Float

____________________________________

The water splashes up and over.

Eula wants to splash all the water out of the bathtub and onto my mom’s wooden floor. We want to rock our small boat.

“Come here, you goose,” I say, and sway her body through the water toward me. This is the third place we’ve lived since Eula was born just over a year ago now. We take many baths together in this large claw-foot tub, now that we are back at my parents’ place. Early June and we have found shelter again in our yurt.

It has canvas walls. It is a tent.

Temperature cannot be regulated.

I’ve tried to maintain the rhythm for Eula, by keeping her in her crib. But the yurt becomes a sauna during the day. I rock her to sleep in a room so hot she sweats through her pajamas. When night comes, cold brings her back out and into our bed. I’ve learned not to freak out about this. I’ve learned nothing stays the same: ebb and flow. We sleep on a mattress on the floor with Bru’s nose pressed on our foreheads and Eula’s dough love body in the middle. In the morning, we snuggle and then I load my girl into a red wagon, along with any laundry and items for the day, and we walk along the creek, under magical trees, birdsong, toward my parents’ cabin. They have agreed to let us use their bathroom, as long as we move into our own house, down the field, by end of summer.

Our home is currently a shed structure covered in wood. We are all waiting for the windows to go in—usually they go in before this stage, but for a thousand reasons it had to happen in this order. My father walks down the driveway every day, can barely contain his enthusiasm, stands beneath fluttering cottonwoods, waiting. Chris is so saturated by the building process. Eighteen apertures hold no glimmer for him. He laughs at us, reminds us that windows don’t mean the house is done.

For the rest of us, windows are everything.

I hover with anticipation. Once we move into our house, surely, then, I will become a steady woman, though I’m less and less sure she’s a possibility in anyone. Pots and pans in one place; clothes in a dresser; a corner for a writing desk; space to be a family. I am aware of the trouble with expecting the changing circumstances of my life to change me. Doesn’t prevent me from doing it anyway.

Eula glances up at me and then holds still in the bath. A few air bubbles rise and with them a little poop. I watch her with neutrality.

“Oh, there’s your poop,” I say.

We look together, then stand up and step out.

~

We make our way home from a Sunday barbecue, along dirt roads, the air warm and green, slow, pleasant. Alfalfa quivers in the breeze. My uterus feels heavy, a day or so away from bleeding. My peaked hormones put me on an edge. I drive through scenery people dream of and Chris and I whisper about nothing and everything as Eula sleeps. He doesn’t put a hand on my leg or tucked on the brim of my pants like he used to and I don’t put a hand on the back of his neck like I used to. I’ve recently suggested more couples therapy, but he convinces me out of it because we don’t have the funds. Okay, well he could go to therapy solo, so he feels supported. I am trying to support him but he doesn’t see it that way. No, he’d rather use the money and time to adventure in the mountains which is more nourishing to him, he says, than talking to someone. As we drive, though, our talk isn’t about that. We argue about something I won’t remember later and, as our car crests a hill surrounded by sky and green and mountains, we become two parts of a steam engine about to explode. How can the ether be so dense suddenly? My teeth are getting ground down. So are his. I call up what therapy has taught us—the importance of speaking a person’s words back so you truly hear and the person knows you heard. Of course, all I’m thinking about is how I need to be heard. I ask him to reflect back what I said to him.

“No,” he says.

I have heard him say no so many times.

I cannot bear to hear no anymore.

The heat starts at my seat, moves up fast, heart pounds, fire out my hands, keep them still, keep myself still, but the heat pulses and pressure builds, and my fear uncurls, wakes up again, beats wings hard, and when we come down the road toward our home, my glass self shatters.

I stop the car short of our driveway and start to bang on the steering wheel.

“Stop, Molly,” he says with a calm voice.

I cannot bear to hear stop anymore. I don’t stop. He gets out of the car and I crawl over the seat, reach out the window, grab at him to hold him down, but he unbuckles Eula and walks away with her. Okay, that’s it. I turn the car around and prowl, follow him, tell him Don’t you dare. He walks away, cradle-arm over Eula, protector father good father bad mother. Away. Away. I get out. I stomp to the woods and throw rocks at the ground until my body falls, pounds on grass and dirt. Give my rage back to Mama Earth like I’m supposed to. Direct it in the right direction, to a place that can hold and transmute it. Do the right fucking thing. None of it feels strange. I have been here before, many times, many moons, many ways.

But he stands at the edge of the woods and watches.

I don’t want to be watched.

That changes everything.

“You are ruining me,” I scream at him, over and over again, my arms punching the air between us, until there is no sound from my chest anymore. I want to scream, You man. My head hangs until I glance up and Eula has awoken. She stares at me, groggy, unsure of what has happened. What is her mama doing over there, why does she have claw marks on her face, why is her body on the ground?

My body responds to her.

I stand. I breathe. I walk toward her. I notice owls in a tree. They are all calling me back. Come back, Mama. Come back.

Later, Chris will call it “The Event” and say he forgives me but it can never happen again. I won’t have any energy to have a conversation about it. The morning after, as sun pours into our yurt, I utter an urgent prayer. Please lead me to health. Now. I cannot lose them. I cannot lose myself.

~

Holcomb asks whether my rage comes before my menses. She wants to run a test.

“Is it all the time or tied to your cycle?”

“Probably. The day before I bleed I seem to go insane.”

She explains that our doctor-culture name of PMS can be misleading. It is a chartable hormonal shift in the body, but there is a deeper level. What has been buried will come to the surface during this time. When people write a woman off as being hormonal, they dismiss her and make her feelings sound irrational. She should not dismiss the feelings. Though rage feelings are magnified feelings, they are real.

“Don’t discount that,” she says.

~

What I learn: Women and snakes. Long history. Our power is often graceful, coiled up and ready at our root. Not meant to be tamped down. But also not meant to flare and flare and flare without purpose. As a young woman, I saw enough unexpressed women to make me never want to be unexpressed. Pregnancy awoke my deep anger. I would not let anyone silence it. Do not hold me down. Do not tell me how not to be. Do not tell me what not to say. There’s been enough of that already. Beneath it was a great sadness. An enraged woman is unexpected and, therefore, a horror.

I gave myself permission to be her.

I gave myself permission to flare it up.

No more well-behaved woman for me.

It continued.

It has become repeated anger, the kind that loops and loops, over and over again. It leads to heart problems. It overworks the amygdalae and adrenals. It pauses the growth of new neurons. It becomes a pattern. It can be hard to shake. But the worst part: rage can sever all other feelings so you forget you were also joyful.

Joy.

There has always been joy within me.

Do not forget that. Go excavate it.

It occurs to me traditional cultures are/were, by design, a postpartum support group. Mothers walked to gather with other mothers at a market or field or other home. They talked, worked, laughed, sang, and grieved together. Their older children played nearby and the bigger ones instructed the little ones on the ways of life. The baby stayed strapped to a mama or got passed around to other women. If a woman needed to rest, the other women took on her extra work. It was a cycle. I don’t mean to glorify it. I only mean to say it is anathema to even want that today. We expect a partner to meet most of our needs. That does not make sense. That does not make sense on the most primal of levels. In constant community, I suspect normal rage would signal a person to pay attention, process and feel the grief, and then dance into pleasure. We would learn the art of moving between light and dark—not getting stuck in one.

Rage on top of rage creates more rage.

I’ve made so much space for my rage.

I want to welcome back my joy.

I want to make contact with my joy.

I’ve elbowed it out.

