As She Grew into a Woman

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The cosmos set me up—placed me at another college surrounded by gentle green hills and brought full women to my door. These new friends were unlike anyone I had encountered. One woman stood in my dorm room, fresh and pink from a run. The easy way her body moved stunned me. Look at her raise her hands up to reveal prickly armpits. I shaved mine every day. I thought that’s what you were supposed to do. Another had done everything, drugs, sex, but she didn’t brag, she just stated it like, of course, it’s fine, whatever. When we sat on the lawn together, she stroked her own leg with reverence. Another held my hand. Often. She would grab and pull me close when something beautiful overcame her—the speckled tree, people singing, something about death she’d read. I went with it, but always questioned why she would want to touch me, of all people.

“You are so beautiful,” she would tell me as if it was obvious. Somehow she wasn’t measuring my body. She was the first person to tell me about my beauty in a way I could hear.

These women pulled me up from a deep well.

There I was. Within weeks, my self-imposed restrictions began to fall from me like scales. We ran through the woods. We spooned in bed and talked about who we wanted to be. We swam naked. We hung our menstrual cotton pads up in the bathroom. Our senior year we would choose to live in a house together on Cider Mill Road because we wanted to be adult women who lived off campus on a dusty road with such a romantic name. We wanted realness.

The we grew me up—to be part of a womanhood I had never seen.

They gave me a model.

They gave me a sense of what body aware could be.

They were all slender. I was the largest one, largest breasts, largest hips, largest legs. Somehow (and how it could have been still awes me), these women had no cause for body comparison with me, or each other, and I didn’t with them. Without the constant drain of body focus, I was freed. I stepped onto a street whose name I had never really known. The world popped into colors I hadn’t seen since girlhood. There was so much to do, so much to be, so much to love.

Six months later, during this sophomore year, at twenty years old, I met Chris. He sat next to me in a writing workshop and, when he spoke, his words were few but profound. What I noticed: long black eyelashes, red down jacket, full-body kindness, scribbles throughout his notebook, schoolteacher parents, born and raised in the mountains of Maine, and he had an ease about him, non-threatening, thoughtful when he told me he liked the scarf in my hair.

I had never pursued a man before.

It took nothing for me to start stalking Chris. I showed up where I knew he would be. I found him across campus, down dorm halls, on the dining patio. After patting my own cheeks in the mirror and saying, Do it, I dialed his four-digit room number from my dorm phone and asked him to go on a hike. He picked me up in his old pale blue hatchback and gave me an orange. We lumbered through an icy winter forest and spoke of moose. I didn’t know what kind of tracks were in the snow. “Maybe you don’t know this animal?” he asked. We were islands reaching out to each other. I was led by a bravery beyond me. I would have never done what I did if some other force hadn’t been guiding me. Cut to the chase. I sat next to him on my bed and told him dead-on, “I like you.” He reciprocated. He wrote poems for me. He drew shape-shifter animals and slipped them under my door.

We had sex for the first time on Good Friday.

In my room, and other rooms, we would unravel each other for the rest of college, slowly, faster, under the moon, layers and layers of my sadness peeled away, as we found words and nonwords, as we learned what it meant to be a body in love. It was easy, somehow, for me to undo the clench of my legs with him.

“You’ve been through so much,” he would say, and I would deflect his empathy and correct him and say, No, not really, not at all, besides, one in four women have been violated by a man. He’d gone to a large public school where many of his peers struggled with drugs and abuse. He was aware. But he didn’t have sisters. Maybe the complex world of women was new to him.

He seemed so innocent to me.

I was innocent too.

