Release

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Anatomy matters to me. I want my daughter to know that hers matters, especially because our culture pretends female anatomy doesn’t. We don’t name it, other than with pet names. We don’t discuss it. We don’t educate about it. We only control it and tell it what it can’t and can do. This I cannot accept. One afternoon, as I change Eula’s diaper on the cabin floor, my mother gasps.

“What’s that?” she says. “Looks like blisters.”

“Mom, you’ve changed her diaper a thousand times. Those are her inner labia.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, did I not have labia as a baby?” I tease and try to keep it light.

“Of course you did, I just . . .”

I don’t want to bully my mother. I had so many body questions as a girl. My mother was a different mother when I was young. She only had cloaked answers then because she herself had been given cloaked answers.

So I learned to stop asking, to shut that valve.

I’m trying to be more open with her.

She is trying too.

Sometimes it’s a disaster.

Sometimes it works.

My mom suggests we get out. Winter has set in at twenty below. It’s a choice. Emerge from the den or become cemented down. I’ve made efforts to go to River Road before, alone: strapped Eula to my chest and held Bru on a leash he isn’t used to. But ten minutes into walking on this sunny dirt road, the warmest spot closest to us, my girl’s nose would turn into a cherry and my jeans would be urine wet and the expedition would be over. What I really want to do is venture out for a long afternoon of cross-country skiing, my most cherished snow adventure. But the pressure of Eula’s backpack on my bladder has made that an impossibility—at least in my current reality.

I’m seasoned now.

I squeeze the stroller into my tiny car.

We arrive and the young male cows at a farm come to the fence to greet us.

“Hey, boys,” I say, as we crunch past them over ice, moving along the wide river, and eventually to a stone house. We wrap our coats tighter and my hand touches Eula’s nose. She’s okay. We are okay.

“This road connects all the way to Gateway,” I explain when we return to the car.

“It does?” my mom says from beneath the blue scarf covering her entire face. She is so willing, so up for anything all the time. Last week, at the hot springs, Eula sucked ninety-eight-degree water up her nose and we dashed back to the changing room. So. Much. For. That. As I dressed my overheated, screaming daughter, my mother, whose hair was matted wet to forehead, somehow dressed me as she held a scrunched-up sock ready for my foot. The taking care is passed on but never leaves the source.

“Yeah,” I say, “it can be muddy this time of year, but there hasn’t been much snowmelt, so we should be fine. Let’s do it.”

“Okay, you drive, though,” she says.

My tiny car has killer snow tires but almost no clearance.

We putt-putt down the narrowing road, past farmhouses, until there are no more farmhouses, and we start to slide in mud ice here and there, but I avoid the ruts. I am finally introducing my mother to something in this valley. She is no longer escorting me. I am escorting her. We slip more. I straighten the wheels and start to think about what would happen if we do get stuck, how no one knows where we are and cell phones only work in pockets out here and it’s below zero and my infant daughter is with us. It gets tense, but my mom laughs with the tension and her laughter relaxes me and we move through the mud ice as people move through cycles of hope and despair, and we do not deflate. When Eula cries, I turn up the volume to Neko Case wailing about crows and love, and something about the sound and the movement and the cold and being in a car with her mama and her Mare calms her down. At a stand of shivering cottonwood trees, we come around the last bend and it feels like flying. Like we’ve made it through something.

Some people say you can make a change overnight. I am an advocate of small releases and how they eventually integrate into a sustainable change. I do my pelvic exercises. Some days. They still don’t feel like a simple physical therapy. I have to unearth my entire history and make peace with every man in the world and every woman and myself in order to fully heal. Tall order. Maybe this belief is my own limitation. The more I learn about my body mechanics, the more overwhelmed I become. The pelvic bowl is, of course, connected to the whole body. To heal it, I need to also strengthen my core muscles and foot arches while stretching my hamstrings and quads and calves into a new flexibility. It requires a full-body change. It’s a lot. Meanwhile, my thyroid is managed with a T3/T4 pill, a careful combination ground down at a pharmacy, so I can get through the day without a shroud wrapped around myself. Holcomb says we have to test it every three months or so and see how it goes. What is the endgame? We want to avoid an autoimmune disease. When the thyroid is off, something else is usually off, letting the person know to pay attention, please. It will help, she says, to get sleep and also foster connection.

Connection with Chris continues to be hard.

My fuse has become shorter.

My recovery time is longer. It used to take me a few hours to pull myself back together from an argument with him. Now, a week passes. I try not to think about whether this is the new permanent me or not. We haven’t had a pause; we are still in the thick of something.

Later, I will name it The Dark Night of The Couple. We hash it out in the bathroom one evening. I am lying in an empty bathtub that smells of lavender, and my socks are damp from leftover shower water. He sits against the toilet. The air hangs thick with the unsaid, the almost said, the already said. If someone lit a match, we would all explode. We are trapped there for days, weeks, years. We cannot escape. I refuse to let him slip out the door, even as the ceiling crushes us. Fear rests on my lap and leans against my chest. There are grievances. There is resentment. We are a record on replay.

“I just need you to say, out loud, that you see my pain,” I say.

“We cannot have this conversation out of the context of our deeper conflict,” he responds. “That’s really important.”

“You sound like a robot.”

“Someone has to be rational and un-triggered.”

“You don’t sound un-triggered.”

“I’m trying to identify our patterns,” he says.

“I appreciate that, but it would help me if you could honor me somehow. I feel like you refuse, on purpose, to see me. That disconnection is the worst.”

He sighs.

“Do you want me to build our house so you can have a stable place to live, or do you want me to spend time honoring you?”

I start to cry.

His blank stare is the hardest part for me.

I’m on the edge of a cliff. I hang on, about to fall into a canyon of bitterness toward him and all men. The canyon is not of my own making. Many women have fallen into it before. My women have fallen into it before. I never wanted to be one of those women. I never wanted to detest my husband. I thought our love would keep us safe.

Somehow we sleep. In my dream, I ask a young woman how she got across the ocean and lakes and rivers and canyons and fields.

“I flew,” she says.

“Oh, flying,” I say.

“Like this,” she explains, and leans out until her body takes flight.

