Shed

____________________________________

Eula teaches me every moment can be a prayer. She is sick. Her sinus, ears, nose, throat are working it out. We are not home. We are in Texas visiting a friend. We sleep in the backyard guesthouse cradled by humid fragrant air. Neighborhood cats prowl and scream outside. I strip her down naked. Must remind myself that, though her mama runs cold, she runs hot. We move around in the unfamiliar bed, brick-red sheets, awake, awake, awake. My face presses against her soft warm back as she snuggles closer. I wrap my arms around her small torso and she grabs my thumbs. Together, our hands make hands in prayer. Trees rustle and shadows dance over us. I will be with you wherever you are, whatever new beds you sleep in, wherever in the world as you grow, even when you don’t want me, here I am, my arms around you.

Twenty minutes later, Eula moves around for a new position.

We thrash together until birds sing their song.

~

When we return, my prayers accumulate—thank you. Weaning has freed me. Please let me make use of this new field of flowers before me. I have been a horse frothing at a closed starting gate. The gate has opened. My legs stretch long and there is somewhere to go, somewhere un-trapped.

Then, one day, my mom’s car crashes. I’m driving home from client meetings, planning how to get Eula more fabric for her folding obsession, when I get a text: Upside down in a ditch off Enders. Am okay.

I keep going on the snowy road because I’m almost to Enders. On my way, I text back and assume her car careened in one of the two-foot ditches so common out here. We’ll need some chains. We might have to call a tow company. But then I can’t find her. I can’t find her anywhere.

Where are you? I text.

Then I see her head as she climbs out of a twenty-foot ditch.

Jesus.

I get out of my car and run across the empty country road. When I hug her, electricity surges from her skin. Are you okay? Are you okay? She is unhurt. Her eyes flash alive, angel-like. We peer over the edge at her smashed car. I don’t understand how she is okay. If she had been knocked out, we wouldn’t have found her. If this had happened in deep winter, under snow, we wouldn’t have found her. I didn’t even know this ditch was there.

“Let’s get you warm,” I say as we make our way to my car. She explains that she slid on the ice, and then woop, there went the car. By the time we leave, she’s made friends with the policeman and tow guy. I keep insisting that we have someone check out her neck, but she tells me she’s fine.

I spend that night with her in the cabin. My father is in New York and I want to be sure she’s okay, even though nothing on her body hurts.

“I don’t want you to elbow me if I snore,” she says, so I sleep on the daybed.

When we wake, we sit around in our blue-and-white Japanese bathrobes (yukatas leftover from her parents’ sojourn there) and drink tea.

“You don’t hurt at all, Mom?”

“Not at all. I feel alive,” she says.

“I can’t believe your mom wasn’t hurt,” Chris says. Even he is moved to an exclamation. My mother rarely feels physical pain, even when a branch gouged her leg bloody, when she cut a sliver of her finger off chopping vegetables, when she had shoulder surgery, when she burned her hand with oil, when her “bulge” was protruding from her vagina. Maybe my long-term interest in the body has made that sort of detachment not an option. I have a different trajectory. That’s okay.

~

In her bright office, Holcomb does internal pelvic work on me, part of her training. I lie covered on a table and she massages the vaginal tissue to release holding. It doesn’t alarm me to have her fingers inside me.

“It’s a wonder,” she says, “we have standard bodywork on all other parts of the body except this one.” Every woman holds her female history in the pelvis. We watch the way our mothers and grandmothers walk. We watch what they protect and what they leave vulnerable. We take note of whether they dance, and how they dance. Because we are programmed to mimic, we do. But beyond observance, we have genes. They turn on or off based on what circumstances life sends our way.

What might live between my hips? The inherited belief systems are hard to identify. They can feel so far from my own but they have spawned my own. I have spent so much of my life trying to shed them. But there are others I’ve not recognized. Years ago, a massage therapist had encouraged me to meditate on my pelvic bowl. I had visions of spending a weekend drawing the ligaments, making the hammock shape out of clay, wearing all red during the process, meditating on my pelvis every full moon. It never happened. There was never a large-enough cause to spearhead the action.

Holcomb rouses me from wherever I’ve been on her table in a dark room. She lets me come to and then shares what she noticed: gentle tone, no significant prolapse, stagnation, scar tissue from the surgery, upper right quadrant slow to respond, left side bound, and lots of heat. It’s a lot to receive, but she says it in a way that normalizes it.

“You can do this work on yourself,” she shares.

I walk into the January winter aware of my holding, eager to release it.

~

What I learn: My incontinence has woken me up to rage, and rage has woken me up to the remarkable Mama Earth voice in my pelvis. It has been locked up—for eons. It is specific to my life and also unspecific, ancestral, beyond me but in me. It isn’t bad. I’m not meant to banish it from my essence (you can’t do that anyway). It is a teacher, an energy to sculpt, transmute, and, here’s the most important step, direct with care and intention.

Amass the uterine lining.

Release the egg.

Float the egg.

Shed the lining.