~

A few days later, we end up at a wedding. We stand outdoors watching Chris’s navy-pilot cousin get married in Montana. People calculate the perfect weekend to achieve the green glory no one realizes only lasts for two months here. They’ve found it today. I’ve always seen marriage as a courageous journey where you get to witness and be witnessed. What connection. What potential for love. I grab for my husband’s hand. We are changed but the same somehow.

I never thought I’d become this kind of middle-aged woman.

I want to stop the show and start a group conversation: yep, that vow is for real, yeah, and that one is really hard.

We left Eula to sleep over with my parents in the hallway of their cabin. We’ll return and sleep on the daybeds because it’s too complicated to get to the yurt in the dark with an already-slumbered babe. All should be well. I nursed her before leaving and will nurse her when we return. Because I didn’t have anything appropriate to wear for black-tie or because I didn’t make the time to find anything, my mother’s clothes came to the rescue—again. They smell of her perfume from years ago. It exacerbates me to be draped in my mother, not myself. I look like I’m going to a funeral, in all black with a sequin top as the only shimmer. I would prefer feathers. Chris’s uncle keeps calling me a black widow spider. Tease, tease. He must sense my venom.

I allow myself to get swept up in the love.

My quiet mother-in-law leaps up and dances with the groom because his mother passed away from a brutal cancer years ago. She awes me with this move, to step out of her comfort zone with such grace. The whole ceremony and celebration transports me to a space away from what has been.

My takeaway: It’s crucial to get out and away.

When the band starts, I dart to the dance floor without thinking, because dancing at weddings is what I love, what we love. When I hit my first bounce-hip move, pee floods out of me and as everyone else accelerates, I slow down, and my hips go stuck as I waddle back to a wall. Slip out to the bathroom without anyone seeing me. I can smell the sagebrush at night. Damp sagebrush. The mountains hum behind me, dark shadow shapes, like old grandmothers watching everyone below. Under these stars, the wrecking ball presses on my chest as I lean over a wooden fence. C’mon. C’mon. I cannot drag Chris into this. I gulp and tell myself that this, along with Eula, are the reasons I must heal my pelvic floor.

I have to be able to dance.

I have to be able to dance with her.

Acceptance is avoidance. It’s been over a year. I thought by now . . . I don’t know what I thought. Do more Kegels. Do more. Fix yourself even though you’re tired and the whole process exhausts you.

I never go back to dance.

We walk toward the car, arm in arm, under moon, stars, open western sky, some part of the old us awakened. He has doe eyes. My breasts are engorged and they hurt. We climb into our gray hatchback.

“You have to get this milk out of me,” I say to Chris in the dark.

“Really?” he asks. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, now, get on there and suck it out.”

We both laugh, but I’m serious. There is nowhere to hand-express my milk and it wouldn’t be fast enough anyway. I lift my shirt, snap off my bra, and there goes his head, ducked under, as people walk behind our parked car in the dark to their cars. Look at us, doing this thing in the car. Think of all the teenage boys who would give anything to do this to a woman in a car.

“You have to really suck hard, babe,” I explain.

“It’s so sweet,” he gurgles up. “I didn’t expect that.”

“Major nutritional value,” I tell him, and we hunker down some more so no one sees us. A few minutes later, I have some relief. But before he latches onto the next one, he pauses.

“Hold on, I need a break. This is hard work. My jaw hurts.”

We finish and laugh the whole way home, across the valley, speculating on which of our guy friends we think may or may not have tasted breast milk. One day, nursing will become a thing of the past for me. I don’t know when; not soon, though. It has been the one easy and heavenly—and that isn’t a word I use—ritual in the last year.

Later that night, while Chris and Eula sleep, I grab my own re-engorged breast and put my mouth to it. My large breasts come in handy here. Beloved breasts. In the clear moonlight, I suck out my own sweet milk.

It doesn’t seem strange at all.

~

In my dream, I fly a paper plane made of lavenders and blues and oranges. I have aviator goggles on and am a teacher of planes. But I crash into a lake and come up, gasping for air, yelling, “Help, help!” There is a man on a paddleboard. I am expecting him to come help but, in a flash, I know I can help myself. My screams stop. I follow the river of feathers and swim to that far-away shore.

~

The windows could sweat. It is ninety-five degrees, a hot sun, never thick here, just burning. We retreat to my parents’ cool bedroom of teal concrete floors and dark blue pillows. Eula rolls around on the bed, for once okay with not being outdoors. She usually pounds on the door, wants out, like a dog. Naked. Where she can pee on the grass, or on the plastic toilet we’ve put out there for her. The porch gives her tiny splinters on her bum, but she doesn’t seem to mind. I like to watch our bare feet touch the grassy muddy earth together. Yesterday we sat on the warm stone. She pulled at her vulva and opened her other hand in question.

This is how we communicate.

This is how she asks me questions.

“That’s your vulva,” I explained. “Like Mama.”

She nodded.

Now she turns and slides off the bed to rummage through Mare’s scarves in the chest. She insists, by pointing, on wearing purple pajamas and a black-and-white striped dress with a scarf in her hair. We oblige, help her fit her baby legs into the pants. She gazes at herself in the mirror with the seriousness of an actor, and then laugh laugh laughs. We’ve been grooming together for the past few months—brushing hair and teeth as we sing. Eula watched a friend show me some yoga postures. Ever since then, when I push back into downward dog, she walks around me, pushes on my lower back, touches my feet, then my knees, as if she is positioning me. Then she flops down into a pose herself.

“Oh-p,” is what we say together when anything happens. How is it possible to have staring contests that end in peals of laughter with a one-year-old? I never knew children are so themselves the moment they arrive.

Language.

I can hear the language train approaching from a distance. Here it comes.

She gestures to everything and then asks me, with a nod of her head, to repeat the name for it. On her crib in the yurt, the “knot in the wood” is a favorite to repeat. Something about the word “knot” sends her off into uncontrollable giggles.

After our dress-up day in Mare’s room, we stroll down to the yurt. My mom stands on the porch and waves. Eula waves back as I pull her red wagon through our mowed grass pathway and we say good night to the cottonwoods, the creek, the owls. I pull the drape around her crib, unroll the canvas blinds, and she burrows into my clothes drawer. The hour before bed allows us to get any excess energy out. When I turn around to scoop her up, she tosses a few shirts at my feet and points at my chest.

“You want me to put these on?” I ask.

She nods and then steps a few feet back. She cocks her head to watch. I slip down to my bra and pull a black flowered shirt over my head. She smiles and then tosses another one to me. Are we doing this? I realize my daughter is dressing me, somehow telling me it’s okay to dress myself. Five shirts later, she nuzzles up to me, rubs her eyes, and we are done, but some old self within is saying, Let’s do more, let’s do this all the time, this is fun.

~

On our drive back from town one afternoon, Eula coos out at cows in the backseat. I tell my mom about my recent action plan. I need to cut gluten and dairy out of my diet in order to truly heal my thyroid. They are inflammatory foods.

“And god knows I’m inflamed enough,” I laugh, and she laughs with me.

“Well, you just have to do it then,” she says.

“I know, but it’s hard,” I say, and then hedge whether to share more, to expose what food dredges up in me, why it’s not as simple as just saying sayonara, as Pat-Pat would say. I no longer want to trim my mother out of my emotional life with my precise X-Acto blade. My mom knows food can be my drug, but she doesn’t experience it for herself. I’ve never seen the woman overeat a day in her life, and not because she’s restricting. She eats everything in moderation—such color and balance on her plate every meal. No one thinks her to be a smoker because she doesn’t smell of smoke, but cigarettes are her challenge. Soon, though, she will let them go after decades of counting on them.