We used three types of birth control at the start, until a friend pulled me aside and said, “It’s not necessary, you know?” You mean it isn’t normal to be on the pill and have him wear a condom and shoot spermicide inside your vagina? I was not going to get pregnant. Despite my diligent pee-after regime, I got recurrent urinary tract infections. “What does a UTI feel like?” he asked. Like someone is sticking an uncooked fettuccini noodle up my urethra. It evolved into a sort of cystitis. A doctor gave me an antibiotic to take every time we had sex for a month. Let’s say approximately fifty-six pills in four weeks for young-love sex frequency. No mention of probiotics. I didn’t know. The urinary tract infections went away and I remained unaware of the link between bladder and unresolved anger. Whatever anger I held had nothing to do with him anyway.

He was a gentle shepherd.

He couldn’t stop touching my back, my strong tan back.

Each time he asked me to please please please stand naked and face away from him, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t show my butt with sunshine coming into the window. He didn’t understand. I heard myself say the same thing about my butt my mother had said about her butt even though we didn’t really have the same butt.

Orgasms were an effort for me.

I never felt unsafe with him, but unsafe with my own let go. I would barely let him explore. Many of my women friends, even those I would have never suspected, had a similar issue—how was this possible? One friend and I bought three books about the female orgasm. Chris watched me read them and weep. “It’ll be okay,” he said, kissed my forehead, and then told me he would do anything I needed him to do. It wasn’t that. I couldn’t explain that it had nothing to do with him. Something much larger than us had shut down my capacity to relax and feel; something beyond my violation in Paris; something layered in how we talked about women, how women were trained to feel about their bodies, how women believed they should give, not receive. When my mother saw the books tumble down from my closet a few years later, she said, “Eww,” and leapt away as if they were toxic. I steeled myself and spat, “They aren’t my books, anyway.”

On my last day of college, I shaved my head.

That night, Chris rubbed my fuzzy skull. How did it look? Different, was all he could say. We were parting ways after college. Not a breakup, but I had insisted we needed to date other people so we could really choose each other. “But, we’re in love,” he had protested. I told him it didn’t matter, we had to do it, and so he agreed. He was headed to an island in the South Seas to study geology, and my future lay in the red rock desert. We stroked each other, wrapped up in what felt like the end of youth.

I told him I wanted to learn about natural medicine.

“You should, babe, you’d be great at that,” he said, and we touched noses.

“But I don’t have anything wrong with my body,” I said, eyes up at the ceiling, awake with life. “And I want to test it on me, I want to have my own experience with herbs, all of it.”

Later, he would remind me of what I had called to me.

I moved to New Mexico to work with girls at a boarding school.

That year electrocuted me.

On my first evening among adobe and blue sky, I ended up in the ER with a racing heart rate and strange disorientation. The doctors gave me applesauce. There was nothing physically wrong. The school campus, surrounded by ponderosa pines, smelled of vanilla and dry and West. This lit me up. Made me feel wild. The men I worked with seemed drawn to me, my freedom, detachment, strong legs, the way I took off into the woods alone, the way I didn’t care about my short strange grown-out hair. Being the desired one made me feel more desirable. I began to understand that putting attention on dress didn’t need to be a superficial act done for others. I had always assumed it to be so. I could self-decorate. I could call my body a landscape to honor with jewelry and colors. It wasn’t bad to wear mascara or choose the blue scarf to match my eyes or take more than five minutes to decide upon a pair of pants that actually fit.

There was a man: blond, former cocaine addict, motorcycle, and literature. On a school adventure, we counselors slept in sleeping bags around a campfire and he and I found each other. Afterward he said, “Now I know what glowworm sex feels like,” even though we hadn’t had penetrating sex. I was guarded with him. We giggled and then I got up in the dark to puke in a clump of sagebrush. He had known hundreds of women. His body was not safe to me.

But he opened a deep uncontrolled part of me.

I met a woman who became my ally. On weekends, we walked across mesas at dusk and rode through arroyos on her tandem bicycle. She showed me how to chart my menstrual cycle. Gone with the birth control pill. Our gorgeous red blood! My cycle. What an honor to have my own cycle to connect me to other women, women now, women of the past, to the moon. I learned that egg-white stretchy cervical fluid means fertile. I learned to feel for the way my cervix hardened and softened to a peach during a month. My body temperatures were low and the books indicated it might be a sign of thyroid imbalance. I didn’t know what a thyroid was. Though a vibrator had helped me like it does many women, I packed it away and explored with only my hands, found breath and a natural pace that invited me into my primal self. When my friend practiced her cranial sacral therapy on me, she would say, “Oh, Molly, you are wide open.”