What I learn: We rarely feel safe to fall apart. We hold it together. Then, when hardship descends and the planets and people around you happen to have aligned a certain way, a door opens. All wounds are relational wounds. The only reason I can collapse is because, despite my incontinence, my basic needs are taken care of—food, shelter, water, and safety. My anger is a luxury. I’m okay with this. It feels like a duty. My mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and beyond couldn’t afford to scream out, not as young women. They would have lost husbands and security and who knows what else. I would rather live life with a companion. But my education and era has given me the opportunity to thrive alone if need be or if chosen. My fellow women also speak out. It is no longer so taboo. Most of us won’t be burned at the stake, at least in the West. Those sisters who are still stoned or beaten or murdered elsewhere and here, they are the ones we must scream out for, speaking words they want to but cannot. When I stare out at the valley, it becomes a bowl made by the upsweep of mountains on all sides. My/our pelvic bowl is this bowl. I can pull it up. No one, no event, no broken moment can destroy it.

My anger is a luxury.

My anger is a necessity.

Recently though I wonder whether I have become attached to my anger. Devoted to it. What happens if I don’t shout it out? Would I lose anything?

In the gynecologist’s waiting room, I fiddle with my bag. We don’t have a relationship. This is my yearly exam. I’m sure she’s going to tell me I’m doomed. I’ve heard myself tell people my thyroid is fucked, my pelvic floor is fucked, and probably my hormones are fucked too. Then I apologize for my language. I’ve wanted to say fuck five thousand times until someone hears my pain. I recognize my victim mentality and also that I haven’t been able to pull myself out.

When she walks into the room, her voice sounds kind.

“I know this might sound strange,” I say in my blue drape. “But I need to feel something positive about my prolapse and incontinence. For better or worse, I’m sensitive and really absorb what medical professionals tell me. I know my response is my responsibility but just wanted to tell you that. I don’t need you to sugarcoat, but . . .”

“Let’s take a look,” she says, and inserts the cold speculum.

“This looks great,” she says. “You just look like a woman who’s had a baby. The cystocele isn’t bad. Not bad at all for pushing for five hours.”

“Really?”

“Yes. You just need to be mindful of heavy lifting.”

“What about the incontinence?”

“It may never be perfect, but your exercises will help.”

I put the may never be perfect part on a wooden shelf somewhere away from my heart and focus on the fact that my vulva just looks like a woman who’s had a baby. Her words aren’t all that different than what the nurse told me.

“Thank you, thank you so much,” I gush. “You are the kindest MD I’ve ever met.” I want her to know she has made a difference for me.

“Oh, that means a lot. Thank you.”

I hop into my clothes and skip out of there. It has become normal to me to look for a problem with my body. Maybe I’ve done so ever since puberty, that girl looking for a reason to be different. Maybe that has been the most dangerous act of my life. As my car eases back home, past black cows hunkered together, past snow and snow and snow, a statement appears and sifts down over me: I am healthy. I am healthy. I am healthy.

It is new.

What do I do with it?

I want to be aware of my body but not obsessed. I want to pass to Eula some combination of my mother’s ability to roll with the punches and my ability to dig deep for truth. The middle road.

Eula has her first fever on the first full moon of the year. In the darkness, I hold her naked body against my chest all night long. She tosses and tosses. Hot, dry hot. Nothing soothes her. Not even my breast. I hum to her and am calm. I am always calm when someone else is ill, when someone else needs me.

The next morning, my mother comes in.

“How are you?” she asks. “First fever is always hard.”

“I’m actually fine,” I say, with a smile, “I didn’t sleep at all, but I’m just fine.”

A few days later, late at night, I go to my mom’s house to chat at normal volume on the phone with a friend. When I come back to the guesthouse, nothing is as it should be. Everyone should be asleep, but Chris is holding a crying Eula in the light of the bathroom. He’s inspecting her head.

“What happened?” I ask, moving toward her fast.

“She woke up screaming,” he says. “I found blood on her sheets.”

“What?”

We can’t find any blood on her, though.

We tuck her into bed with us and assume a new tooth broke the surface.

The next morning, I scrub the small blood patch from her sheets under cold water. It is the first time I’ve seen her blood, my daughter’s blood, the blood of our ancestors made into hers. Of course, it won’t be the last time, but I don’t want it to wash down the drain into the ground. Photograph it somehow. Preserve it forever.

Instead, I raise it to my lips.

Meanwhile, Chris continues to build our house. It is the easy but not so easy conversation between us. We were supposed to be out of the guesthouse two months ago. My parents aren’t putting pressure on, but we feel the pressure. Most days, his face goes blank around anyone but Eula. He lifts her up, smooches her ears, face, hands. We show up for her even when we can’t show up for ourselves, or each other. I have made the choice to be as hands-off as possible. I cannot make any emotional requests of him. I cannot say much at all. It’s too much for him to hold. This detachment is unlike me, so my execution of it is sloppy.

His hands have started to go numb at night.

He can sleep only on his back.

“We should probably look for a rental,” I say one evening in bed.

“We can’t spend money on a rental.”

“I know, but we also can’t stay here much longer. It just isn’t fair to my parents.” My mind leapfrogs through all the people I know in town, who do we know, who has a place, how can this work, I can make this work, we can do this.

He rolls onto his stomach.

“You know what,” I add, “I don’t want you to worry about it. You are building our house. I can be in charge of figuring out where we are going to live in the meantime. I can do that, okay? That’ll make it easier. Good old division of labor.”

He says nothing.

Quiet as a green hill.

I must allow him his silence. In this moment, I have become someone noble, a real adult who is going to deal and isn’t, for once, triggered by her husband’s non-response. That’s when his back starts to heave and heave and heave and heave and heave and then the sounds of his sadness emerge. My chest starts to implode—a man in tears is the underbelly, the unexpressed, the push back to a world that expects a certain definition of manhood. They say boys stop crying publicly around age seven. I’ve seen him cry before, often, stood on porches to say goodbye, held each other under the rain, but not recently. This is new. This is a wail, his own sort of depression, his own sort of giving up. I don’t know what he needs me to be right now. If I am part of the cause, then is it okay for me to be the comforter?

I have been such forest fire for him.

I scoot closer, put my hand on his heaving back, and rub him.

I don’t ask.

I know not to ask.

I know not to analyze.

