parts of life or relationships. I’m solid, though. I’m supported. But the loss of urinary continence has wiped out all other possibilities in my life and made the smallest everyday tasks feel enormous. Even I don’t fully admit to the impact of it. I tell myself to just get over it, get myself to the grocery store, buy food, take care, deal with the pee pads, deal with living out of a duffel bag, deal with not knowing where my clothes are, serve my daughter and mend my mood.

I don’t dare wonder anymore what it would feel like to slip on some sexy underwear without a pad and walk around town with my daughter on my hip without any discomfort or pressure on my pelvis.

I don’t dare.

Instead, the upset surfaces in other ways. When the viper awakens within me, I cannot control my rapid escalation. Walk away. Take a breath. Come back later. Write it down instead. None of that works yet. None of that shifts my surge, my urge to say it now and say it true.

One afternoon, something in me breaks.

“We may not be able to have an overhang on our roof,” Chris says in a flat voice.

“Okay, but should we pause to consider that? How does that affect where the snow falls?”

“It’s more work for me to put an overhang on.”

“Okay.”

I don’t know how to say what I need to say. He won’t look me in the eye. He gathers his pile of graph papers and starts to pour a coffee. I move toward a corner to rub my face, hand on my chest, slow yourself down, Molly, slow yourself down.

“Babe,” I say, “I just think we should pause. That’s a big decision.”

That is not what he wants to hear. He wants a shortcut. He wants a break. I understand and I don’t understand. He makes no sign that he’s heard me. He chooses not to hear me. The cement wall between us has no fissures for any light.

“Babe,” I repeat.

“Hey, Chris,” I say as he starts to walk toward the door.

My whole body starts to shake.

“Listen to me,” I shout.

I put Eula down. He is not listening. He is not listening.

I grab a pile of laundry and throw it at him. Most of it floats halfway between us, lands with a gentle thud on the ground. Someone starts to scream and I don’t realize it’s me until he has picked up Eula and they are out the door, with our cowering dog. They are fleeing because they must. My. Beloved. Family. I fall on the bed and punch it, punch the hell out of it, my arms working hard, until my sobs calm, until I am limp, a limp woman. Something is wrong with this limp woman. She cannot stop the sentences now. The thoughts. They come fast.

Where is the strong laboring woman who was here, right on this bed?

Where is she?

She was in control of the out of control.

I refuse to believe this is only lack of sleep. Something is wrong with me. Will people in the grocery store stop calling Eula serious? She isn’t serious. She’s an observer. She doesn’t smile unless she wants to. I tell her, “You are free, I take responsibility for my emotions, these toxic emotions, you are free of them.” I hope she believes me. I can’t stop crying in the shower. If she sees me cry, I explain I’m sad but it’s okay. People get sad sometimes, Eula. People get angry sometimes, Eula. It’s normal. But this, this right now, doesn’t feel normal.

~

I stand in my mother’s red-floored kitchen and hear myself complain. Eula only had a twenty-minute nap. I’m bleeding again. All the other nursing mamas don’t have their menses back yet. I wanted to be able to be a mother who hiked every day with her daughter.

My daughter, in my arms, watches me say it all.

“And now . . . she’s imprinting on me,” I sigh. “This is all she knows of me. Weak pregnant woman. Weak new mother. Weak all around. I want to be the mom who is out and about.”

“Don’t go there. You can’t worry about that. Just let that go,” says my mom. “You are not a weak mother. You have been on walks in the woods with Eula. You are an amazing mom. You laugh with her all the time. You pay close attention to her. She will grow up feeling seen by you, Moll. But I am concerned about you. I knew there was a reason I needed to be here this fall.”

Her words wash down the shore from me.

“I just have no time to sit down,” I say.

“I know,” my mom agrees. “I never sat down either. And when I did, I felt guilty.”

“God,” I growl, “why is that the case for so many women? Chris takes her for half an hour in the morning and I feel bad about it, like I shouldn’t burden him. I thought I’d trained myself out of that old model.”