“It’s strange to say it,” I start, “but gluten and dairy are my only reliable friends. I mean, that’s what it feels like, anyway. Bread and cheese.”

“I get it,” she laughs. “I feel the same way about cigarettes.”

“Yeah?” I say.

“I even wrote a letter to the tobacco gods once.”

We are more similar than I think.

~

On a dry, baked, rocky ascent, I watched Holcomb fling her daughter onto her back so easily, side hip, bend, scoot her to the back, and draw up the straps of the carrier. No need for another person to help. No extra stuff. No hat. No sunscreen. I haven’t seen this easy maneuver of hers before. She’s always had her daughter on her back by the time we arrive. By contrast, I could have been embarking on a desert expedition with Eula in a bulky framed backpack, my huge straw hat, globs of sunscreen, long-sleeve shirt, bottle of water.

I thought I could injure myself if I move in ways I used to.

It cannot be true.

Later, I practice once and then strap Eula to my back in the carrier.

We step out the door and seek shade.

I don’t wear anything but a tank, a skirt, and my daughter. I don’t want to hide my body anymore. We walk with Bru through the woods, grass grazing arms, and then, at last, arrive under the treed canopy of the creek. The water runs coppery and low over rocks in July, when farmers use it to irrigate their fields. I step in, welcome the cold water to my feet.

We move upstream.

Rustle in the willows. A fawn darts by, up and over the bank and away.

“A baby deer,” I say to Eula. “Did you see?”

I don’t care if I pee all over myself—into this water. Eula leans over the carrier and peers into shade and sun on water. We crawl over fallen cottonwoods. We balance on rocks. We slip and then don’t on slippery stones. We dip her baby feet in the flowing water. We move all the way up the creek, as far as we can go on this land.

It feels good to move my body with abandon.

It feels like a baptism.

As water rushes over my feet, I call up my thousands of agile moments. Must be able to see them to make them real again.

I am made of healthy tissue.

I am made of healthy tissue. We, Eula and I, are made of healthy tissue.

I must repeat this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over as water rushes over and over and over and over me.

~

What I learn: No one has personally ascribed any of my story to me. My shovel can only dig so deep. I have recently considered a jade egg. It is a practice from four thousand years ago in China, supposedly taught only to the queen and concubines. Though many believed the result—tight sexual organs—was to please the king, it actually improved the woman’s health and her connection to spirit. The egg gives a woman a felt-sense of where and how her muscles work together to lift up the Chi. As a woman tones, her orgasms become longer lasting and more intense and she has a stronger sexual flow, and therefore, perhaps more important, a stronger divine flow within her. Without that strength, you leak urine and life force. Once again, who knew? Years ago, Chris made me a wooden oval for that purpose. Neither of us knew much about vaginal weight lifting but he was tapping into a knowing beyond him. Here, tend to your femaleness. I wish I had. Instead of the egg, I buy what a friend recommends for mother-vaginas: Lelo beads. But they seem to push my prolapse out, so I stop and decide to push past my fear of an egg doing the same and try one, one day, some day.

~

Eula tucks her cold feet between my legs. I open my eyes to a flaxen dawn. It settles on the yurt’s wooden floor, and the sound of a hawk and the creek comes into focus. My body snuggles us both back, closer to Papa.

“Come closer,” I whisper to Chris. “Keep us warm.”

My words wake her up.

Once she’s up, she’s up, but we try to lure her back.

“Come play, come yank on our ears,” I beg as she prances around.

“Come do anything but get up,” Chris moans, and flops a heavy arm over me. But my firebird is ready for the day, and it happens to be the day of my birth.

I’ve written notes to both my parents. It’s my turn to honor them for making me and raising me. My father will get on a plane and move to New York for work today. He’ll come back to visit, but not to live, not until he can. I’m surprised by my whole-body sadness about it. Somehow it feels like the end of a hard era, one I want to commemorate by taking a picture of us all in front of the cabin, frame it—The Year(s) We Cohabitated and Molly Went Loca.

We walk into a cabin full of balloons.

My parents blew them all up. The tears gather behind my eyes. Why is everyone so nice to me? I hug them and Eula orates and swats at each balloon. Bru makes a quick escape back to the calm porch. Chris makes gluten-free blueberry pancakes and we all celebrate before the airport run.

I usually walk in the woods on my birthday.

We drive up to Emerald Lake and Eula demands to walk the trail on her own. She can do it on her own. She wants to do everything on her own. No hands and when she sees me strap the carrier around my waist, she pushes my leg away.

“Be mindful,” I say, as she pulls herself up and over rocks. The word careful is too loaded. I don’t want her to walk through life as a careful woman. I’ve heard Holcomb request wise feet from her daughter. This I also like and adopt. We hear a helicopter fly overhead. She pauses, lifts her finger to her ear. I hear it, Mama. I hear it, Papa. Over roots and stones, she grunts.

“Do I grunt?” I ask Chris.

“That’s a May family thing,” he says, and pinches me. “You all speak in sounds.” I’ve recently made a point of doing cartwheels in front of Eula on the lawn. They aren’t perfect. They almost rip my pelvis in half, but I can do them. I want her to know that her mama can move. This action may be a different overextension of the mother, but it matters to me. She stands naked in the grass and frantically signs for more, her fingers pecking together. Again, Mama, again. But now, here on the mountain, after an hour of walking/stopping/investigating, she’s hit her maximum. Tired girl.

I try to load her on my back because it’s a wanting-Mama-not-Papa moment. She grabs for my chest so I slide her in front; she nurses and falls asleep. I haven’t carried her in a carrier on my front since she was an infant during our hikes with Holcomb, and even then not often because of the extreme pressure on my bladder.

“You sure that’s okay, babe?” Chris asks.

“Yeah, it’ll be fine.” For the next hour, I walk downhill with a twenty-five-pound baby on my belly and somehow, I do not pee. Is it that I haven’t drunk enough water today? The mourning moves in me. It isn’t a wrecking ball; it’s a wave. I never got to carry her this way without feeling awful and peeing. As my feet move over roots and rocks and brown earth, a resurrection begins. We arrive at the parking lot and I keep walking. We exchange the sacred parental nod that signals we want to keep our child asleep. I continue down the dirt road, aspens lean toward us, and my feet could go on forever now, one foot at once, down this road, as long as necessary, dust at my heels, dust on my toes, until the mountains greet me, and I will walk over them and to a valley and then to the ocean. I will focus on what is good and working—in my body, my marriage, my daughterhood, my motherhood.

Eula wakes to beating sun.

“Hey, sweets,” I say, and wipe her sweaty brow. I turn around to beckon Chris and the car. When I hand her over to him, my lower back has gone numb. But, for the first time in fifteen months, I have held my bladder.

We drive home.

That afternoon, we walk up to the bench above our house and bury Eula’s umbilical cord. I try not to think back to why we didn’t do it on her birthday. Nothing but bluebird sky up here. We squint out to all the mountains, squat down together, and dig a hole in a patch of sagebrush. I show her the heart-shaped cord and she tries to pull it apart. She has no idea what we are doing but it matters to me to say it anyway.

“This,” I tell her, “is where I peed on a pregnancy stick and we knew you would come to us.”

I was a different woman then.

We place four stones over the cord. What does it means to cut a cord from a person—your mother, your daughter, your self? Eula might think this all strange and intense when she’s a woman, or not. I don’t know how she will develop. Chris hugs me from behind as Eula picks sage. I let myself fall backward into his embrace, but with caution still.

He puts his hand between my legs and breathes into my ear.

I pause.