Ground yourself after blood.

Rage might be part of my medicine. It has been both my destroyer and my healer.

~

Healing really does happen for people. Maybe these people are more practical. Perhaps they have not constructed a worldview that a wound never shakes free from the body because it has become part of your important human story—or even an ally. Now I’d rather have no story and the ability to trapeze and cartwheel. I wouldn’t have dared or wanted to make that trade two years ago.

Eula is approaching her second birthday. When she falls, she smooches her own knee. At first, this awes me. How does she know? But then I remember I taught her to do that and must remind myself of my own self-care. She wants to tend to everyone’s Boom-bas, investigate and track the progress of Papa’s blister, Mama’s stubbed toe, Mare’s finger cut. If I’ve had a cold, she strokes my throat and asks, “Your throat better, Mama?” I choose to believe this interest is developmental or a part of her inherent curiosity, not a response to having witnessed a wounded mother.

By nature, she wants to soothe.

She hugs the animals in her books, leans her face onto the page and snuggles them as best you can snuggle a hard-edged story. On one page, two children bury a dead chipmunk as butterflies surrounded them. I understand this metaphor for death, but she furrows her brow and stares up at me, “Awwww, okay?”

“Well, that chipmunk died,” I explain. “She’s going back to the earth. It’s okay, everything dies, sweets, we all die, it’s a natural process.” I refuse to make up a lie. I know she won’t absorb what I’m saying completely, but she also knows. She just came from that place. She knows even as she tries to sort it out in her mind.

“There you go,” she says, and strokes the chipmunk, “there you go.”

When I hear my own language coming from my daughter’s mouth, I hear the frequency of my There you go. We flip the page to a scene of turtles, deer, and storks resting by a stream. She steps her feet on the page and inches closer, trying to push her way into that world. Her green-striped socks slip. She wants to go there. I get it. Determined, she turns her whole body around and tries to back in with her bum. Maybe that’s the key. Then she attempts with her arms shot out. No luck.

I’ve been watching her transport herself these days. She and Mare have a ritual of doing “lipstick.” One afternoon, I made dinner in the kitchen and watched her. She picked an orange crayon from her art box and flopped down on our low couch. After a contented sigh, she stared up at the ceiling and began to paint her whole mouth orange, over and over again, for an hour, no pause.

Where was she?

These private moments multiply.

At bedtime now, she wants to tweak the hell out of my nipple. I usually don’t mind, except when the sensation of wanting my body back swoops over me. One evening, I said, “No thank you, Eula, no nipple tonight.” When she huffed and puffed and blew my house down, I gave in to my exasperation and barked, “Just go to sleep, just go to sleep, please.” I slunk off to bed with the chest ache of having said the wrong thing to my child.

The next night, after my planned glass of white wine and some chocolate, we sit on her blue rug together with the lights off. When she reaches for me, I cup my own breasts and don’t move. The look of confused betrayal in her eyes is hard for me to watch. She pounds on my chest, scrapes at me, tries to pry my hands away.

“I know, sweets, I know, I know it’s hard,” I repeat.

But she rages more, hurls her body on the bed and then pounds on my legs. I breathe and tell her I’m here, I’m here, I’m here as she screams. I want to reach out to her but then my breasts become available. Under the dark canopy of her room, I wait for the energy to move through her. Her movements are familiar. We all do this. When her body collapses on me, I hug her to my chest and feel her fury evaporate.

“There you go, Eula, there you go. I’m here.”

~

At my yearly women’s exam, my second one since Eula’s birth, I realize I don’t know what exactly caused my incontinence or minor prolapse. I assumed the vacuum, pushing for five hours, the natural posture of my body, but maybe not. Somehow knowing what it was will help me heal.

“I’m looking for a why,” I ask my gynecologist, the kind one from before.

“It’s hereditary,” she says. “I’ve seen women with five kids, or women who push for hours and hours, and you’d never know they had a baby. Some women have a textbook birth and tons of postpartum challenge. It’s about connective tissue, and often your mother’s pelvic floor is your own. The vacuum and pushing didn’t help, but they probably weren’t the direct cause.”

I’m shocked.

It makes complete sense. It’s also her opinion, one opinion. I tend to believe it’s all of the above. It’s everything. It isn’t just one reason. But part of me is made this way. What does that mean? Afterward, my gray hatchback cradles me in the parking lot. My body feels liberated and bound at the same time by this information. No event to blame. No person to blame. My inheritance. But I must choose what to do with it.

I go home with a sort of health resolution.

When our house darkens, I sit on a chair in our loft with a towel underneath half of my butt and do a Kegel, as if on a horse. This is one exercise from the pelvic-floor audio CD I recently bought—one to add to my collection of barely used ones. But on this cover, a woman leaps on a beach. I want to leap again. The woman, trained as a Feldenkrais practitioner, healed herself after two births and some significant incontinence. Her story becomes my beacon. I can no longer afford to be inconstant with my pelvic-floor exercises simply because I have been in denial or anger. It is no longer such a shock. I’m beyond that part now.