When Eula turns nine months old, she spits peas out to see how far they can fly. I chase her crawling. She laughs hard. She bangs her wooden spoon and rejects books she’s seen too much. Textiles send her eyes into another world I don’t know about. She starts to fold cloth—any cloth, napkins, dish towels, rags. She is content. I’ve created rhythm and ritual for her. I can be proud of that.

There is one photo from my labor.

I’ve never seen it.

Chris shows me.

I am in transition, my cervix opening from eight to ten centimeters, arms flung over the tub, the messy bun of my brown hair, about to start pushing, probably fifteen minutes away from going to the hospital though we didn’t know it. I see that hopeful calm woman and want to bring her into my arms. Maybe she needs to pull me into her arms—remind me of how to labor, how to be separate from fear. She has a message for me. It’s time to move forward. Here again. I’ve developed a true compassion for those who rage and make poor decisions. Beneath that swell of anger is some form of pain, and beneath that, divinity. I’ve touched it a few times at the lowest of the low. No matter, you are here now.

Dear women.

I write an email to my closest friends to ask them to help me mark this moment. I make a conscious choice to take a turn in the road.

We can be good.

We can set intention.

There are so many moments when we think we’ve changed. There are so many moments when I think I’ve changed. These are not false, but they are not static either. How many times in my life have I decided I would will myself to be fine now and forever? The expression nine months in, nine months out refers to what exactly? Someone once told me baby steps. This is one of those.

Alternative medicine and bodywork can become a wormhole for me. I don’t require scientific studies to prove it works. I want to try it all because every experience leads me closer to my body, myself, the natural world around me, leaves, trees. It’s an option many of us don’t realize we have, or can’t afford to have. Other than naturopathy with Holcomb, I haven’t allowed myself to open that door recently: acupuncture, massage, or singing bowls played over my body. I keep investigating and investigating and it’s time to focus on the one resource I always have.

Myself.

Unless I can trade with someone; in this instance, her services for my writing coaching. I scrape ice off my windshield and drive to town to get a Mayan abdominal massage. It’s a technique to heal and realign the uterus. My uterus seems okay, but I want to be in touch with my pelvis and all its contents. Dark room, incense, oils, deep sound of the woman’s voice, and her confident, strong touch. She rubs my belly in circles and then strokes inward from two parts of the pelvis and then two parts of the ribs. Then she asks me to do it, to massage myself and go through the process.

I begin.

“Wait,” she stops me. “Breathe and pull yourself from head to root.”

I do and it feels like descending in an elevator.

Down.

I’ve tried to embody this way many times but have never gotten there and suddenly I’m there and stunned. There is my uterus. Hi. I’ve rubbed around my belly only a few times. The woman asks me to send my uterus love for growing my baby and bleeding for me. Yes, okay, I understand. But this sort of self-care is hard for me, why is this hard for me? I’m here. I can’t let myself take myself seriously. I start to feel bad for my uterus, poor thing, not getting the love from me she deserves. Then my history with self-hate hits me. Tears don’t bother to form slowly. They catapult out from my face, and my lips tremble, a tremble that moves across the canvas of my throat down to my chest. She notices me try to will it away and continue my self-massage, but my hands cannot move.

She puts her hands on me.

“There, there, no need to go anywhere else, just place your hands there and send love.”

Afterward, for days, I lie awake at night with my hands on my uterus. I don’t hear much—only a dark warm silence, restful even. I don’t have acres of patience. I want contact. Actual words. Made from the alphabet. Instead, images come: palm trees and paper reams and wooden shoes and tigers and mossy rocks and, of all things, a spatula.

There is a wilderness in my uterus.

My cognitive self cannot function there. My uterus does not theorize about what she is or isn’t because an organ operates on felt-sense, responds that way, acts upon that way, shifts that way. How is it that she has known to bleed every twenty-eight days? How did she grow and give shelter to a baby? How did she know when, the precise moment, to start contracting around that baby? As the days pass, my body and I finally enter an honest conversation. It has received many instructions and accusations from me. It seems confused about this. There is a zigzag feeling. That’s how I know what it says. We are on the same team, I assure it.

I won’t ever betray you. Even when I do.

My car moves down the snowy road at dawn. I arrive with other hot-spring pilgrims and, under fluorescent lights, swim laps near a woman who lowers herself from a wheelchair into the pool. It’s remarkable how people make peace with what is. My legs flutter and take me deep and up and somersaulted. Here, only here, do I remember how capable my body is of graceful and athletic movement. When you know incontinence doesn’t matter because you are in water, the body does not constrict. There is no holding.

I’ve come to appreciate simple acts of my past—stepping into a hot shower and controlling the urge to pee, laughing so hard with friends everyone has to cross legs because you’re all “going to pee” even though you’re not, spotting a large rock and running fast to leap over it and then land beyond like a cat.

My goggles fog up. I rinse them as another woman enters the hot water fully clothed. A few older men emerge from the cold plunge like seals, or gods. I make my way to the silent outdoor pool where darkness has begun to peel away from the sky. Tread water. Stare up at fir trees. A Tom Waits song enters me. Then words, not his, but my words matched to his rhythm, a song for Eula: I put limes on the table and string flowers from the bed, when it rains hard tomorrow, we’ll listen to the drum overhead. Other lines about my arms always open for her, about how we’ll dance wild in the spring of April. I can’t stop. Then the line I’ve needed arrives.

I’ve got a body full of stars.

I’ve always had them.

I’ve forgotten them.

Afterward, in the parking lot, I face my car toward a trailer park and start to tap on my chest. The science of tapping yourself into health seems legit. I don’t know why we all aren’t doing it all the time, or why I’ve only just begun and probably won’t continue with any regularity. For now, I am the lady bundled up in a down jacket and hat who taps on her forehead, her wrist, her clavicle, her heart, her eyebrows.

What is that lady doing? the people walking out wonder.

She is caught between trying everything and nothing all at once.

In the grocery store, people continue to tell me that Eula is a serious baby.

“Yep, she is a studious one,” I hear myself respond. “But she smiles at home.”

Lauren tells me to say to people, “She just doesn’t like you.” Why the hell am I apologizing for my daughter, for the exquisite intensity of my daughter, for her no-bullshit detector? People prefer girls who smile at first glance. It scares them to have a girl look right into their eyes.

I told my mother the other day that I’m intentional, not intense.

Not intense the way people define intense.