I’ve wanted this moment for so long. I don’t know what to do with it now. It’s too much. It’s almost too much to be held this way. I force myself to trust it.

He tells me he has written me a letter about why he fell in love with me.

It’s too much to feel.

When we start to love-make at dusk, he stretches over me and the pressure of his body releases a flood.

“I think I peed,” I sigh, and we both stroke the wet spot on our sheets.

“It’s okay,” he whispers, and pulls me toward him.

~

My mother looks up from her mop bucket. She’s tied a red bandanna around her forehead and for some reason this makes me want to call her Rambo. The rental guests arrive at the guesthouse in an hour.

“Can I help you clean, Mom?” I ask.

“No, no, it’s fine,” she says and keeps moving. Eula and I wait in the cabin and try to tidy up stacks of magazines for my mom. When she gets unsettled, my brothers and I have often teased or berated her because it scares us. She is supposed to be the steady one. What I need to do is give her what I want from Chris: hug her, tell her I’m sorry it’s frustrating or hard. I want to be soft with her in the way I am with Eula. My mother always put herself last.

She never got to have a mood, or an “Event.”

She stomps onto the porch and waves from the window at Eula, who is now dressed in a blue ribbon and a towel around her head.

When my mother smiles, the world calms down.

We go into her bedroom and she takes out the pear-shaped ivory necklace. Ivory is layered with complexity and gray striations. Pat-Pat gave it to her for her twenty-first birthday. Where had she bought it? What thoughts had rolled through her head, her heart, as she picked it for her daughter? I have seen my mother wear this ivory on a long thin chain for years—over blouses, sweaters, at Christmas, to the movies. One day it will be mine. One day it will be Eula’s. We all take turns placing it around each other’s necks, like the anointed ones. I wonder how ivory changes based on who wears it. My mother uses it as her pendulum as well.

“Open your palm, Eula,” my mom asks.

She does.

My mother places the ivory in her chubby little hand, and Eula nods at Mare, takes in what all of this means, as if she is telling her something about this object. How does she know?

~

There is a cycle. Here is how it goes. As much as I soften, when our history surfaces, the world is made of small electric shocks. Isn’t this how it is with all parents and children?

Act 1—I hurt my mother. My mother requests we be cleaner and not leave our stuff on the daybed. I get offended and say, “Well, what do you want me to do? Put it outside.” Then she explains that she loathes giving her time to cleaning but is bound to it right now. Pat-Pat made her clean banisters till they shone, never asked her brothers to do it, only her, so she hates it, there.

“You hate us being here,” I tell her. We’ve overstayed our welcome. I know that’s true. We sleep in the yurt but days require running water so we stay in the cabin and nearby. We have been in her space too long, and we’re so close to being out. It’s already August, Mom, only another week or so. Plus, I’m not a messy person. I never have been. We fight some more and some more.

Act 2—Day of avoidance. Eula and I spend much of the day under cottonwoods down by the creek stacking rocks. She is a Taurus, all earth, and, whoa, does she want earth, stones, to throw them, lay her body across them. No breeze. We cuddle up on a rock surrounded by gurgles and flowing water. That rock is who my mom is—unflappable, in general, among chaos. I scoop up a long gray stone to give to her (my attempt at reconciliation). Heat on my back. I peel off my shirt. Eula stands naked on the rock, grabs my breast, and nurses. I could do this all year long, this right here. This would be a great photo—the phrase if I were thinner pops up and I shoo it away. When we climb back up the bank; my mom is getting into her car and calls out to me.

“Want me to get you a big box of pads at Costco?” she asks (her attempt at reconciliation).

“No, thanks,” I say, but what I mean is No, no, no, I don’t want anymore humiliating Always Extra-Long Pads with Wings. Even though I still need them.

Act 3—My mom hurts me. The next day, while Eula is on a walk with Chris, my mom finds a coconut ice-cream bar wrapper in my grocery bag.

“Ah-ha, I see,” she says, waving it in my face. “You still love that ice cream, don’t ’cha?” I wasn’t even trying to hide it. I’m actually not ashamed of that particular sneak eating. But my shame reaction is muscle memory. I tell her she’s being mean. She says she’s just teasing and tells me that she feels abused by me.

“Abused?” I say. “Now that’s a strong word. You sure you want to use that word?” and as I say what I say I realize my language is abusive.

“We’ve all heard enough about your troubles,” she hisses at me. “I just hope you learn how to take care of yourself. I haven’t seen you do that yet.”

That sets me off.

“Do you know what it feels like?” I scream. “Do you know what it feels like to be betrayed by my body? No one here knows what that feels like and do you know what it’s like to go on a walk and pee and bleed all over yourself and on the car seat while your thyroid doesn’t work, and that’s become normalized for everyone, including me, but it’s not normal! And I’m trying to reconcile all the complicated feelings I have about my body based on how we were raised.”

“What does that mean?” she asks.

“All the messages I got about not being able to wear those pants, and blah blah blah.”

“Yeah, well, Pat-Pat told me I had a big butt and always said, with her critical tone, that I had my grandmother’s legs. But I don’t remember ever saying anything like that to you.”

“You didn’t,” I explain, “not exactly.”

We comment on our daughter’s bodies because the world commented on ours. It’s an old conversation. It’s proven that the less a mother makes out-loud observations about the shape and size of her daughter’s body (good or bad), the less her daughter will have any judgment toward her body. It’s a rope with knots and each one of us is holding on tight, even when we don’t want to.

We end calm.

I leave in my car to go away and my sobs take over. An owl swoops in front of me, saying yes, it’s okay, go deeper, this is hard, but you must.

My heart has cracked. Will I ever grow up?

~

On our last night in the yurt, something happens. It is the eve of moving out of my parents’ space and into our own home—at long last—and a massive cottonwood tree falls over our path to the cabin. We don’t hear it. There is no wind. When we wake, we say goodbye to the yurt, bless it by running our hands along the wall. This three-month yurt life with child was cozy and messy. I will miss the close togetherness. We step off our porch and amble through green grass.

“Whoa,” I say.

“Whoa,” says Chris, who never says whoa.

“Oh-p,” says Eula.

Across and over the fallen tree, we see my mom waving at us.

That afternoon, as Chris hauls our clothes to the house, I watch my mother talk to the tree. She walks up and down it and her hand bump-bumps along the bark. When we join her, she says, “Do you realize that it was one trunk split into two branches and one of those branches is double-branched, like me and Dad, and the other one is a single branch, like you.” Whoa, we say to each other, and marvel. My mom was never this symbolic when I was young. A medicinal smell wafts up from broken branches. Eula crunches the tiny branches and comes up sticky with orange cottonwood sap on her bare feet.

We decide to call it the Boom-ba tree, because whenever Eula falls, we say, Boom-ba! I saw off a large branch to put in our house. I want to be reminded of softness, of what it means to detach—cut a cord—and still love.

“It’s a great omen,” my mom says.

“That it is,” I agree.

~

The next day, Chris makes two wooden doors for our house. Last minute. Our friends from New Zealand arrive to spend three weeks with us. We haven’t seen them in years. But the timing is not ideal. We haven’t had a moment to acknowledge our home or that Chris built it with his own hands. Concrete floors, shed roof, windows open up to the hill, a tiny room for Eula and a long steep wooden ladder that leads to a loft for us. Our bare living room becomes a sleepover party.

We go with the flow—boxes, clothes, and kitchen pots everywhere.

The house isn’t done, but we can live with an unfinished bathroom and kitchen.

It’s a mess, but life has been a mess.

“You built this,” I whisper to Chris in bed. “Thank you.”