What if I befriend my bladder and my pelvic bowl?

Give them a name. Talk to them; believe in their capacity to heal, instead of berating them. Tell them we can do this together. When Chris and Eula run races on the driveway, the wrecking ball returns heavy on my chest. I feel separate. I don’t want to be separate anymore. In a recent dream, Eula and I both have red-splotched birthmarks. They begin at our thyroids and flame up all over our throats. I ask Chris to rub calamine lotion on us and he does, but we aren’t sure whether it’ll go away.

When I wake up, the no from my body sets a boundary with the great beyond.

Don’t you dare make this part of her body story one day.

Don’t you dare.

February unfolds more snow and more snow and more snow, as usual. When we drive to town and stop at a light, I hold my bladder and say, I see you, I honor you, I’m here, and then Eula, from the back, sees the green light and calls out:

“Green! Go, Mama, go.”

~

There is the healing of my body. There is the healing of my relationships.

I wish I could believe they are separate.

That would be convenient, easier.

My mom and I are in synch these days. One afternoon, we sort through Eula’s clothes—put away the small ones and integrate the hand-me-downs. Sun pours through her bedroom window and Eula stands naked in a drawer on the floor and dresses up.

“I remember getting all her clothes ready before birth. So neat and tidy,” I laugh.

“Yeah, you can’t know what’s coming, can you?” my mom says.

We re-story, day by day. I could never let my mother love me by offering clothes because I couldn’t love myself. Clothes have now, for the most part, become a connection point. I have chosen to make it so. My mother leaves tomorrow to visit my brother in Thailand. I don’t want this domestic moment of ours to end. I already miss her.

“What do you think about these pants?” I ask.

“Pitch ’em.”

“These?”

“Those will last another few months.”

During the three weeks she is gone, I clean the guesthouse for the rental guests. My mother is present everywhere—the way she folds rags, leaves a pad of butter out for cooking, stores her grains in a basket, keeps her spiritual books on a cherry wood table by her bed. Her absence is a hole in my stomach. It’s acute. And I come to understand how necessary her being here has been for me. She has been the familiar background—the person Eula and I can walk down the dirt driveway to see, the one who knows how long the salmon should be in the oven, the mother who says, “It’s okay. You just can’t go there right now.” It makes sense to navigate motherhood with your mother.

I would have been very isolated without her.

She filled in when Chris was unavailable.

Maybe this is how it has always been: the women together, the men in and out.

Now that we live in our house, he has gathered some of his energy back—works normal hours on furniture, comes in for dinner with us and we all say thank you to the great elk spirit, leans close to me as we discuss what kind of couches he might build for us one day. We thread our partnership back together and touch our pain as we do so.

Bloodletting.

Woozy.

We are acting out a gender dance, a systemic healing of what men have done to women and women have done to men, part ours but also older than us. It’s been a mutual violence. Men have wronged men too. What would this process be if my lover were a woman? Women have wronged women too. The discomfort of our growing encourages me out of the house. I am holding on to the lifeboat that reminds me one person cannot nor should meet all my needs. I am trying to change my tendency to rarely reach out to friends when in need. I meet one in a restaurant. At midnight, I drive to one’s house with puffy eyes and tears streaming. With another, I walk. They all understand the nuance of my marriage without me saying much because somehow it is the nuance of their marriages too. We do not live in cocoons. Exhaustion can swallow my intentions. What I’m saying is I don’t know if I can do it, if I have the strength to heal both my body and my marriage, and they need to happen together.

One friend reminds me about radical self-acceptance.

Another passes on what someone passed to her: You do, he sees. It’s on you.

Another friend tells me to throw my diagnosis, not myself, off a cliff.

They are all saying, Assume a posture. One evening, he puts Eula to sleep and I leave on foot with cranberry lip stain in my pocket. We haven’t had an argument. We aren’t triggered by one another in this moment. I move up the hill behind our home, past owls and hawks above and coyotes somewhere, to engage in my own prevention ritual. I need a red mouth for it. I want a red mouth as part of my body. I have learned about the importance of self-decoration from my daughter. On goes my red mouth and, near trees, on the open flat, mountains watch or don’t, as I spin and spin and spin and shake myself down into the earth.

For hours.

When I return, everyone slumbers and, then, so do I.

~

At the end of March, we meet up with some of Eula’s friends at a park. Under the linden trees, spring calls to us all, grass, sun, warmth at long last. The dogs run around in a pack, as do our toddlers. Eula breaks from the group and runs far away, down to the bottom meadow. I sit with the other mothers and watch. Thought I’d be done with my healing by now: another spring, another chance for renewal.

She smooches each tree.

Runs with her hands above.

Laughs to herself.

A boy rolls down the hill and his mother follows him, rolling. I take note of the way she hugs to her core. I want so much to do that too but worry my body will break. It is time to step out of what has been. Let wounded woman dissolve back to the earth, or at least let her rest. Soon. Look at my teacher, Eula, and how she runs.