“I know.”

This phenomenon exasperates me. I’m sure Pat-Pat conversed with that guilt; perhaps every woman in my lineage, in most lineages, has wrestled with some form of it.

Later that night, I sit on the bathtub’s edge and explain to Chris.

“Eula only knows me as ill Mom, as angry person; that’s so sad for her.”

“Babe, that isn’t true at all. That’s just another arm of your guilt. Let it go.”

He names it for me, just as my mom did.

He doesn’t require me to feel guilty. He never has.

Eula and I play harmonica. We hold on to it together. She blows into one side while I do the other. This makes us laugh and laugh. We sing songs about listening for birds and how Papa is on the roof, and the only line I can come up with about me is that Mama is dressed in red.

~

My mother makes both of these comments to me in one day:

One: “Molly, I realize language is important to you. What you said about the word pretty is true. It can limit a girl’s understanding of herself.” She holds her hand out to me. This validation feels like sweet syrup in my system. “And,” she adds, “you are such a good mom for knowing that, and being mindful about it.” I re-explain that pretty isn’t a bad word, let’s just not make it the first and only word people use with her. It’s so often the one word anyone uses for a girl—and a girl is so many other adjectives besides pretty. I don’t want to coddle my daughter or shield her from common language, but it is an act of intelligence to be awake to it.

Two: “I don’t want Eula to look like a pauper when we go to Chicago. Polka dots and stripes don’t go together.” I stare at my baby in her polka dots and stripes and tell my mother I don’t care about what goes together. She grumbles and walks into the kitchen to chop vegetables. I fume on the chair, stroking my daughter and telepathically communicating to her that she is perfect as is. I don’t want her to feel the family obsession with pleasing others through clothes. Then, as I get up to leave, my mother adds, “Sheesh, we’re also going to have to spend some time getting your clothes together for the trip.” I know she is referencing the huge and elaborate party my uncle and aunt host—that she thinks I never have the right sort of dress or slacks. “Mom, I’m thirty-four years old. I can dress my own body,” I say, and I let the screen door slam behind me.

We wax and wane.

My mother might utter two incongruous statements in a day.

But I am capable of twenty.

~

Here we go again. Control the mother. At early November, Eula gets sick for the first time, with a hoarse cough. It sounds like whooping cough. I become a dragon trolling through the shallow ocean looking for someone to blame. I find Chris but he is also sick, passed out on our bed. My mother appears like a beacon. She can handle anything. She also has a cough, after all.

“Do you think you caught this cough somewhere?”

“Molly, it may not be the same thing,” she says.

“Someone brought it into the home.”

“Fine, if you are looking for someone to blame, blame me,” she huffs back, and walks out.

I’m scared. I’m scared something is really wrong with Eula. I lash out because the fear wants to burst out of my chest. I just need to say, “I’m scared, Mom,” and be the me who is normally calm when other people are sick. But this is not other people; this is my child; this is the first time I’ve seen her body struggle. If I want Eula to grow into a woman who forgives herself, then I must become a woman who forgives myself. It’s okay you made a mistake. It’s okay you lashed out. You can set a goal to be different next time. My mom is the one who tells me I was so hard on myself as a child. She didn’t know what to do about it. She would pull me aside and say, “You don’t have to be so hard on yourself, honey.” Nothing helped. She decided I was made that way. Some people are made that way.

Once Eula recovers, my mother commiserates.

“I remember the first time you were sick. You woke up like a wet rag.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, that was scary.”

“What was I sick with?”

“I don’t remember,” she says.

“How did I recover?”

“You always recovered fast.”