Our friends make no demands. They are happy-go-lucky. After each meal, I am able to pick up Eula and navigate her sticky food hands and face and body to the sink while singing, “I want to dance with you, my girl.” We do it every time. Nothing strains me about the situation or chaos, other than Chris. He is free from the house for the first time since Eula’s birth. I want him to myself. I want every part of him. But my husband only has eyes for our friends, talks with them with a lightness I haven’t experienced since pregnancy. He won’t look at me. Suddenly the fury in me rises. What about me? What about his wife, the woman who has been waiting her daughter’s entire life to have some time with her husband? We’ve always had a deep friendship. At least before all of this. I want it back. I want him back. I expected the hardship to evaporate when we moved into the house.

But I say nothing—my new practice is to pause, not react. It’s okay, viper. Settle down. None of this is permanent. Keep your eyes peeled for the joy. For a few days, this works. Then, under a hot sweltering sun, Chris and I stand outside alone before I leave for a meeting.

“We might go exploring on Saturday,” he says, and the high lilt of his voice gives away that he’s nervous about what he’s saying.

“Just you two?” I ask.

“Yeah, we can ’hoon around a bit then,” he says, using Kiwi slang and what he means is that the men can adventure and not be held back by the women and children. I know he needs it. I know it is really what he wants more than anything—time away from a domestic world, time for play in the mountains and no strained conversation, time to unwind from this challenging last few years. Of course he would rather do that than be with me, or include me. I do get it. As I stare at burnt-out grass, though, my chest still stings. Wish he would say: “I’m going to go on this adventure, and when I return, I can’t wait to go on an adventure with you.” He won’t ever say that. I’ve already asked for that introductory phrase—for years. Wish he would prioritize me in his orbit.

“Okay,” I say, and turn my body away from his. “So, for our first free weekend in over a year, I get to stay home and play house.”

“Molly, you don’t have to stay home. You all can go on your own adventure with the kids. They are visiting us from across the world. I have to make time for him.”

“But not for me, never for me.”

“What do you want me to do?”

I recognize the impossibility. I’m being an ass.

“I don’t care anymore. Do whatever,” I say, and I walk toward my car without a goodbye and the awful satisfaction of being the one who leaves. At least I walked away. What would it be to be free? Mountains and cows and alfalfa fields and I have no response to any of it. Nature doesn’t have a place anymore. Sobs taper off and get replaced by cold and reckless calculation. I never thought I would be this woman. I need to do something drastic. My hands test the wheel. Small car wobbles as it careens down the road. Crows rest on fence posts. If I crash before town, no one else will be hurt out here in the country. Then he’ll know my pain and have to look into my eyes, even if they are dead eyes, and care.

I can make this happen with one turn of the wheel.

Eula.

My Eula-babes.

Thoughts of her bring me back into my heart and the sobs crowd out the cold calculation again. I pull over and call a friend.

“Hey, Molls.” I didn’t expect her to answer.

“Hey.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I almost crashed my car.”

“Where are you?”

“Pulled over.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I fuck everything up.”

She talks me down from believing I have ruined everything for my family. I thank her. She makes me promise to call her every hour until I’m home with Chris.

On my way home, the mountains try to help. Rise up with us. We are cold. We are also green. We understand your man. We also understand you. Everything erodes. Everything is made again. Nothing is as big as it seems. Even we aren’t as big as you see us. I hear them but don’t listen. My plan becomes disconnection. It is the safest plan. Just disconnect from him and go into autopilot. As I stuff clothes into the washing machine, he comes up behind me and pulls me into a long embrace. This is how he gets when he feels he’s done the right thing. I can tell he must know something. My friend called Chris who called Holcomb and they have triaged. He knows not to involve my parents because I don’t go there with them. We must start to monitor me more carefully. It’s a we now, he says. I have been heard by my husband. Holcomb tells me to please feel free to tell her what I’m feeling—any time. I haven’t been responsible to myself, or to her. I’ve assumed I can handle it. The neurotransmitter test results are back. We meet at her office. My serotonin levels are actually fine. A general antidepressant might have helped a small bit, and I did consider it, but it would not have addressed the entire picture. I would have continued to flounder.

They say it gets worse before it gets better.

This is a cultural black hole. We do not take care of our women, especially our mothers. If a woman with a mood shift after birth actually admits to it, she finds herself under the catchall label postpartum depression. It is not always accurate. Some women weep. Some women rage. Some women go blank. Some women cannot shake anxiety. We are nuanced creatures. We don’t fit one category. Depression doesn’t always look like what we think depression looks like.

Couldn’t the name be, instead, postpartum challenge?

Maybe more women would seek help then.

Less shame around that language.

It’s clear I’ve been having a postpartum challenge. I don’t doubt that. I’m not ashamed of it, just trying to understand the physical part from the emotional part from the circumstantial part. How do they affect each other? The ecosystem of my body is complex. The test reveals my norepinephrine has skyrocketed off the charts—fight or flight, rage, irritability. My GABA is also low—overwhelmed and overstimulated. Holcomb prefers not to give a static diagnosis but suggests I might have PMDD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, linked to my menstrual cycle and exacerbated by the thyroid piece. My menstrual charts track that my car-crash reaction and “The Event” both happened a few days before my bleeding. Of course. Why couldn’t I have seen that and responded accordingly? We talk about supplements and hormone replacement. She suggests I start to wean Eula so we have more options for herbs, and drugs, if I’m open to that. There is also the additional possibility that the hormones in my system, from nursing, are affecting my moods.

I don’t want to wean my baby at eighteen months. But so I begin.

~

What I learn: The sea change washes toward me. Premenstrual syndrome is actually not a malady but a signal. The dark pulse of it lets us know when to start the retreat away from responsibility. Responsibility, in our modern world, means schedules, long workdays, anything that maxes or stresses us out. Only we don’t ever retreat. Both women and men have been taught that to take downtime is weak. Continue on, instead. But we miss out. Ideally, menstruation is a time to renew, clear the calendar and create a sanctuary. What few know is that our potential for insight and divine connection while bleeding is amplified. Pliny said a menstruating woman could break mirrors, sour wine, rust iron, dull knives. He may have cast it as a negative spoken out of his fear, but he saw the power. Our female body is connected to source. When we miss this rich window, our PMS gets misdirected and our female power sabotages itself. Month after month, we repeat. We lose the opportunity. Then we get mad about it without exactly knowing what we are mad about. We are mad at an untapped self. We are mad that there is a much deeper cultural phenomenon at play.

It isn’t one woman’s solitary “hormonal freak-out”—it’s all of us.

Every female passes through a few hormonal gateways: first menses, childbirth (if chosen and possible), and menopause. These are opportunities to open and connect to the deepest essence within oneself, astral-plane moments where we are able to see with crystal clarity. Our body leads us there, whether we want to go there or not. It is designed to move through huge passages. We are designed for those profound shifts. But we have almost no cultural conversation about any of it.

My laboring woman didn’t intellectualize this concept. She embodied it. She understood the importance of rest and pause and breath without anyone having to give her a textbook about it.

She was the living cycle. She lives in every woman. She must still live in me. She is and all women are the understory—that place where loamy soil and nutrients support the entire forest ecosystem to grow upward. Nothing could survive without her. She is the bedrock. She is all-knowing. I wonder what else we haven’t acknowledged her to be. I wonder what she will be next.

~

Eula has begun to put necklaces on me. We sit on the concrete floor of our new house together and intertwine our warm legs. She chooses a strand of red cinnabar beads and anoints me with them—then the white ones, then silver. When I’m ready to move on to another activity, she pulls my arms, pulls me back down, No, Mama, and wants to go on for hours. I feel like a queen.