I was finally awake to myself.

But with such opening came that disorientation and spinning, a spinning so brutal I often cried out to a god, to someone, anyone. I would rather die than experience the flutter in my heart as it crawled up my throat every single night. Sometimes I sat on the gravel road and used a phone card to call Chris across the ocean. He didn’t know what to say about the spinning. I would ask him to stay on the phone with me anyway. He would. He was often silent, so I was too. We were both too stunned. My parents suggested it might be panic attacks—but I had no use for modern medicine diagnoses, or for my parents those days. When my mother had seen my fertility-awareness chart on my nightstand, she picked it up and started to read—creamy, egg-white—and then tossed it away with an “Oh, uh, gross.” Really, Mom? If I had panic in me, something else lay beneath and I would unearth it. When the spinning consumed me, I crawled out of my white trailer into the moonlight where I could find a juniper to clutch. The ghost smell of juniper and pinion would turn me on or turn me off.

Me, in my underwear, as the scratch bark scratched me back to my senses.

I couldn’t see it was a portal opening, the start of my feminine wanting to wake up at my root, to spin me open. I wasn’t ready for it then. Too much fear of what would awaken, of what it was.

Strange things happened to my body. I saw a healer who wore only gray sweats and ate only raw meat. From a sample of my blood, he could read my history, down to the actual events, down to violation. He cleared them for me. Was that possible? I found flecks of black in my urine. When my menstrual blood turned to sludge, he nodded, “Good.” Clear it all out. In a dress shop, a woman with cat-eye sunglasses told me a worm had lodged in my brain from drinking bad water in the woods (I had spent the summer in the woods) and that I was sleeping with someone dirty (my new dangerous man friend). Everyone now had an opinion. She continued to click her words at me until I said Stop and walked out. I learned to stand on my head and to weep in savasana. My dreams of shit and blood came through every night now—so much of it.

My parents came to visit. We walked through the Santa Fe plaza where my mother had dropped me off and cried a year earlier. I could now sense her doing something behind me. I turned to find her coming at the back of my head in public with her Mason Pearson brush, trying to brush my unruly short hair down.

“God, Mom,” I yelled, and walked further and then farther away.

A few weeks later, my coworker’s car spun out on ice and we rolled in just the way I had foreseen we would. My houseplants leapt from shattering terra-cotta pots and soil sifted down over upside-down us. One well-placed rock prevented us from plummeting into the river. Then a naturopath gave me a liver tonic. She told me my liver wasn’t functioning at 100 percent, which I heard as my liver wasn’t functioning. A psychic told me three things: I had been born under a dark moon, my life-partner man would work with his hands, and my only path to salvation was through expression.

None of this helped my night attacks.

I chose to believe my wounds and strange experiences made me special, deep.

My departure from the red rock desert coincided with the disappearance of my night attacks, or a new pathway for them. I moved to New Zealand to work on farms, learn about food systems, and be near my love. Chris had picked me up at the small airport in the red 1964 Volkswagen bug he fixed up. The ether smelled sweet here, an island so near the island of my birth. After more than a year apart, after a year of another lover for each of us, our hands fit with a new sort of grip. He continued his study of geology and I drove to a valley four hours away. I pulled on canvas work pants, bumped up a dirt road to a farmhouse, and asked a barrel-chested man for a job.

He stared me up and down.

He let me feel the pause.

“Most women prefer the packing house,” he said, referring to standing over a conveyer belt in a loud warehouse to sort the good fruit from the bad.

“I would rather work outside,” I stated.