“Yes,” she said, “I see that.”

Thank you. After years of being called intense by my family. I would like to change my tendency to be a bulldozer determined to rearrange the earth. That aggression doesn’t serve anyone. But when did intense become a bad thing to be? Intense is laser eyes, clear mind, focused, articulate tongue. It isn’t bad for a man. Our culture believes an intense woman is a catastrophe. I’m tired of the inevitability of this paradigm.

After a long day of teaching, I push the door open into my mom’s cabin. She has tied twine to a plastic laundry basket and is pulling Eula around in this boat. Wooden spoon in hand, Eula grunts when my mom stops, grunts again to say More. I wouldn’t have thought of this simple game.

It’s been six months since I returned to work—meeting with clients about their projects and teaching four classes a semester. No one would guess I struggle. I crack jokes about the hardship of early motherhood or sleep deprivation. I’m not trying to hide it. But everyone thinks I’m normal. One of my students tells me she sees clarity in my eyes, no pain, no subterfuge. Who is that woman she is talking about? Where is she? I squeeze my professional life into two full days with a lot of catch-up in the evenings. My mother watches Eula one day a week—they make construction-paper art projects and look through all her jewelry. Chris watches her the other day, takes her skiing around the field or to Home Depot to talk to Gary the plumber. During my four solo days with my daughter, we make meals and do laundry.

I know there is value in her watching daily tasks.

I know there is value in not entertaining her.

We also sing.

I’m trying to keep myself steady.

I stay steady until something with Chris turns sour again. Here’s the honest consideration: let’s say my subconscious, or even conscious, self was preventing me from healing in order to both get Chris’s attention and punish him. It’s likely. It’s ugly. I haven’t allowed myself to voice my continued concern that I cannot heal my body while living in the climate of this marriage. All I want him to do is recognize what I’ve undergone. He did, sort of, the other day. We sank into the car together (my request and my asking my mom to take Eula). Our taxed breath fogged up the windows. His gray wool jacket was covered in sawdust from work. This would be our culminating moment after almost two years, since my pregnancy, of me continually asking him to verbally honor me—and him not doing so. He read off the list I wrote and gave to him: I honor you for carrying our daughter for almost ten months, I honor you for vomiting that entire time, I honor how difficult it must feel to pee on yourself daily, I honor . . . He was kind. I cried until my nose was raw because his body language indicated that his words were only out of duty. He was following orders he thought “good” husbands should follow. When he said, “Let’s do this every night,” with a distant voice, something in me broke again. Were we playing pretend? Were we in some film where I played the wife? I wanted him to come up with his own words. I wanted him to care enough to plan and organize and initiate the whole thing. As if he were the keeper of a magic potion that would allow me to heal. When the car door shut, I didn’t know where or who I was. My vow to turn a corner had turned into a brick wall.

“That’s so simple and great,” I say to my mom when she looks up.

“You kids used to love your cardboard-box boats,” she says.

I scoop Eula up and nuzzle her to my face.

“How’s Chris feeling?” my mom asks.

The question launches me into a rant about how men can’t deal, how Chris has a cold and he can’t function, like he can’t form a sentence it is so painful, and I want to scream, “Oh please. Are you joking? It’s that bad? Try feeling like shit, so much worse than you’ve ever felt for nine, no, ten months straight, and then going through childbirth, and then feeling even worse, a thyroid that doesn’t work, hormones probably askew, loss of continence and therefore loss of a basic human dignity, with almost zero sleep and a child dependent on your breast, your mood, your everything, but you show up and smile and sing and create rhythm for her despite it all. Try that. A cold. Whatever. Mothers are the only ones capable of never getting a break. I wake up with Eula at five forty-five, whether I’m sick or not, when you can’t muster the energy, because you aren’t a morning person.”

I’m aware of the superlatives flying out my mouth.

“I know,” she says.

“I’m losing faith in men,” I sigh. “And I have one of the best.”

“You really do,” she agrees.

I don’t want to become that bitching woman. I really don’t. Though, if a friend ranted and released in the same way, I would hold the space for her, wouldn’t let her define herself as a bitching woman. I’ve never hated men. I don’t want to believe they are less resilient. I don’t know whether I’m mad at Chris or all men or the unchecked masculine in our world and in all of us. My cells are in a holding pattern about it. As I watch my mom pulling Eula around in her laundry basket, the strength of women moves like a tidal wave over me. I want to chest bump every woman on the planet.

At the end of February, we move out of the guesthouse. It is time. My parents need it as a rental, and we want to respect that. Our friend Rebecca has invited us to live in her basement in town for free and we have offered to pay some rent, something for utilities, something. We’ll keep her and her infant son company while her husband works out of town.

The car is packed.

Two backpacks full of clothes, a crib, and my Costco-size box of Always Extra-Long Pads with Wings. Rebecca said it’s okay for us to bring Bru but he’s too big and he would probably dog-hair their entire home. He’ll stay with my parents until we move into our house, sometime late this summer.

“Come here, sweets,” I say, and I gather Eula, who is nearly one year old and crawls like a gorilla now, with one fist, one flat hand. We walk around the concrete floor of the guesthouse. Say goodbye to the fan, fireplace, and Mexican giraffe. I remind her that we labored here together and she grew almost her first full year here. Part of me grieves and settles into nostalgia. The other part is depending on the energy of a geographic switch.

“This is the last time we’ll be here as we have been,” I say, and she cocks her head at me and starts to whimper. I tell her it’s okay, but somehow she understands we are leaving. She waves goodbye to the trees without a prompt from me.

Goodbye, trees.

My mom stands by our car wearing her father’s old wool hat and her standby black stretch pants. She knows how to move across oceans with infants. This move is nothing.

Goodbye, Mom.

Goodbye, Mare.

Thank you.

We will be back. But in our own house—nearby, but separate.

On our drive over, I know we’ll see my mother in a few days, so easy. In moments like these I always reference the story of my orphaned Irish great-great-grandmother who, as a twelve-year-old, stepped onto a ship bound for America with her two siblings and never returned home.

We are all descended from the remarkable.

In the backseat, Eula laughs at her book.

Her hee-haw laugh is my laugh.