“Thank you for decorating me, sweets,” I say, and she giggles.

“Can I decorate you too?” I ask.

“No-kay, Mama,” she insists, and pushes on my chest indicating that she wants this to be a one-way street for now.

When she wakes at dawn, we snuggle on an old rattan loveseat I used to play on as a child. She nurses as the moon goes down and the sun spreads across cottonwoods. My child has honey-brown hair now because her papa and uncle and grandmother once did at this age. I stroke her head, cheeks, arms, legs—all of her. The other night she fussed and started to fake cry (it’s a thing she does now) and I asked her what was wrong. Did she want to read a book together? No, she shoved it away. She crawled into my lap and hugged me and it became clear all she needed was a long, slow, uninterrupted hug from her mama. We sat that way before bed for ages. No milk. No books. No rituals. Just a hug, her body heavy on my chest, gazing out the window at trees. It doesn’t seem strange to me that these holy moments can coexist with such despair. When I placed her in bed, she sunk down, satisfied, peaceful and not one little peep when I left the room. The morning time is my favorite time. It will be the last nurse session I let go of because this will be gradual over the next one to two months. But these days, a few minutes into it, she already says, as if she knows, “All done,” and pulls my shirt over my breasts.

~

On the cabin’s porch, I have my monthly call with my counselor Janice.

It’s a quiet oasis up here, under the cottonwoods by the creek, with my mom out of town and my babe and man in town. I tell her about the norepinephrine but hear the excuse in what I’m articulating. She listens and then reminds me that the body reacts to the state of the mind.

“Honey, I’m concerned you’re stuck in a rage cycle,” she says softly.

“Of course I am,” I say.

“Molly, you have healthy anger, honey, but I think you’ve also indulged in your anger,” she says. The word indulged bludgeons my face. I don’t say anything, so she continues. She tells me that anger is addictive. It may feel like power but that’s only because anger lets us feel when we are depressed and unable to feel sadness. This is exactly what I’ve come to on my own—my attachment to anger, my dangerous replay of it, my hold on being the dark, wild woman who spits out if she needs to, even though anyone who knows me beyond close friends and family always says, “I can’t imagine you enraged at all.” The cure for rage isn’t more anger. I must accept my rage, she says, and parent those parts of me who are raging. Then do something kind for them. She keeps talking and, though she’s heard me and validated me a thousand times over, what I feel is squashed, told off, told I’m bad. I know what she says is true but I’m not ready to hear it from someone else, not this way.

I don’t have ears for anyone or anything anymore.

“I don’t want to be silenced by anyone, even you,” I lash out.

“Molly,” she bellows with a deep voice I’ve heard before when she’s serious, “you are being mean. Listen to you. Listen to how mean you are being. Listen to how mean you are being.”

I can’t believe she is calling me mean.

I can’t believe this is happening.

I can’t be on this phone anymore.

I don’t want her to know I’m crying.

I don’t ever want to talk to her again.

We are silent for a minute.

“How do you feel?”

“Disconnected,” I mutter.

“If you need to hang up to go cry . . .”

All I needed was permission. I hang up on her and vow to never call her again. Later she will leave me a message explaining that it was an intervention with love. She felt she had to jolt me out of my rage cycle. Rage is just energy. It’s time to stop processing and tracking and just work with the energy. Move the energy through your body. If I don’t want to work with her, that’s okay, but I need to find someone immediately and start working once a week. She’s concerned and says again, “Remember, honey, that rage is just an energy in your body.”

My body rolls off the porch and somehow gets up to stomp around the grass, arms punch sky, stumble, stumble, what just happened, phone thrown to ground, body thrown to ground, roll down, roll around, pull at grass, more grass, cover head, cover face, cover scream, curl up, pull at grass, cover head, curl up.

~

Gray clouds. I sit in my gray hatchback three days later and call Janice. Car windows go down on a dirt road nearby a field with three horses. My ear buds go in. The only reason I call her back is because it took courage for her to name the truth and risk me leaving and some therapists would have never done so.

“I want to roar, howl, scream,” I say.

“Can you put the phone down and scream? I’ll wait,” she asks.

“I’m too embarrassed,” I say.

“That’s okay.”

We continue, and I ask where ritual has gone. People used to move a shadow through the body—put on a mask, dance, and sing. I want to move my body. I want to express it out. I don’t want to be in love with my wounds anymore. I speak in plain language. There is no longer a place for intellect. I close my eyes as Janice speaks to me and I see a room covered with charcoal sketches of one woman’s face in rage, despair, joy, shame, envy, boredom, frustration, hope, embarrassment, ecstasy, regret, gratitude, empathy, contempt, love.

Nothing has ever seemed so beautiful.

“What if feeling these feelings draws bad things to me?” I ask, even though I’ve already felt them.

“Create a container to feel your feelings. Feel them. Cry them. Scream them,” she says. “And then, reclaim trust and use the law of attraction.”

The last part sounds impossible.

~

In September, the fields turn yellow-white. My workshops begin. I go back to teaching other people how to own their stories while I try to own my own. After my steamy shower, Eula stands nearby to watch me put on a skirt she’s never seen and arrange my hair in a new way. She takes a step back, points her hand at me, waves it up and down as if she is directing traffic, and says, “Ooooo nice, Mama.”

My daughter has already healed my relationship to clothes.

When I return from my first day away, I strap Eula to my back and walk us up to her four-stone sagebrush spot. The cord. Her cord. Our cord.

We squat down and bless it.

“Do you want to dance with your mama?” I ask her blue eyes.

She nods.

I pick her up under her arms, kiss her face, and we spin, spin, spin around the yellow-white field, spinning and laughing into the light. The outdoor dance becomes part of what we do. Here I make contact with my joy. And every Sunday afternoon, while Eula brushes watercolors onto paper, I make a menu for the week and write it up on the blackboard inside of our back door.

Mon—Kale and red cabbage tahini salad, salmon, sweet potato fries.

Tues—Paprika chicken with rice and peas.

This act helps me.

I call my oldest friend, of the macadamia nut allergy. As we catch up, I decide to expose part of my shadow, one that only Chris and my parents have witnessed. I’ve pretended to my friends, without consciously knowing it, that I don’t do this. She asks me about my last month or two.

“Well, I basically sneak eat when I’m sad,” I laugh.

“But, doesn’t everyone do that?” she asks.

“I don’t know. Do they?”

“Though I did think you ate broccoli and beets when you were stressed.”

“C’mon. Really? I gave that impression. Jesus,” and we both can’t stop laughing.

When we stop, I continue, “Clearly there’s a shame situation there. No, I go full-force chocolate, cheese, chocolate again, and when I could do gluten, chocolate pretzels.”

“I’m eating a bag of chocolate chips right now,” she says.

“Oh my god, I wish we could eat them together.”

It’s not that I want to go down this road of sameness. It’s not that I really want to spend my time eating chocolate chips with her. But, a part of me is revealed, a small sparrow hurled out of the nest. The shame comes not from the actual eating. I don’t think it’s bad to eat chocolate. If I were slender or small, sneak eating could be a casual mention at a party, ha ha, I ate the entire block of cheese, silly me.

But when a round/fat/curvy woman mentions it, people judge.

Who is she to eat that?

~

I do and don’t want to wean Eula. Milk is beyond food—it’s connection. I can’t yet know what kind of transition this will be for me. I tell her Mama’s milk isn’t going to be here much longer but that I have loved, loved, loved giving it to her. She hears me. We talk about love in our hearts. Where is your heart? I ask. “Boom boom,” she pounds on her chest, my chest. We’re down to one nursing a day—in the morning.