I will mimic my daughter.

~

Eula screams for me before dawn. I scamper down the ladder, walk across the concrete floor, and crouch down by her bed.

“What’s wrong, sweets?” I ask.

“Owls get you,” she mumbles. “Owls get you.” By you, she means her. The owls have been hooting outside her window. I grab the down comforter, crawl into her warm bed, and cuddle up with her.

“Hold nipple, hold nipple,” she says, and grabs on, her safety always, at the grocery store, in any circumstance she needs comfort. She hands me a stuffed animal; if she has one, I should have one too.

“They won’t get you, sweets, they’re just saying, Hello, Eula. Hello, Eula, when you hear them,” I explain as we wrap up, press nose to nose, and fall asleep together.

My dreams come, too.

My dreams will come like a great migration this spring.

I dream of a tattooed woman. She tells me I’ve passed away. I tell her I haven’t. “Yes you have,” she says.

We wake up wrapped up in each other, and Eula pushes up, ready for her day. I pretend to be asleep but can sense her blue eyes watching me. It’s a good thing to pass away in a dream. Time to enter a passage and leave the old behind. Why is death so much like birth?

~

“Sorry, Mama,” Eula says one day when she bumps into me at the front door. I’ve never heard her say sorry, and it bothers me that she says it in this context. No need for that word so overused by women. I bend down and put my arm around her.

“You don’t have to say sorry, you just say, excuse me,” I explain. I realize excuse me has its own set of issues, but the word sorry frightens me. It’s the gateway drug to all the other words women use to apologize for their own existence. Clearly I say it often—sorry I was late, sorry I didn’t tell you, sorry sorry sorry. In our early days, Chris used to say, “Babe, you don’t have to say sorry when you tap me on the shoulder to ask me a question.”

I need to erase it from my weekly vocabulary.

I want to preserve it for when I really mean it.

Eula nods.

Later that afternoon, Eula runs through the house. Her bare feet tap tap the concrete floor and she sings, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” as she glances back at me with a grin. Oh, girl. I don’t respond but love her defiance, this feedback loop. When I start saying, excuse me, she will follow.

~

What I learn: Our language is the language of our dominator culture. It has become familiar; we no longer recognize it. We use it to exert power over another. I want to tend to language. It’s my thing. It’s the one choice and intention I feel most sure about as a parent. I know I will make mistakes. Everyone calls animals he (unless the animal has a baby), so I call almost every animal we see she. When winter rolls around again, we are going to build a snowwoman: snowmen too, but a snowwoman first. Why aren’t there more snowwomen? I also won’t call a poop diaper dirty because poop isn’t dirty. It’s poop. Nothing from our body is dirty. We rewrite “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” with a queen and little girl who lives down the stream. I know Eula will grow up in a mélange of words and worlds and that is good, but I want to give her a foundational sense, through everyday language, that equal footing between genders should exist.

The pendulum has got to swing for that to happen.

I would have made the exact same word adjustments with a son.

Because it’s a myth that only women suffer from the patriarchy.

Men do too.

They get shut down. They benefit from the system on a thick surface level—jobs, power, control—but the expectations for a man to be “a man” can be brutal and unyielding. It might be easier for a girl to be a tomboy than a boy to be, what? Other men expect them to be men. Don’t lose your manhood. I’ve never heard of a woman telling a woman not to lose her womanhood, though the subtext of what women expect of each other is equally complicated. I don’t mean to understate or overlook that it’s been harder for women, but I no longer want to be the person who demeans men in order to find a place for women. There is such unexplored terrain for men. It hasn’t been safe for them to access their own feminine essence. Actually, it hasn’t been safe for anyone. Women of my generation have been trained to be masculine. Out of need. Out of era. Out of an attempt to match the world’s pace. But my own overblown masculine has caused significant pain—to me, to my loved ones. On many levels, I have been the very patriarchy I abhor.

We don’t see the feminine anywhere in our culture.

It barely exists in our collective language, actions, or policies. Bless those on the forefront of gender conversation. Gender fluidity is shaking it all up, reminding us that the feminine and masculine energy can coexist in each person, each town, each country.

This isn’t about female takeover.

But the shift includes an overdue recognition of the female body.

~

At the base of my throat, an apology has begun to grow. It happens slowly in everyday moments when he, the main he in my life, walks past our kitchen table to get a glass of water and touches my shoulder just because, like he used to; when he emerges naked from a shower, strong shoulders and strong butt, and Eula asks about his penis and he doesn’t skip a beat, says, “Yep, that’s my penis,” and continues toweling off his head; when he becomes obsessed with playing the ukulele for Eula as she dozes off; when he leaves uncapped pens around the house, trademark move of his; when he peeks around the corner, runs toward his daughter, swoops her up and tosses her high to then catch her and her giggles; when he teases me about the vocabulary I make up by saying Only Molly; when my parents ask him to chainsaw a fallen tree and he gets right to it; when he shares some obscure fact about geology or Syria or the way an airplane works; when he makes his coffee first and Eula’s scrambled eggs second and she doesn’t goad him like she does me; even when he says in the dark, “We are both triggered, let’s leave it until tomorrow”; even when he is tired and hunched and silent and covered in sawdust.