“Okay then,” he said, and the grin on his face foretold his approval of what he would later call my grit. I would get paid for how much I picked and share a bunkhouse with other workers from the Czech Republic, China, Malaysia, and Sweden.

The apple trees smelled of wax. The work was hard—apples heavy on a reversed backpack, eight-hour nonstop days, and metal ladders hot under a sun and thin ozone layer. Tree climber. My young self would have wanted nothing more. In the shower, I watched dirt wash from my tan, slender, strong body. This efficient body was the body I was meant to live in. My friends and I were now in our mid-twenties. Those back in the States somersaulted toward advanced degrees and professions. But all I wanted to do was move my body.

I stayed on for pear and cherry and apricot seasons.

I was the only woman and the fastest picker of the bunch—always comfortable as the leader in a group of men who were as tame as younger brothers. One afternoon, I drove them to a lake across the river to shuck off our heat. My normal reservations about being seen in a green bikini or any swimsuit didn’t apply here in a mix of cultures and ages and stages.

One man from India poked my stomach.

“I didn’t expect this from you,” he said. I couldn’t believe he had said so and just gone ahead and touched my woman belly softness. He caught me off guard. I had a flat stomach. Did he expect a six-pack? He wasn’t trying to offend. It surprised him because of the way I ran around the orchard.

“I guess I didn’t expect it from myself either,” I said.

“Okay,” we both laughed. No one had ever made a comment about my body in such non-judgmental plain-speak.

When each season ended, as the wet winter approached, I returned to Chris with the scent of flowers and boxes of fruit in my car. Some part of me aware of how a goddess could awaken in me.

“You are a new woman,” he would say, and grab for me in his breezy flat.

For work in his town, I modeled nude for an art class. Somehow I had no qualms about taking my robe off. The only hard part was sitting still. The scent from a nearby chocolate factory wafted in through old, creaky, lead-paint windows. The teacher turned on guitar music, and they all drew me as a version of themselves. It became an evening of adoring the female form. During the break, they invited me over to their canvases to show me how wonderful it had been to draw this line or that curve.

I was becoming a beautiful woman.

Part of my dam had crumbled, but my “new me” collapsed with anxiety when I was quiet or still, and I reverted around family. Lauren came to visit me with her best friend. The three of us traveled around the island, camping on rock beaches and in ditches and fields. They stood out. Blond. Tan. Confident. When they strut into gas stations, all eyes would turn.

Somewhere, in a corner, was me, a shadow no one could see.

In their presence, I allowed myself to become less than I actually was.

I hid my sorrow about it by being the leader, again. I drove the car, and once they both told me my hands were lovely. But it seemed a token.

My hands.

My hands.

Yet working with my hands helped me touch my beauty. I vowed to ask a future daughter one day—how do you feel gorgeous, radiant, feminine, what ways or moments draw that up in you?

For me, it was body movement. I knew that now. As long as I could move, I could embody beauty. Pull me up a tree. Haul that heavy box. Do a cartwheel. Though my mother had modeled this way for me in her own container of life, for her it was out of necessity, less out of her personal desire. Had any of my ancestors felt body connected to earth? On a seaweed farm, after dragging long dark green strands of kelp from sand beach to garden, I stood at the edge of a wild ocean and understood all my woman ancestors had indeed been of the earth. Every one descends from people who have worked land and depended on nature.

Two years later, when our plane coasted back across the equator, I landed in Boston and went back to the land: drove tractors, carried boxes of heavy vegetables, worked with teens again, and swam in ponds.

It wouldn’t be my endgame.

I knew so.

But my grounded female had found a home with the earth. It was a natural posture for me. I began to dream of ground animals—rabbits, mice, marmots—holding out small pills of medicine for me in their tiny paws.

My mother was glad to have me back in the country.

One afternoon, she sat on my bed and watched me undress from work.

“This life suits you, Moll,” she said, and gazed at me. She meant my slenderness must be an indication of my happiness. I didn’t call her on it. However she saw it, I knew she could also see the pleasure of my body in nature, in labor.