It’s early October and it’s time to stop.

She calls to me at two o’clock in the morning.

“Mama, Mama.” I step down the ladder and go to her.

“Come here, sweets,” I say, and scoop her up. “Hug your mama, I’m here.”

We stand on the cold concrete floor and moonlight pours in from the windows. I bring her to our twin-bed-standing-in-as-couch on the floor.

“You can touch, but no drinking, let’s save it for morning,” I request.

She understands and rests her head on my shoulder. I could stay here forever, stroke my daughter, her toes, soft back. A few hours later, she inches up and opens her eyes in the dark. Those eyes. Those eyes stared right at me when she was born. She rests her head on my breast and noses down to smell. Her head nods when she is telling me she knows about our agreement.

We stare at each other.

It’s hard for me to restrict like this.

I decide to go halve-sies, as Mare says, and let her hold my nipple.

“You can hold . . .” I say, but when I pull my tank top back, she mistakes it for an invitation and dives fast, latches, and then sucks milks out super slowly, as if being slow will make me think she isn’t there at all.

I try not to laugh.

I snuggle her close and plan to contend with it later.

~

We decide Chris has to be on call for nights because I cannot bear to hear Eula cry for me and not go to her. She’s been sleeping well and through the night for a while—a cool cloth over her parents’ heads. The ease of consistent sleep for us reminds me how the early sleep deprivation pushed us both into a severely altered state. It doesn’t excuse anything but it does help explain it. But now our girl has hit another growth spurt and her rhythm is off. She also senses the end of the boob. Her papa goes to her. If she doesn’t stop crying within ten minutes of his soothing, I dash down our stairs and interrupt the whole effort we carefully organized (and promised I wouldn’t interrupt) beforehand. About 80 percent of the time, I’m the irritated rescuer.

To avoid this, I remove myself and sleep in my parents’ cabin on the daybed.

Otherwise our sleep plan unravels.

It hurts my body to be in a separate house from Eula, and from Chris. But there is no way I can go to her at night and negotiate again. My body wakes at dawn without an alarm. My daughter and I are programmed to each other.

In the dark, I stumble into clothes, walk out onto the porch, and there, right there, a lunar eclipse beams at me. There goes the light. Welcome to the shadow. It isn’t so bad. I want to lie on the grass and gaze up. I want to place my small self in the galaxy. But tree shadows scare me. Instead, I go to my car and watch it from the safety of my back pressed against a large steel machine.

No one is awake at my home.

I sneak in and lie on the couch—waiting.

“Mama,” she calls out.

We venture out together to the cool moon night and her hand digs down my shirt.

“There’s the moon,” I say.

She freezes, stares. Oh my, Mama. I want her to know cycles and tides and how to trust the moon’s bright gaze. We stand cheek to cheek, warm, smell of her lamb’s breath, us pressed together, and I think one day I will tell her about this moment.

“So many stars, sweets. See? Sometimes stars shoot out of the sky. You have to watch for them. They are little blessings. They’re called shooting stars.”

She nods.

We go back to the couch and nurse for an hour.

When she is done, she squirms her naked body up to my face and says, with her finger in the air, “Ta, ta, ta, ta.” I try to understand my daughter. What is she saying? Such insistence. Mama, hear me.

“Oh, star,” I say, “yes, stars, star, star.”

Her face relaxes with a nod. She has been understood.

We have a body full of stars.

~

What I learn: Just as women’s arousal starts on edges—toes, not sex organs—and moves inward, feminine awareness must descend downward into the dark loam before it can ascend. Dark and light coexist. Inconsistency is how we are made. We are of the moon, and the moon does not present one way all the time. We are equal to men. We were never meant to be the same. Let’s not dilute ourselves to sameness. We women are cyclical. This is about a new feminism.

Some say we must re-wild ourselves.

Go back to blood.

Our anatomy has the most exquisite purpose. Our menstrual cycles give us the chance to attune every month. The female body was and is a natural healing and planning system. In the one to two weeks pre-ovulation, a woman has incredible energy for action and doing and projects. When she ovulates, her egg floats and she becomes ripe, alive, sensual, sexual, full, magnetic, a creator matrix awake to her sense and radiance. As she moves into pre-menstruation, the world sharpens. Her laser beam focuses. She becomes a master discerner. She deepens into her intuitive place with a clear, no-bullshit honesty. With that come the uncomfortable moments of magnified feelings. This isn’t a place to act from, but a place to gather information. When her blood comes, a woman slows. She goes internal and can connect with the unknown and unseen world. She can let go of the grief from the last month of her life and forgive. Then she pauses at the still point of transition and it starts all over again.

Our hormones guide the cycle.

Our moon waxes and wanes in tandem with the cycle.

My cycle is my teacher.

I have known this for years but my signals got crossed. I’ve been so devoted to a no-holds-barred expression as part of my right and need as a woman that the idea of timing never occurred to me. If someone told me to save it for later, I would have told that person to stop being the oppressive patriarchy. All along, there was my cycle—Come back to me, Molly, come back to me, move with me, trust me. Here is my latest consideration. I’ve usually said whatever I want in whatever tone I want whenever I want to with Chris. What if, during pre-menses, I did this instead: journal, stomp, pound, cry, scream, but privately, move it through my body alone. Then process those feelings more during menstruation and then, afterward, bring them to him with care. Revolutionary. Better result for everyone. Requires patience.

That is new for me. That is growth.

That is body literacy.

~

As I wean Eula, freshwater lakes enter my dreams. I hope this means something about my own internal lake, my ability to hold my bladder. She woke up with a new word the other day: baby. Maybe because you feel like you aren’t a baby anymore, sweets.

One morning, loss creeps toward me as I consider the importance of today. I wake early in the cabin, where I have still been sleeping, and walk out into the dark-ink dawn. Once home, I will nurse my daughter for the last time and leave for a book festival—two days of absence, my first absence from her, to seal the deal.

We have timed it well.

As I pad across the lawn toward my car, I stay lost in these thoughts until I lift my head and see a shadow with four legs on the driveway.

What is Bru doing up here so early? Why would he? It couldn’t be. Sudden. My body flush, held breath, heart drum, hot scalp let me know it’s not him. I backpedal to the guesthouse and slip inside. Now what? No phone. Stranded. There is a mountain lion in the driveway and I need to get home. I open the door and a metallic earth smell hits me. The creek rushes and gurgles. My eyes see shapes that weren’t there before. I lean out and say, “Heyyyyyyy-o,” and then decide to chance it. Rationally, I know a wild animal wants nothing to do with me. She’s probably watching from the trees, waiting for me to leave, so she can continue her night journey. I take a step toward my car, toward where the shadow was. As I make my way, I might be chanting, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” until my hand yanks the driver door open and I catapult my body into safety. In my six years of living here, I have never seen a lion. Blessed by a lion. I drive without headlights and watch for her. When I enter our bright house, Eula toddles up to me, wraps her arms around my calf. I tell them in a flurry, my hands wave all over the place. For the first time, she doesn’t ask for milk but I bring her to my breast anyway, try to lock in memory the feeling of her lips on my nipple. Cuddle her up.

We pack my bags into the gray hatchback.

“I’ll see you in two days,” I say to Eula, and I make sure our eyes understand one another. Two days. I love you the most. I love every part of you. When my car turns onto the highway, I am both fractured again and released.

~

People have warned me about the hormonal plummet. When you wean, you can descend for a week or so. “Blues like none other,” one of my mama friends described. I have seen some blue so this will only be one more transition for me.