I have begun to see my husband again.

I don’t know what part of my lens has been real or not real.

The bud in my throat starts to unfurl. Somehow, now, it might not require an apology from him in order to bloom itself. I have said I’m sorry a thousand times, with half breath, in stolen moments, twice with tears and what I thought was meaning, though usually, not always, with a condition: if I say it, he must say it back to me. His silence, any deliberate silence, can be its own form of violence. I do believe that still.

But enough.

There is an apology.

It is alive and green in me.

It is feral and of my flesh.

It has words but does not want to use words.

How can I communicate this with my body: I’m not sorry for my feelings but I’m sorry it was so messy, for my attacks and demands on you every day, for wanting closeness five minutes later, for that whiplash, that new parenthood wasn’t what we expected, that I could not be the glowing new mother and you didn’t even require that of me, for all the blame, the way I undervalued your contribution because I wanted mine to be seen, for the unsafe space, and that I hurt you enough so you, tender you, could not be tender with me.

~

I step out of our concrete shower, away from our green plants, and bend down naked to put Eula’s books back in a basket. We are cleaning up. She dances around behind me and then goes to crawl through my legs. I glance through my own legs at her paused, face-to-face with my vulva, looking at it with big wide Oh my goodness eyes. What is that, what is that place?

I don’t say anything.

I watch her take stock.

I will never forget those eyes.

Later that week, Eula stands in the bathroom with me as I change my pad. She sees blood and asks, “Owie, Mama, boom-ba?” As she scuffs her feet on the wood floor, I explain that it’s my blood, not a wound. I say the word period even though I want to say menses. Menses seems not part of street language, so I opt out of it. For the next four days, she watches, checks my pad, helps me fold it up and put it in the trash. She asks if she can touch the blood. Yes, you can. Can she smell it? Sure. Eula marvels that a tampon goes in me and comes out. I tell her over and over again this part of being a woman. It’s good and not scary. One day she’ll have blood too. I wonder what of it she understands.

A few days after my blood is gone, we walk though our small backyard forest: over mossy rocks, under cottonwoods, near the baby woodpecker nest. I try my latest vow to lead with my pelvis. It’s not a jut out, more of a sway, more like my eyes reside between my hips. The world smells of water.

Ahead, Eula patters along and chants to herself.

“Mama woman, Mama period. Papa no. Bru no. Mama woman. Eula girl. Eula woman. One day.”

~

Chris puts his head between my legs and I light up from the inside. What I need to trust: we are part of coming back to some center. He can sense a change in me too. In the dark, trees stand somewhere beyond our pane of glass. Motherhood has made me more animal than ever before, unbound by what came before me, more in tune with the feminine art of receiving. Remember you were born a sensual person and you will continue to learn well into old womanhood all the ways it is safe to be sensual. Waves start to pass through me. No expecting a man to make me feel this way, not this man, not any man. But when it happens, I accept. I cannot only do physical pelvic exercises and take thyroid medicine.

There is more.

The wilderness within me needs a voice.

My inner current depends on my tending.

As we love-make in the loft, this connection is everything I want right now.

“Mama,” Eula screams. Oh no. Oh no. I plead with her telepathically, Please just an hour, then I will come down. But it doesn’t work and she has a cold, so I pull him up.

“I know,” he breathes. “We should go down.”

We means me.

I go down, smelling of heat, and soothe her, give her my nipple to hold in the dark until she falls asleep again. I climb back up the ladder to the warm body of my husband, his strong hands, and pull his face to mine: my body, his body.

We have spoken decades to one another.

“I wasn’t done with you,” he says, and then he descends down the length of my body, back down to my root, to me, to the root.

~

Holcomb works on my pelvic bowl again. Her fingers move along the scar tissue. She asks me to signal if it’s too much. Lying on the table, I close my eyes to the bright sun and the sensation of an eight out of ten on the pain scale—a hot iron smoothes out the tissue and the burn of it goes deep, beyond, out to far edges of my hip.

I can handle it.

I will handle it if it is meant to help me.

At the end of our session, she swivels on her stool and stares at me.

“Your body responds fast,” she says. “Faster than most.” Many body-workers have told me my body shifts quickly.

Remember that.

Remember how willing my body is.

Remember how my mother has always told me my body heals fast.

“That was super intense, I mean, super intense.”

“Yeah,” she sighs. “I hope not too much. Remember, this kind of deep work can loosen some feelings too, so be gentle with yourself. I also noticed an energy, almost got knocked off my chair by it. You’re holding on to a collective suffering and it isn’t serving you.”

“That feels so vast,” I say, and I start to sit up, pull my underwear on.