~

It’s been six months. Shouldn’t I be rising out of the ashes of a hard pregnancy and complicated birth by now? My body moves through molasses these days. I am so very tired. After Eula has fallen asleep, I crawl away from sitting to standing and eventually toward the bathroom, willing my toes not to crack. Shut the fuck up, toes. She can hear that imperceptible sound of me, past the ocean waves, past Bru snoring, past Chris coughing, she hears my toes, because she knows it as me and I have boobs full of milk and I’m her mama. It could be a tender memory. But my exhaustion makes it not so. When she wakes at night now, I become a violent whale in bed, one who slaps the covers over her husband. I want to be sure he knows I am awake—again. How will I ever dance or cartwheel with her? My prolapse is worse. My incontinence is the same. Put a diaper on Eula, put a pad on myself. Every day. Maybe we’ll potty train together one day.

One morning I wake up and cannot move my body from bed.

Eula rests nearby in her co-sleeper. I don’t know how I will reach her.

“I’m so tired,” I call out to Chris, and I start to cry. “I feel like I can’t move.” He continues to bustle around in the kitchen; he’s ignoring me; he’s over and done with my issues.

“Babe,” I say, “I need help, please help me.”

“Babe,” I say, and my cry morphs to a roar, “. . . please.”

But he walks out the wooden door without a word.

The shock waves crash into me. What do I do now? How do I reach my baby? I roll over to her and pull her toward me, toward our full day in bed. My tears stop because she gazes up at me. Over the phone, Holcomb speculates it might be thyroid, and she calls in a few blood tests.

So it is.

Postpartum thyroiditis. On the same day, our pup gets diagnosed with the same thyroid issue. He watched me vomit all through pregnancy and has been beside me during the entire transition, this sensitive dear animal of ours. I stroke him, hold his snout, my eyes to his eyes, and say, “You don’t have to take this on, you don’t.”

We go together to pick up our pills.

I’ve never been a pill person. Now I have to be. I put this medication and my herbs in an empty glass spice jar to make them appear exotic and stunning. It will help me take them.

This diagnosis is not uncommon for new mamas; however, my numbers teeter on the edge of an autoimmune disease. Not there yet, though. This is good. Holcomb says she’s impressed I’ve been able to teach, take care of Eula, and function in general. This information becomes my sword. See, I want to tell everyone, especially Chris. See. I wasn’t making it up. This is real. It’s scientific. I am not so crazy. Beneath the gratification is more rage. My body is officially broken. I pee on myself and my thyroid doesn’t work. I might feel sluggish and heavy my entire life. Great. To jump-start and heal my thyroid, I need to exercise. But when I exercise, pee pours out of me. It’s an impossible cycle.

There is no out.

There is a grander story at work.

I cannot yet make the link now.

Just be grateful you have a healthy daughter. You aren’t dying. Don’t complain.

~

What I learn: The emotional causes for hypothyroidism are both resonant and not. I do not feel like an unexpressed woman. Perhaps my good-girl childhood contributed to part of that, but not much. I’ve never not shared what I think—what I feel, though, is debatable and based on my audience. Holcomb mentioned thyroid disease is often associated with long periods of mild depression, meaning the depression is actually caused by the thyroid problem. Someone can be misdiagnosed very easily. I don’t know how to parse the physical versus the mental. They are one. I’m responsible for all of it. In Chinese medicine, hypothyroidism is considered an imbalance, a deficiency of yang masculine energy: no get up and go, a “giving up” sensation. The giving up is accurate. If Eula didn’t need my care, I would lie facedown on the muddy earth all day. Not my inherent way. My temperament has always been more masculine. Maybe the feminine yin energy is trying to bloom in me—what a way to do it, though. They say bladder problems indicate fear and suppressed anger. My body has called the rage up. It is not a symptom. It’s old. It’s the deeper unexpressed I thought I didn’t have.

~

Maybe our oldest female story starts in the pelvis and moves out the throat. My oldest female story also comes from the family created by my maternal grandmother. We go to her homeland, Chicago, for Thanksgiving, where everyone born of Pat-Pat gathers. My old wounds usually crawl out of holes in this setting, despite the inclusiveness—true, maybe, of all childhood places.