When we arrive, the shift to town is noticeable. Gone is most of the wild. Gone are the owls. Gone are the cranes and mountain lions, the presence of a creek, the open, the trees holding us up with their roots. The weather isn’t gone, though. Chris unloads our duffel bags, and I help where I can. With Eula on one hip and small bags in the other hand, it occurs to me that my incontinence has made literal movement through life difficult. Sleep deprivation is a heavy smothering blanket, but maybe it wouldn’t have knocked me down so hard if we had had our own home, or if I could walk to the car or out of a grocery store without feeling like my organs were going to fall out of my vagina. Maybe I could have been a normal sleepy mother. Is there such a thing? I’ve never been scared of effort. But this kind of effort has no name. It has shorted me out.

I try to be kind to myself.

After dinner, I take Eula downstairs for bed. I explain this will be our home for a while, and we go about making it so. We say good night to the music speaker, trees outside the window, wooden boxes, zebra, map, and the lights. We will do this same bed ritual for months.

Over the next week, Rebecca unloads what she has been holding. She, unlike me, has been alone. She tells me how she has lost her inherent confidence since becoming a mother. She was so in her skin as an adolescent. I listen and notice grief catch in my throat—grief for her, grief for me, for having missed that in my skin knowing that could have been when I was that age. We pause. We feed the babes some salmon and egg yolk and sauerkraut and zucchini. We remember to eat some ourselves too even though we would rather eat bread and butter.

The conversation continues, in the minutes that make up each day.

This, we decide, is how living should be.

The village. No nuclear-family-in-one-house mumbo jumbo. And yet we all do it.

We take the babes to our local museum to check out geckos. It’s our ploy to get out of the house in winter. After two laps, my pad is soaked and I tell Rebecca I won’t be able to carry Eula up the stairs to the kid floor without wetting my pants completely. She grabs Eula, and up we go. I follow and watch Rebecca’s strong biceps as she hips both babes on her slender frame. Neither of us knows that in less than a year her Lyme disease will flare. She’ll be in a prison of seizures, and body breakdown will, eventually, surface. No matter what a woman seems to be there is always a layer beneath. Why are so many of our bodies suffering? For now, she appears to be the goddess mother I can’t be. The numbness starts in my chest and moves out to my limbs. Just feel the sadness, don’t numb. But numb is how I’ve learned to self-protect.

She’s been at it for an hour in the shadowy dark. It’s well past her bedtime, but I won’t pry her away. Her ten-month-old body is working something out. Her front teeth have started to come in. She leans against the carpeted stairs in this new home. It’s her first encounter with climbing to another level. Lifts one leg, looks down, picks up a foot, as if willing it to do something. Next she arcs her back, reaches up into nothingness and talks about it, moan, groan, chirp, dadadadadadadada. I let it happen because what else can I do? There is so much golden hope in this moment. She becomes a bear cub. She becomes, perhaps for the first time, completely unaware of where her mama is. Then, with a bolt, she crawls up one step, pauses for an instant, realizes what has happened, then slides back down, retreats back to safe space. And this, yes, is how it works for all of us, I think, sitting there, my back against the wall, watching my daughter find ascension.

What I learn: No part of the body is isolated. The pelvic bowl and feet mirror one another. Fallen arches can indicate weak bowl. My flat feet may be part of the equation. From the beginning of this journey, I’ve sensed pronounced collapse on the right side of my pelvic bowl, much like my more collapsed right arch. Strengthen the foot and see what happens. Same story with the jaw. Midwives know to tell a laboring woman to loosen her mouth—no clench. When you release the jaw, the cervix can ideally dilate as it needs to. I remember that sensation. Our mouth is connected to our root is connected to our feet. It all operates as a movement. A prolapse can often be a result of misaligned posture. Women know, instinctively, how to walk with a curve in our body. It’s a biological benefit. But how many hours have I sat in a chair—in school, at college, at jobs, as a writer, right now? Humans were never meant to sit. I have also wanted to hide my body. Don’t poke my butt out. Don’t sway. There is an unlearning that must happen. Untuck my tail. Invite myself back into movement.

We go to visit friends and family on the East Coast. On the airplane, Chris and I snuggle our faces together as Eula stands on us, ooos and ahhhs at everyone. She’s a croaker these days, sounds like a pterodactyl orating to the masses. People will ask me, “What’s she like?” Studious. Shy. Silly. Observer. I can name these qualities, and they are true, but I want to practice saying, “That might change.” That being shy or silly or any category isn’t for life, if she doesn’t want it for life. I want to notice her in a way that she notices me noticing.

In New York, one of my close friends does a bodywork session on me. She tells me I’ve always had a deep reservoir but don’t have access to it now because I’m blocked. My diaphragm is crammed up in my chest. Emotions have no way to process and can’t reach my organs.

It feels to her like my body is cut in half.

“I don’t know how to do this healing and do everything else,” I say.

“You will do it,” she says. “Just be gentle with yourself.”

In the early morning, as we stare out at a blue-dawn city, Eula, who thought the skyscrapers were trees, bites the hell out of my elbow flesh. I make a silent deal with her. If this buys me another hour, another fifteen minutes of sleep, bite away, I’ll take it.

The movement.

At night, she won’t wind down.

“We were here together once,” I tell her, “when you were in Mama’s belly.” I sat nauseous on this bed, read about baby sign language, and finally connected with tears to the fetus within me. Now we sign every day—please, more, all done, milk. She nods and spin spin spins, scoots herself safely off the bed, reaches for everything, does side somersaults, waves at the elephant mobile, cackles, arches her back and then, when she finds my hairbrush, we are all hairbrush for an hour. I show her that it brushes my hair. She tries it on her own hair, slow at first and then swats at my head, trying to help me brush. I see practice as integral to life now. She is on the verge of walking and must use all her muscles to get there. I am on the verge of healing and must use all my muscles to get there. This back-and-forth goes on forever, in the dark, with the sounds of sirens and human bustle below. I love this moment of teaching her how to groom herself, all that is implicated, all the beauty and obligation and expectation of woman with her hair. None of that is here. The brush is a tool. I am her mother and she is my daughter and we can delight in this act, just like my mother showed me with her Mason Pearson hairbrush.