By the time my car zooms along our country road, past cows and familiar barbed wire fences, I wonder how any woman cannot hold on to that suffering. How do we not allow it into our bodies? How do we release it from our wombs? If we do, are those women before us forgotten? I don’t even know what those particulars are for my lineage, what their bodies have been through, other than guesses about the women I knew and know. It feels endless.

That night I transform into a tempest—my body cannot stop the sobs. Chris protests at first, thinks it another rage cycle, realizes it isn’t, climbs the ladder, and places his body over mine. I don’t curl into him. I don’t actually need him in this moment. I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling as tears run down my cheeks, enough to wet the pillow. My wrecking ball heavy again. I hear myself call out to Pat-Pat and my father’s mother, Grandmommy. My emotional connection to them never had time or space to develop.

But I call for them, for anyone else, for help.

I don’t know if I can do this.

My pelvis weeps.

What if I can’t heal myself—or feel really alive again? What if I pass that on to Eula? Now that I’ve opened to the possibility of healing, the possibility of not healing haunts me more. There are so many ailing women. There are so many. There have been many hopeful moments where I’ve thought, “This is it. I’ve resurfaced.” And I don’t know if I can hoist myself up again.

A wave of tenderness washes over me, for me, for all of us.

The body is made to heal.

The truth is I’ve never expected to fully heal, as if I’m destined for partial health forever.

I must expect to heal.

I wake to a bladder that has lost control again. My incontinence will reign for weeks, something released from scar tissue, a getting worse before getting better again. That afternoon, as I nestle Eula down for her nap and call forward women everywhere, lineage, ghosts, a message comes. In the other room, where no one is, I hear our woodstove creak open and then close with a firm sound.

~

Water is everywhere. Splash, splash in the bath, Eula splashes around in our utility sink. I’ve given her Mare’s old ivory mirror. She scrubs it with a washcloth and explains to me that “Eula clean it.” Then she pauses, gazes at herself in it. More scrub. Pause. Gaze. More scrub. Pause. Gaze. I stand, lean on the sink, and stretch out my calf muscles like a runner. We attract what we are. But we can remake what we are. We must have this option. She is pure source. She seems to have messages for me in every moment, or I just choose to make meaning from them.

At breakfast, she spilled her water glass onto the wood table on purpose.

“What are you doing, sweets?”

“Drawing,” she said, as her finger moved through beads and smears of water.

“What are you drawing?” I asked.

“Woman. Long hair,” she said, and I could see the long-haired woman she was making, could actually see her emerge from water spilled onto wood.

Now in her bath, she weaves water around the mirror her grandmother once gazed into as a girl. An hour later, she tires of the bath and hands me the mirror.

“Oooooo,” she squeals, delighted by a warm towel and her mama’s arms.

I pull the plug on the drain and we watch the water swirl down together.

“Goodbye, water, thank you, water,” we say.

Thank you, water.

What would happen if I let my old water down back into the earth? My wounded-woman story gave me power when I felt powered down. Without it, I lose a few flashy items: the righteousness of being right and making my husband wrong, the permission and reason to vent, and a bunch of attention for being complicated and, therefore, interesting. Old story. Not helpful anymore.

My cells want to live into the next story.

They have gathered and staged the greatest protest of their lives.

Because beyond the story spreads a bursting green land.

The woman in labor lives there.

Oh, look at the space, look at the possibility.

My body need not be broken, right?

~

Eula turns two years old. Could it be? Green grass starts to poke up and snow stays in the faraway mountains. No great changes in my body. But my perception has changed. My period has come a week early. It’s strange for me to be irregular, but the small dose of progesterone is re-regulating me.

After dinner, we walk up to her four-stone spot. It’s her origin place. The grass is still matted down and a slight breeze greets us. She pulls her pants down, squats, and pees.

Then she balances on one of the rocks. Falls. Balances. Falls.

“Moon,” she yells at the moon coming up. “Watch Eula do dis.”

She commands the moon to watch.

She knows the moon.

She waves good night to it every evening.

As she continues to practice her balance, I sit in our meadow bowl surrounded by mountain ranges. We are small here. Somewhere elk bed down. Somewhere hawks coast over us. They don’t think about the cycle because they have never removed themselves from the cycle. We have. We do it every day. There must be a way for modern women to live in a modern world and still hold on to the cycle. Our cycle might be the forgotten solution. I pull at grass and gather sticks around me to make something—wrap, fold, wrap, fold. What will it become? Eula scampers over to me, flops on my legs, watches me create, and when I’m done, I hold it up.

“There,” I say.

“A woman,” she responds.

“Yes,” I say, and grab her to me. “It is a woman. How did you know?”

~

In my dream, Eula and I move upstream and uphill in a rowboat on a twisty road flooded to become a creek. The current grows thick and brown. The only way I can push us is by getting out of the boat to push it while doing breaststroke and relying on the power of my legs. Then another dream, in a public restroom, amniotic fluid pours out of me and keeps coming. I grab paper towels and try to mop it up but there is no end to it. I run outside to hide under a tree in a parking lot. Masses of people walk toward the building at dusk as violins fill the night air. “The orchestra,” I hear people say. I must go back in to fess up but remain frozen, unsure of what to do.