My aunt and uncle throw a massive party every November. It brings together families who raised their now college-attending kids together. It’s a way to recapture all they’ve shared as friends over the years. Lauren and her younger sisters, my cousins, pose in mirrors and swap dresses and draw on makeup. It’s a ritual. It’s happened for years. They laugh and dance. They’d rather be in pajamas but they have to dress up because three hundred people are downstairs waiting to see them, and their friends, the other young adults at the fresh start of their lives. Though they invite me to be part of it, I do not consider myself of that element. I feel like the fat cousin and usually end up crying in a closet alone.

This time must be different.

There will be no crying in closets.

I have to be strong for Eula. She will watch my every move and learn from it. Chris, my steady background in these moments, knows the history and tells me it’ll be great. The thyroid news has either hardened or loosened me because I wear my black lace tango dress and walk around detached and unaffected. People buzz around and call me pretty and I choose not to be my usual offended when someone says with surprise, “Whoa, you are beautiful.”

When my brothers comment, “Oooo, lace,” I don’t attack by telling them I do actually own some feminine items. They often tease me about my clothes and body. They mean it as a point of loving connection but it’s still a tease. The world teases women, not men, never men, about clothes and body. Do they know they are cogs in this system? With Eula in my arms, I wonder whether I’ve crossed, or half crossed, the wet valley of this particular beauty sadness.

Is this what progress feels like?

When the party ends, when the mass of people have left, my cousins and aunt hop up to dance on the granite kitchen counter in short dresses. Everyone can finally relax and be done with small talk. Eula squeals with delight at all the action, and I tell myself it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay. One day that can be me, if I want it. It is me in other settings with other people. But I don’t need to want it here. My mom isn’t up there. She’s across the room, watching them, just like me, with red wine glass in hand, smiling but with a defeated look. I can feel her feeling. The cord between us thickens brown and strong. We are aligned here, in some way—women who are shy, who don’t fully know how to express our sensuality in public, who feel out of our knowing in this moment of hotness.

~

When we return to December snow, I decide, again, to take seriously the act of self-care. Another vow of mine; Chris often says if there’s one thing I do always and without fail, it’s make plans and intentions. There are no longer huge unknowns. My health information has been gathered. Now the data and diagnosis computes out to give me a place to start from.

I can track my body and mind.

I can converse with my cells.

Meanwhile, I feed Eula gorgeous foods—pumpkin, avocado, and blackberries. These colors. We sit and mmmmm together and she, turns out, is a child who loves the sensual part of food. She rejects nothing. She wants to try everything. Watching her reminds me I am inherently that way too.

One afternoon, I cook carrots and we eat them together. I pretend to be introducing us both to this new food. We talk about it. The sweetness, the deep orange, how this vegetable grew in the earth, sent its taproot down. By the end, we are both covered in carrot and nourished. I want to believe I can keep this up. I want to believe a carrot can hold my attention. I want to believe I will choose a carrot over cookies. Cookies aren’t bad. But I choose them often to hurt myself and to prove something to some people who aren’t even listening anyway.

“Why does food matter so much to you?” a friend asks.

It’s what my body is made of—colors and textures. I love food the way I love clothing the way I love all the things I’ve chosen to reject in the name of becoming a different sort of female. I want to care for myself the way I care for my daughter.

Eula starts to crawl.

I prance around her as she moves along the rug. She stops, starts, looks up at me, grins, chooses a direction to go, and then goes. Her world is exploding right now, right at this instant. Selfhood. Agency. The choice to grab her cow stuffed animal over the others. In a few days, I know my daughter better than I ever have—her preferences, decisions.

“Welcome to the world of locomotion,” I say.

She grins again.

I dance to make her laugh and launch myself into a cartwheel. It sort of works, only air sucks into my vagina and then leaves it with a farting noise. No matter. My daughter is moving. This week, her movement journey has begun: walking, dancing, running, hugging, lovemaking, squatting, jumping, there is so much for a body to do.