Because we are on vacation and away from our storm, Chris talks openly to our dear friends. In the corners of apartments, I sit and listen. He is not talking to me directly, even though he is. He thinks birth is more traumatic for the partner than the woman. “How?” someone asks. Then, without drama, he shares that my eyes were closed the whole time and I didn’t see the monitor with our child’s dangerously low heartbeat, or the nurses from the OR ready to wheel me away, or the stress on everyone’s faces, or the look on my own face. I was an animal in a flood of hormones. He wasn’t. He lived it. I see his point. I see the best supporting masculine wanting credit. I want to interrupt and say that he’s never given birth, for one, and suffering isn’t a contest, but then I’d have to live up to that truth myself. For days, I think about what he has said, how it might extend to everything we’ve lived. Maybe it’s more of a heartbreak to watch someone deteriorate than be the one who deteriorates. Maybe it’s worse to witness an unraveling than to unravel. I’ve always told him I’d rather be the one dead in an avalanche than the one who loses him to an avalanche.

Where do we meet then?

How do we meet each other again?

We take the subway and head over to Riverside Park with Eula. She cranes her head out the stroller, stares at each person, at each dog, each tree. She would kiss them all if she could. This will be the first time Chris and I have shown her a place we knew before her.

“We lived here six years ago,” I say out loud.

I used to jump rope here to train my muscles. We used to rollerblade together and laugh as we hopped curbs and corners. We would eat a baguette and avocado and watch the sunset over the Hudson. Chris used to find trees that meant something to him and then take my hand to show me, the bark, the leaves, the height as he wrapped his arms around my waist.

These are the moments I want to share with her.

These are the moments I want to remember with him.

This moment could be us, the new family, lying on a picnic blanket, intertwining our legs, and marveling at the trees, at each other, at bringing our daughter, our healthy co-creation, here. But I can’t get on the ground because my pad is overflowing and I didn’t bring another. I used to say “I’m peeing on myself” to Chris but he no longer acknowledges that I’m even speaking when I say it. His silence in response to my plea has become a pain so constricting I cannot go there. I want to be joyful for my loved ones so I continue to smile and comment on the spring smell of trees. I don’t tell him how hard it is for me to be in the place my body once moved and jumped and played. I don’t tell him how my pelvic floor feels extended after the long walk on concrete. I don’t tell him how much I miss him, us. I don’t tell him about the metal wrecking ball sitting on my chest, how the grief is so heavy I can’t squirrel out from under it. I don’t tell him any of this because he’s heard it before and it’s all mine.

I try to be someone good.

I open the packet of raspberries we just bought.

I feed one to Eula and one to Chris and one to myself until we are feeding each other and covered in stains. Forget about who you thought you would be in this moment. Just forget about it. Move on. When the wrecking ball squeezes the breath out of me again, my hand comes to my chest and rubs. I get up and tell them I just want to see that tree over there and I walk to it and lean against it in a way that won’t appear to others like sadness and beg it to help me keep it together. Just for now. Please. I cannot drag my family into more grief.

We fly home and then across the country to San Francisco—our travel for the year lumped into two weeks. Chris stays home to work, so we make it a female trip. My mom and I push the stroller up a sidewalk near my friend’s home. The air is gray and not all that warm and smells of flowers.

“Look at those bottlebrush,” she says, pointing to a tree with red fuzzy caterpillar-like flowers all over it.

“Hmmm,” I nod.

“They remind me of you,” she offers.

“They do. Why?”

“The streets of Sydney were covered in them when I was pregnant with you. I used to walk to the market. I walked everywhere. Remember that brass gong? I bought it the day I found out I was pregnant with you.”

“Really? I never knew that.”

“I did,” she says, and smiles.

“That’s so something I would have done,” I say. As we continue, I’m struck by my younger mother’s purchase, how she made a symbol out of a moment, how I didn’t know that she did that. Of course she does.

It’s a short trip. On our way to the airport, I ask my friend’s husband to carry my suitcase down the steep steps for me. I have to—or else. Is this my body now, is this who I am now? My mom is waiting on the sidewalk by her rental when we drive by. Without skipping a beat, she opens the trunk and hurls her suitcase in. My friend comments on how impressed she is that my mom didn’t ask for help with something heavy, that her mom, most moms this age, would have. Not my mom. It’s who she is. It’s who I used to be. I want to be just like her.

It’s the end of April. Eula is one day away from being a one-year-old. Chris has gone to buy groceries. Rebecca is out of town, so we have the house to ourselves. Right now, at 5 p.m., my water broke a year ago. Labor began. That labor represented all other labors—a passage of all the ages. I notice the time and hold Eula to my chest. We’ve been dancing to flamenco but now we waltz across the carpet listening to the ethereal sound of Icelandic music. The sun descends as aspens flutter beyond the window. I smell her head and a river of tears pours out of me, my whole body remembering, as if on cue, how we began this journey. “I love you, I love you,” I say, as we dance and dance and spin, but there is no way to express such gratitude. Eula sees a dog run by outside and kicks her legs out. I put my turtle mouth to her turtle mouth and we smile at each other with our eyes.

That night, Chris and I make a dinner of pasta, pancetta, peas, and goat cheese. We drink white wine and huddle close. We talk about how our daughter is preparing to walk. She nurses like a hippo, all the time, standing, sitting, grabbing, laughing, and giving me the sign for milk, a squeeze of the hand, proud of herself for making the connection. He sets himself up on the floor. I’ve asked him to paint a sandhill crane in red on a handmade drum for her first birthday gift. He has an affinity for cranes; I call her my firebird; cranes fly overhead and croak their croak often, so much so that Eula will one day shock a city friend of ours when she points to a bird in a book and calls it “crane.” While he designs and dips a brush in red, I write her a long letter that doesn’t feel adequate enough because how do I explain her to herself, how do I explain anything about this first year?

I wish I had a letter like this from my mom.

I wish she had one from hers.

We’ve driven out to my parents’ home and our soon-to-be home to celebrate Eula’s birthday. Her dried umbilical cord rests in my pocket. I’ve been waiting to bury this cord and make ceremony. What a day. What a warm, brown, still day. We left our wool hats in the car. My cheeks feel warm. I greet the band of cottonwoods with a nod. They remember. While my parents bustle around in the cabin, Chris and I get ready to climb the hill with Eula.

“My whole body is buzzing,” I say, and I squeeze him, squeeze Eula, and Bru.