In the real world, Eula starts to call out at night: “Where Mama go?”

In the real world, she bites her animals on the nose and then says, “Oh sorry,” followed by a hug. I remember doing the same as a child—creating a pain so that you could soothe something.

In the real world, I see my body in the yoga-class mirror and love washes over me: my sweat, my red face, my strong butt, my dark hair, never before, the surge of such love. The viper within nods her head in approval. Could it be possible to let my body sadness be simply a moment in time that ended when I was thirty-six years old?

Let me get honest with myself.

In those early months of new motherhood, Chris held me from behind, licked tears from my eyes, reminded me it would pass, suggested that sleep deprivation affects mood more than we know. Any time I did my pelvic-floor exercises for a week straight, it helped, noticeably. My father wrote me a long letter sharing all the ways he saw me, a list of how he honored what I had been through, how proud he was of me for all of it because he had, over the years, grown from a man full of tension to one full of less tension who believes women are the answer to everything. My mother cooked for us and loved me through all my lash-outs. My doctor is also my friend. Chris woke with Eula as much as I did. He built us a house. I have freedom. I have freedom. I have freedom. She was born pink, not blue as the doctors expected. She was not compromised. My body has muscle memory. My body knows how to engage muscles. My body can remember how to heal. They tried to help me.

Be kind to others and myself.

Subterranean changes are the only way.

~

My brothers fly to Montana from other parts of the world. They are my limbs, I have always told people, and it’s true. Something clicks back into place when we see each other. My parents offer to stay with Eula as she sleeps so we can sneak out to a cider house—me and the boys and my husband. I’m struck by what adults we are now. I sit across from them and watch the way they speak with such clarity. We are past youth. We have entered the meat of our lives.

Feminism comes up.

I don’t remember exactly what gets said, something about how men often like when a woman acts soft or needs something. Peter loves being able to protect his wife, take care of her.

“That doesn’t work for everyone,” I say.

They all stare at me.

“Well, Chris,” I continue, and notice acid in my throat, “you don’t like it when I ask for help or need anything from you, if I appear weak.”

“That’s because you come at me with a spear when you make a request.”

We choose to laugh. I choose not to latch on to my husband’s comment, the way it shows his own unexpressed rage, his learned passiveness, his inability or lack of drive to help himself or seek counsel or be responsible to his own feelings. I tend to choose and then un-choose. My younger brother, Alex, feels kin to me, maybe because he’s gay and feels marginalized too. Even he, though, says, “C’mon, Molly, it’s the old dance between feminine and masculine.” Across the gulf of a wooden table, I am the last woman standing. Even the men I trust live a hundred thousand miles away from me right now. They must be talking about goddess energy. It’s the only way I can accept what I’m hearing.

As we walk out to the car, as dark descends over us, my fury slithers up, tells me that they know nothing about what it means to be a woman in need, and how complicated that is, or what it’s like to have your body destroyed in the act of giving and sustaining human life. The whole thing is bullshit. For all their own woes, they don’t ever do the personal work. They can never ever understand my situation in a felt-sense body way. Never.

I march onward and my arms start to shake.

Oh no. This is messy: trust your cycle, leave it till later, practice what you’ve learned, you can do it, take a breath.

We start to drive and I realize I am the woman driving the men who drank alcohol home. Hm. The urge within awakens. Maybe it’s adrenaline or my older-sister tendency, but I cannot control it.

I hear my voice begin.

“Do any of you know what it’s like to be broken and have no one help you? Do you know what it’s like to be so zapped of energy you can’t pick your baby up and then your husband walks out the door irritated at you? Do you know what it feels like to not know if you can ever run again without urine pouring out of you? Have you ever experienced anything close to this? And do you know it’s not only me? It’s many women, women all over the fucking world. Do you have any idea?”

“Whoa, Molly,” Alex says from the backseat. “This is intense. It sounds like you are in a lot of pain, but this is a lot.”

“Yeah, it’s a lot,” I scream. “Welcome to my life.”

Chris audibly breathes next to me in the dark, protects himself by staring out the window.

“Are you blaming Chris?” Peter asks. “It sounds like you are talking about him and he’s in this car right now. This is really inappropriate. You need to stop.”

Oxygen flees our car.

Don’t you dare tell me to stop.

My mouth, though, stops.

I remember words, phrases, hurtful controlling ones from my younger brothers right around my puberty, when I became a woman, and later: Yeah everyone in this family is beautiful, except for Molly. You’re really letting yourself go. You used to be like a model, what happened? I’ve never dwelled on them, but now they snap onstage. No reverence for a girl becoming a woman. Old teases between siblings. Ha ha.

They get out at the cabin.

We inch the car back to our house.

“Sorry, babe,” I beg of Chris, who says nothing back to me. With bed covers over my head, the sludge becomes a hard stone in my belly. I am certain I have destroyed my marriage and my sisterhood. My only option is to hide.