There is so much for a body to do.

There is so much for a body to explore.

Remember this, I tell myself.

~

At night, I smell the milk of us, watch Eula’s hands twitch as moonlight comes through the window and feel a vast freedom to craft my own relationship with my daughter, as we choose. My love for her has expanded into something far beyond the animal love of protection. This is now relational love. I would die if she died.

I’m sure of it.

“My love for her is so intense it hurts,” I tell Chris.

“Me too,” he says, and slips his hand in mine.

Beyond the house walls, birds sleep in the dark at 6 a.m. We pull Eula into our bed for snuggles. Not yet time for wake-up. Though, can it be? She has slept through the night. I told Chris she would on the eve of her turning eight months old. I just knew it. I am learning who my daughter is. We can predict each other’s moves. And so she has. She pulls my hair and yanks on Chris’s nose and tries to escape our blockage to get to the power cord nearby. We groan our love to her.

She finds the concrete wall by our heads with its little holes and marks.

“Ohhh, ooooo, ahhhh,” she gurgles.

Her fingers explore the contours because it could be a moonscape.

That’s when, in my attempt to keep one eye open and on her, I notice a smudge of almond butter on the conduit. I sit up. Leftover from labor, from those crackers I ate when my uterus contracted down, to hug Eula, to prepare her for her birth. That laboring woman was me. She has left a remnant of herself, an offering: here, take it, remember yourself. This is the woman I must remind myself of. She was in flow. She was not fearful. She let her body do what it needed to do. She knew how to fly and moan and hum to move her baby, and her own self, into the world.

I must call her up within me again.

~

Some days, a metal wrecking ball lands on my chest. It doesn’t warn me of its approach. My arms are not steely enough to remove it. We wake up to a silent land, so much snow tree boughs hang full and low, almost to the ground. A predominant thought pokes at me: I need my own house in order to heal. I cannot heal in the chaos of duffel bags and storage and mostly absent husband and overstaying.

Heavy wrecking ball.

The plan had always been to move out of my parents’ guesthouse in November. They want to use it as a rental. Our house was supposed to be finished by now. But houses are never done on schedule. Especially a house built by one man who is also co-parenting his daughter. But it’s a first-world problem and it was our choice.

So get over it.

My mom sweeps off her own porch and calls me. The men are gone for a week, on separate work trips. Our driveway will be impassable until the plow comes, today, tomorrow, or a few days after that. But our path between houses needs to be shoveled today. If we don’t, it will turn to ice and the whole winter will become a slip hazard. I tried to shovel once and it, just like the act of splitting wood, damaged my prolapse further. But she also has a prolapse.

“I can shovel,” she says, like the elder of the village.

“Well, I can try too,” I say, and mean it.

“No, you stay there with Eula,” she commands.

We women of this lineage lift heavy objects. My mother never needed a man to help her haul groceries, bags of soil, huge clay pots, anything. I once slid canoes atop cars by myself, carried fifty pounds of apples up and down ladders, hurled a backpack onto my back and hauled it up steep mountains.

We know how to labor with our hands and arms and legs.

I once knew how.

Heavy wrecking ball.

Right when Eula finally descends into her nap, right as her eyelids start to flicker, right as I levitate away from her, breathless and relieved for a break from holding it together for my daughter, my mother busts through the door. She wears a black balaclava, heavy jacket, has a shovel in hand; steam envelopes her, she puffs toward me, toward us, and Bru pants at her heels.

“It’s me,” she says with the exuberance of a girl.

I should add to her joy but a scowl comes out of me because now Eula is awake and it will take me another hour to get her down and this makes my skin crawl, makes me question what I’m doing as a mother, and that’s when I see the shift, how I have, in one scowl, tamped out my mother’s light. She turns and scuttles out the door.

Why do I do this?

How do I do this?

Heavy fucking wrecking ball.