The moment will beget other movement. I know so. I want so. Doesn’t everything change after the first year, don’t people start to break the surface again? That’s what they tell you—the postpartum period is officially over at three months or nine months or a year, but it doesn’t go beyond.

That demarcation would seem absurd to a more seasoned mother.

This is hope.

“I love our life,” I say, and smile at him.

“I’m glad, babe.”

“Do you know if we have a trowel?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says, as he puts Eula into the carrier on his chest.

“We probably need one.”

“Why?”

“I want to bury the cord, not leave it there to blow away.”

“We can put some rocks on it,” he says, and then adds, “If you want a trowel, you can find one. I’m not responsible for knowing where the trowel is.”

What I hear is: Don’t fret, Don’t Ask for Help, Don’t Make This a Big Deal.

What I feel is: Disconnection. Moment ruined.

“This matters to me,” I say as the wrecking ball slams onto my chest, and my legs move fast to the guesthouse, away, and when I collapse on the bed, I cannot get up, no rising from this place I labored with Eula a year ago, at this time, where we breathed so well together. I try to breathe and remember me, the laboring woman, and trust that all will be well, but I’m not sure I can ever get up again.

This physical response comes from somewhere beyond that one moment.

Eventually, they come in, I get up, and we go on a walk.

I carry the now-found trowel.

My man and my daughter and my dog go ahead of me. I stay back. Alone. I weep along the ditch near our soon-to-be house. My body falls again, on wet ground. Maybe this is what needs to happen. He looks back at me and stops. But he has no energy to move toward me, and actually I don’t want him near me anyway.

“Honor me, fucker,” I scream into my hands so no one can hear.

We make it to the plateau.

Eula starts to eat snow.

“We can’t do this right now,” Chris says, and I know he’s right but I don’t want him to be right about anything. We don’t do it, even though it’s her actual birthday and the spring weather is all small hail and then sun and it’s so damn beautiful. When we get back down from the plateau, he hugs me. The touch calms me enough, but I keep my distance. He doesn’t feel like someone I know at all. We stand by the creek. I pick up sticks and hand them to Eula. She’s still in his arms. I don’t want to transfer my energy. She watches brown water flow by and then I look at my watch.

“There it is,” I say. “You were born.”

I press my lips to her forehead.

I stand apart and remember a memory I’m not even sure is true—how, after they sewed me up, they wheeled me to the new room as Chris stayed in the delivery room and held Eula in his arms skin to skin, and my parents came through the emergency room door, saw me on my way, quick hug, and continued past me to go meet their granddaughter. How I, the vessel who had done my job, was carted away.

I ask Chris to come with me to my doctor visit with Holcomb. I want him to hear so he can be part of my healing process.

“Sure, babe,” he agrees with no resistance. This hot and cold we exist in with each other is unlike anything pre-pregnancy. He calls it whiplash. I can see him as my destroyer one minute and then my savior the next. I dart like a snake from this to that. I can’t know yet that I am finally connecting to my feminine. She, by essence, flows between emotions. But she is also skilled at it. I’m not skilled yet. I only do damage. My inconsistency has made me unsafe to him. We are emotionally unsafe to each other. Yet we’ve been ravenous for each other recently—on the carpet, blinds open, while runners run by at dusk, over and over again, as our daughter sleeps in the basement. We tend a tenuous connection. He has made it clear that he will not budge. He cannot honor me the way I need unless my anger toward him gets directed in healthier ways. He is right but some part of that equation still doesn’t sit right with me.

We sit in her office. I want to be holding hands but we aren’t.

Holcomb glances through the blood work and saliva test and tells me my hormones are out of balance: high estrogen and low progesterone. We could consider some progesterone supplement. My thyroid, however, is looking great. My body is actually doing the healing. I’ve moved out of the red zone for a potential autoimmune disease.

“It’s still there. But it’s far less acute,” she explains with a smile.

“Really?”

I don’t know what to do with this good news. There are other issues still and new issues, but this big one is actually healing. I didn’t think healing would happen. On many levels, I’ve courted my wound, been seduced for years and years by the false power of sickness and sadness and anger. They have purpose, but aren’t they meant to pass through, not lodge? Has my darkness and struggle made me interesting to myself and therefore interesting to others? I’ve never been curious about my joy. As we leave the office and walk past crocuses and the green flush of spring, I start to acknowledge the trench of my own making. Chris glides next to me and shows his relief at the good news when he takes hold of my hand.

“This is great. You are healing,” he offers. “You’ve been waiting for a reason to take care of your body your entire life. You’ve wanted to heal and heal deeply.”

“I know,” I say, and rest my head on his shoulder.

At the pharmacy, the progesterone troches stack up as another medication to me. They give me vanilla-flavored. Okay. I will start them soon. They should help with mood and perhaps the prolapse too. Somehow, less than twenty-four hours after being told my body is healing itself, before any new medicine, a few miracles happen. I dance with Eula and don’t pee on myself. My thighs feel and even look stronger. I stop wearing my pads at home because I don’t want to become dependent on them. My whole body becomes a hawk to me. May as well spread my wings and fly. I tell Chris I will take on our food situation. We haven’t been able to dial in our cooking of meals, between work and parenting. I have time to make Eula gorgeous food but never enough for us. I am still trying to release my fear of domesticity, of being a woman at home who cooks.

The next day, Eula feeds herself a bite of chicken. Then she feeds me. Then tucks a piece of it into the orchid’s soil to feed it. Why not?

Someone recently told me about a friend whose pregnancy was easy, no nausea, a little tiredness, but not much, and the birth, oh, the birth, only four hours and a cinch, and the baby has already slept through the night for a week. Apparently, the new mother is really low-key, super low-key.

It must help to be low-key.

I never wanted to be a low-key woman.

Do I now?

I’m trying to hold on to this new possibility that my body, that I, am heal-able. Release my outrage down the creeks and rivers and back to the ocean. My ears are open for how—how to do so. A woman at a dinner shares a story with a group of us. On a walk, she once saw a mountain lion kill a deer. Her mother heard and put her in front of a medicine man for the next four days: part of their Navajo tradition.

“And they were telling me that it was a warning,” she explained, “to stay with the goodness in me, to not choose the bitterness.”

“Thank you,” I tell her, “I need that. Thank you.”