It’s easy to forget what you’ve been told.

Nursing ended a few days ago. So far so good, except that I brought up my sadness about not being seen for my body challenges again and Chris came back at me with the same context argument. I thought I was over it. Guess not.

He falls into a flour-sack sleep after that. Next to him, I stay awake and stare at nothing, me an owl in the middle of the night, watching, waiting, alert.

Body hot.

Body full of fumes.

I sneak down the ladder. Our house becomes a museum: concrete floors, spare wooden furniture, white walls everywhere, dark beyond the windows, windows, so many damn windows. My body leads me to the bathroom. I yank five of my pee-soaked pads out of the trash. I’ll show him. With black Sharpie, I scrawl You don’t pay attention across them. I will hang them on the wall, an artwork, a blaze. They will appear and rock the boat and rock me into recognition. Where is the masking tape? I end up covered in reams of sticky scotch tape, stuck to my pants, my arms. Cannot find any nails, or a hammer. Shit. I line the pads up on the kitchen table instead. He’ll see them when he wakes up and when I’m gone. Not sure to where, but I’m out of here.

Except that I’m not.

I can’t leave Eula.

That’s right, I am a mother of a toddler.

For a few hours, I pace around like a caged animal.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

Then some grace washes over me. Stops me in my tracks. I realize the mistake I’m making. Not now, not in this pre-menstrual-stage weaning moment, not the time for anger at him. Save it for later. Trust your cycle. Open the front door. Release it back to nature. I step onto cold grass, crouch into a ball, and silent scream into my knees for hours. My body moves back inside, where I remove the pads and throw them back in the trash. Crawl up the ladder. Wake Chris up.

“Hold me down, please,” I whisper.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Put your body on top of mine and don’t let me go anywhere.”

He does.

I welcome the lead of him.

But he doesn’t know what to do with me for the rest of the weekend. He watches from a safe distance and never approaches. I become more and more isolated. In my dream, a brown bear claws at my throat because everyone but me made it to the safety of the forest bathroom. When Eula naps or goes to bed, I collapse on our twin-bed-mattress couch with my face toward the wall and weep. My shoulders hurt from all the heaves.

On Sunday morning, I wake up.

“Let’s go get a pumpkin, sweet love,” I say to Eula, and button her sweater. We meet Holcomb and her daughter. I don’t tell her exactly what I’ve just done because I don’t want to be another downer.

We ride a hay wagon and the girls scream Woooooo.

When Eula trips over matted grass, she says, “Boom-ba, Mama,” and grins.

When we lounge among the orange globes, surrounded by the spirit of dark and light, I hand Eula seaweed and cranberries and we all laugh and laugh.

~

Slowly, my despair lifts. Who was that woman drawing with Sharpie on her pee-soaked pads? What was she doing?

“Yoo, yoo,” Eula says in an attempt to say her own name, “Eula, Eula.” We put on music—she likes Michael Jackson or Spanish flamenco the best—and bop around the house, pump our fists in the air. Sometimes, we stir soup or rice and I groove with her on my hip. Sometimes I hold my bladder. Sometimes I don’t. I want her close to me, even more now that we don’t nurse and because I’ve been away at student readings for the last few nights.

All I want to do is come home, snuggle up.

I hate being away from her.

There are other songs.

When she hears the mountain song combo from an Argentinean guitar player and Austrian yodeler, she runs from anywhere in the house to leap into my arms. We clutch each other. I spin her and we move across the floor, into the bathroom, her bedroom, spin in the kitchen, flip down, flip up. Mama yodels with the song and then Eula slips her legs on my shoulders, leans back with her chest open to the sky, and we spin.

I want to make a marmalade of this moment.

Preserve it. Put it in the cupboard for when I’m old.

This afternoon, as we dance to a slow Southern song, sway, sway gently, she falls asleep on my shoulder and I don’t care if it ruins her nap. Stay there, sweet love. Stay with me.

~

My breasts are honored now, more than ever. One day, Eula stands on our wooden kitchen counter, the same place we chop vegetables together. Autumn sun spreads over us. She pulls open my shirt and touches my bra. I understand she means, Take them out, Mama, and I do. She nuzzles her warm face into my chest. Then she cradles one breast in her small hands, hugs and kisses it as if it were a baby bunny. She reaches for the other one and does the same. We are female. We are female love on female. We are adoration of the divine feminine.

She is helping me feel what I want to feel.

“Oh, sweets,” I say, and hold her to me.

We gaze out the window and decide to walk to the top of our hill.

It might be our last sunny November day before snowfall.

Sun pokes through a gray sky. The ground spreads golden for miles and miles, that straw color of youth. We lie down on the hump of our hill. Eula crawls over me and flops and flops as our Bru-dog hangs his black jowls over both of us. Sun warms into every cell of us. The whole moment could be a commercial, and what flashes before me are futures—our futures, of growth and who she will be as a girl, and then woman, how she becomes herself. When I returned from her eighteen-month doctor visit, my mom asked about it so I gave her the numbers: 37 percent in height. “Oh,” my mother had said, as if it were a bad thing. “Well, she just might be short.” I had taken a breath and said, “Moommmm, who cares? She will be what she will be.”

The body is a continued conversation between the women of our lineage.

Remade, like clay.

After Eula’s bath, we talk through the day and unscrew the small mason jar of coconut oil. She knows the drill—time to oil her up, a gentle self-care I want her to know about, but not before some crazy naked running around in laps. When she returns, she digs her hand into the jar and comes up with a chunk of fast-melting oil. Slap onto her belly. I rub her arms and back and then she reaches down between her legs.

“Yoo, vulva,” she says, and stares up at me.

“Yeah, that’s your vulva,” I repeat, and try to downplay my sheer exuberance at hearing my daughter say vulva, claim vulva, for the first time.

~

A few weeks after we wean, I feel changed.

I make an announcement. For the first time in almost two and a half years, since we conceived Eula, I am me again. The shadow dark is also me, but here is the everyday me, the woman who doesn’t need to explode at someone every other day. I don’t want to associate the end of nursing with this feeling, but it’s undeniable.

The hormonal shift has affected even my incontinence.

I start going to town with no pads when I’m pre-ovulatory.

I start to brave the world with just underwear under my pants.

Where fallen rocks once covered the tunnel, there is now an open passageway. Life becomes exponentially easier when I’m not peeing on myself. After a sleepless night, I no longer emerge from bed aggravated but eager to put on pad-less underwear. I can snug Eula up in winter clothes, drive to town, buy groceries at three different stores, return home, lug her and them into the house, and not feel destroyed by the end of it. To be almost in control of my bladder restores some ease and a dignity I didn’t fully know I’d lost. Instead of energy rushing out of me, it rushes back in.

I start to see glimpses of a healed me. She is real. She moves with grace in the forest, on our plateau, down by the creek. She has let her hair down. That’s interesting. When I call out to her, she slips through the trees like a fairy, visible but hidden, moving, never still. Sometimes a gray cloud overtakes her, but she dances with it, sharp movements, kneads it like putty. Sometimes it’s a flood of lava or a loud swarm of insects. Same response. She never turns her back. She welcomes. She engages. She moves onward. She shows herself to me.

I am your future, but I am also your past and your present.

What if, instead of the pressure of healing, I just told my body we had a lot of fun exploring ahead of us? Time starts to accelerate. The word possible becomes part of my vocabulary again.

“I haven’t been capable for so long,” I say to Chris.

“Yes, you have, you just haven’t felt capable,” he responds.

“Now I feel glimmers of it.”

Capable me.