She helps me and I hurt her.

I want to own my violence. I want to own my violence toward women, my mother, myself. Every human has grown up in collective waters that perpetuate this violence toward women. We all do it, whether we know it or not. On some level, we are all misogynists. When I feel disgust toward my mother it is my disgust toward myself.

I am violent.

I am tender.

These coexist in me.

As I shush and rock Eula, the prayers bellow out of me.

I cannot be this angry woman with my mother.

I cannot be this angry woman with my daughter.

Please help me find the other part of me; where is the good part?

~

For our Christmas tree, I find an aspen branch and tuck it between two chairs. The only ornaments on it are from my female linage—the art deco orange-and-silver star from my great-grandmother Anne, the Japanese cloth balls from Pat-Pat, the painted eggs my mother bought in the Czech Republic. I put the red-and-aqua wooden giraffe from Mexico at the base. It sends Eula into paroxysms: part crying, part elation. She calms herself and then reaches out a hand to softly stroke it. This girl has a gentle touch.

Our tree is sparse.

It speaks to me.

I regret again how I have or have not treated my mom.

We sit in the cabin. She cuts pineapples for pineapple upside-down cake and chitters and chatters about something that doesn’t interest the men and normally wouldn’t interest me, but now I am on her side. I want to pull her toward me and say, “Let’s be wacky together. We are wise.” But I don’t make any moves. I am too shy. I stand across the kitchen and inhale pineapple smell and know I’m going to be devastated when she dies and I will remember this moment and wish I had told her then, now, how remarkable she is.

~

What I learn: Rage is a circuit that starts in my pelvis and moves out two openings: my urethra or my throat. No wonder the screams, the urine. It is mine. It is also part of a greater current of all women: women like me, women of other races, cultures, languages, and terrain. It is our push back toward the institutional violence we’ve grown up in. It spews outward in response to patriarchy. If I am angry, women of color must feel it a hundred thousand–fold. We have un-similar experiences held in the similar container of femaleness. Beneath it all, for all women, is grief. Can you hear the wail? We have a voice too. Our body is sacred. Do not defile it. We have been unseen, disrespected, shut down. Leave us alone. But the strangest indoctrination happens. Rage also turns inward toward each other: violence from women toward women. Who does she think she is? Look at her. We inhabit the system that breaks us. I have directed my own violence toward my mother, the woman who made me. It’s an easy and safe anger. It stands in for what we’ve been taught—violence toward self and our own female body.

~

As I grow in and out of myself, Eula grows toward movement. To nurse, she now sits up on my knee, switches from left to right breast and takes ownership of which one she wants when. Then she tries to scrape freckles off my face. In the bath, she holds on to my nipples and leans way way back.

“Easy, there,” I say, and we laugh.

Eula yanks up on Pat-Pat’s old wooden hibachi, a Japanese portable cooking apparatus. On the carpet, she practices her pull-ups with a huge smile of pride, one so big her cheeks make a square of her face. My mother has used the hibachi as a coffee table. It’s been a central part of every home of ours, dark and oiled and familiar. This is to watch an ancient her-story for me.

My daughter can move now. With eyes and hand gestures, she communicates what she needs. The world has opened for her. Any fuss Eula had seems to have evaporated. I don’t know whether it was her fuss or mine. She was just a baby getting used to being in a body. I am just a woman getting used to being in a body.

I beg the sky and moon to please take my grief away. If my future is as a young incontinent woman with a prolapse and a slow thyroid, well, so be it. One friend warns me not to accept it. Don’t accept it. Don’t stop trying to heal. But it is so much effort to heal. It doesn’t matter, she says. Don’t stop trying.

One afternoon, as Eula naps, I pour hot water over dandelion tea, kneel near the fire, and take stock. I go back to my biography is my biology. What have I received and what can I now release?

The fire flickers back.

It has no answers.

I do, though.

Undo a contract I made long ago with my body.