The next morning, I welcome spring. Beyond our tiny basement window, an aspen shakes itself awake. My legs are propped up, and Eula points to the birthmark on my hip.

“Yeah,” I say, “that’s my birthmark. You have one right here and here.” I stroke her hairline where a noticeable dark freckle has always been and then point to two on her ankles. She crawls to the black sheets hanging around her crib and starts to drape them, an elaborate dance of folds, this child of folding, folding, folding. When she is done, she grabs a diaper from her basket and comes back to bed. She grins at me and puts it between my legs, as if she is going to put it on me.

“If only you knew, girl,” I smile at her.

Then she crawls right up to my face, nose to nose, and plants a kiss on my mouth.

It’s her first voluntary kiss.

In the outdoor pool at the hot springs, my legs wave in the water and what comes to me is this: “Thank you, fat, for protecting me all these years. I needed you, but I don’t anymore. I’m ready to expose my muscle, myself.” Under the cloudy sky, I hook my feet on the metal ladder and float back. Warm water flows over my body until the only part at surface is my nose.

I am in a cave, soft cave, womb, my mother’s, yes, but a larger one, an everywoman sort of womb. She tells me to reshape my rage. It is to be used but used well. I’ve been rejecting my own divine feminine all these years—scared of her, unsure of her, mad at her. But she is always here and willing to give, and this has been my opportunity to connect.

Pat-Pat and Mare and Eula.

I get to remake my womanhood.

I see an old woman in the changing room, must be at least eighty-five years old, her skin as white and translucent as a moth wing.

“Hello,” she winks at me.

“Hi,” I say, and think another teacher. Pay attention. She is naked and wrinkled and sagging and stunning and wipes her feet off with paper towels, then oils her body slowly. Such care. I’ve never cared for my body that way. Part of my low-maintenance-woman persona. Chris has been asking me for years to step into the feminine goddess I want to be but don’t admit to wanting to be. My mother taught me how to moisturize my face, brush my hair, wanted to teach me how to decorate myself.

Not for me, I said. Those things are empty, trivial, stupid patriarchy.

I didn’t know they could be self-honoring.

I didn’t know about the importance of that pleasure.

I don’t want to be good.

I want to be whole.

“Gorgeous day,” the woman says to me as she walks out.

What I learn: Women are doorways. Not doormats. I already know so but relearn it every day. Long ago, and not long ago, land-based people organized their lives around menstruation. Many evolutionary anthropologists believe that structure was instigated by women in order to protect children and provide the right food for pregnant and nursing mothers. In effect, it made sure the human race survived. Rituals began with the moon. Most indigenous cultures have a long-held belief in the Great Mother and the sanctity of menstruation. A woman’s blood is considered as precious as gold.

Of course, even the most unsuspecting cultures honor the female—almost in secret, it seems, a holdover from another era. Many churches and cathedrals have an oval archway door (vulva) that leads into the dark sacred space (womb). The vulva shape repeats all over nature: an open door, a passageway out for every human, a place to transform.

Women can teach me, us, how to live inside of mystery and awe.

Doorways.

Mid-afternoon, I come home from work. My mom has been watching Eula at Rebecca’s house. They don’t hear my car. I lean against wood siding and peek through the large window to see them lying on the carpet with Eula flopped over Mare’s belly, both of them laughing donkey laughs with each other. Sun beats on my back, a breeze, a bird, my heart, and I watch for a moment, lock the scene into my body, then knock. They grin at me but stay spun in their honey moment.

Grandmother.

Granddaughter.

My teachers.

Later that evening, Eula and I sit outdoors and she walks for the first time, from concrete onto grass—nine bold steps.

Summer has arrived. Eula waddles around in a green world. She watches the play of shadow and light. We are about to move back to the land. The house will be ready in August; in the meantime, we will live in our sweet yurt, all two hundred square feet of it. I could go on and on about how blessed I am. I start to notice how my incontinence changes with my menstrual cycle. The first two weeks, all is generally well, minus jumping or lifting. After ovulation, everything loosens and the closer my body gets to bleeding the more my bladder can’t hold. This gives me one more piece to my puzzle.

“You know,” my mother barks one day, “you just might have to consider surgical intervention.” She knows better than to say that to me. Something must be bothering her. She must want to hurt me.

I stand in her kitchen and say nothing.

My armor starts to lock into place, slides over my chest and stomach first.

“I’m just saying, it is probably an important option,” she adds as I move to behind the counter, far away from her.

“Mom, it’s not helpful to hear that. Just because some people take the easy way out doesn’t mean I will. I’m not that way. I’ve never been that way.” The easy way out was offensive and not the right thing to say. I watch myself do what people do in arguments: pass my hurt on to her as a way to diffuse it away from me. But really doing that just magnifies it for everyone.

She starts to cry.

“I just need appreciation,” she says, and holds her scrunched face. It always hurts to see my mother cry, turns me right into a soft snail.

“I do so much,” she continues. “I’ve given you so much of myself. What’s the problem? I don’t understand.” Everything she says is true. I don’t know what it has to do with me having surgery but clearly what we say initially is often not what we mean or even want to say. For her to say this is the start of a breakthrough for her, a shift in a caretaking role she’s played her whole life with her children and others.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I haven’t thanked you enough. I don’t know why. I’m sorry.” But my mind tracks back to all of the apologies and thank-yous. I want to string them up on a laundry line and count them. Have I withheld? I don’t tell her that deep connection with anyone but Eula has felt like a burden to me—either rife with potential hurt or me as caretaker at a time where I have little to give. I want to offer more connection to my mother. We all start as a released egg waiting to be fertilized, hoping for the very first contact and connection of life.

There is so much to release.

There is so much for my mom to release.

There is so much of me to release.

A few days later, she comes over to Rebecca’s house and we all sit on the couch together. Eula lifts my shirt and pokes my belly button. I tell her that’s what connected me to Mare. Then she lifts Mare’s shirt and my mom says, “Oh look.” I love that she is willing to show her whole body to Eula.

“And that connected Mare to Pat-Pat,” I say.

“And this,” I coo, smooching her belly button, “is what connected you to me.”

It’s strange and common that humans come from humans.

Eula scampers up to me and brushes my hair out of my face.

Such gentle touch, this girl. She studies my face, points to my eyes, and smiles. Then she flops backward onto Mare.

I see you. I see you too.