No sleep.

No chance of sleep. I get up before dawn and leave. My pee pours out of me. The link between my rage/sadness and my incontinence is unmistakable. My car chugs up into the mountains, past so many trees. Suddenly, a female elk emerges from the woods, tall and stately at the edge of the road. She wakes me. We lock eyes as I continue, up, up, up with no plan other than not to return for hours.

At the top of nowhere, I slouch down into my car seat and let my sorrows out.

I don’t have energy to walk into the forest.

Hours later, when cars start to approach with people eager for a weekend hike, I buckle my seatbelt in the early pale sun and descend back to the valley floor. Me, a sepia image no one in this current world can recognize. Not ready to see anyone, I park my car on our dirt road and sneak up and around to the top of our hill.

My body crumbles down on the four-stone spot.

Facedown, arms out, and I release it all down into this Mother Earth, all of it, every last drop of me, scent of loam, turn my sludge to loam. Round the hurt out. I can feel Eula’s words below, Where Mama go? Oh god. A tiny ant with wings catches my attention, the way it walks up and down blades of grass, pauses, not sure where to go, but slow and fast and purposeful. My brothers have offered me a shovel. My gender work is not done. Later this afternoon, Chris and I will call Janice from our gray hatchback. When she asks how we are doing, a scream will erupt from my mouth. It’s my scream for all ages, a scream with no shame because there is so much shame.

But now, small black birds have landed nearby, so close, so long I’ve been here I become one of the flock and when at last my head rises, the whole earth shudders as they fly away and up.

~

What I learn: We cannot separate a culture’s treatment of women from that same culture’s treatment of the earth. The theory and study behind the connection is academic, ecological, and displayed in our everyday moments in homes across the world. When I scream into the earth, she hears me and has the remarkable tender strength to hold whatever comes out of me. Somewhere, in England, France, all over Africa, all over Asia, all over everywhere, ancient stone goddesses hold vulvas open in celebration, an offering of the divine, a passageway.

The earth also offers itself as a passage for anyone.

Come into my arms, it says.

You can rest here.

~

The early summer nights wake me up—all owls, coyotes, wind, some sound like crickets but less dense. My brothers have left. Chris and I have made our way back to each other. One evening, in bed, our sex heat builds, and light starts to spread out and up from the base of my tail, as it always does, and then a flash. Men. Many men. Smothering. Me smothered.

“Please stop,” I say, “now.” He does. Arousal dissolves. Release halts. With a whomp, my root becomes a vacuum, no movement, no sound, no sense of me. I don’t know yet that it will stay this way for almost two months.

We lie in the darkness.

He puts a hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t know what just happened,” I say. “Strange, flash, strange past-life flash of me, but not me. Strange. It’s not you. It’s other men. I don’t know.”

“It’s okay,” he assures me.

“Maybe I can get back into it,” I say, feeling bad even though I know I shouldn’t feel bad and he doesn’t expect me to get back into anything. We drift into sleep and my dream takes us on a descending elevator. The belt securing Chris snaps and he falls to the deepest hardest floor, lands on his head. I fly down and pull him into my arms. This still-alive but severely broken man becomes a boy, and I am yelling at people to get the quickest plane to Bangkok, and then the boy becomes my brother Alex and then my brother Peter and then other boys I don’t know, so many boys in my woman arms. These men. They are not so harmful. They are harmed too.

In the morning, I stand barefoot in the bathroom alone.

The sun lights up trees outside.

I touch between my legs—strange vacant black hole of space.

All my gender rage makes and unmakes itself in my pelvis.

Of course. I have been a woman who believed men would hurt her body for the simple reason she was female. This belief is not my own—it comes from a collective truth, came to me in a flood from ancestors I cannot name, perhaps comes to every woman that way. The man in the elevator did hurt me. But he was one man. The men in my family are not that man. I often tell friends if only women populated the world, I would spread out my arms, sway my hips, footfall my way into dance, and inhabit my sensuality, sexuality, and womanhood with no fear.

None.

I do understand the complex biology of it. I do understand the beauty of the male-female dance, but I cannot ignore the deep history of violation toward women. We are capable of evolving into a new connection. Just because men might be programmed to spread their seed doesn’t mean men should violate and disrespect. Just because women might be programmed to grow babies doesn’t mean every woman must grow a baby.

The one person who can create that well of safety is me.

It is a shedding process. As we make breakfast, Chris sees the analyzing in my eyes. He knows I tend toward leaden truths. He pulls my face close to his and smiles.

“Babe, I know you had a past-life flash last night,” he says, and squints love at me, “but it might not help you to relive it all day long.”

I laugh.

“Yes, true,” I say.

My practical man is good for me.

~

On the first of June, Eula finds a dead vole near our garden bed.

“Oh-p,” she says, and squats down to investigate.

“Bru must have gotten it,” I explain.

“It’s be okay, though,” she says with a nod. I nod back. Yes, even though it’s dead, the vole is still okay. Bare hands. We push dirt up over the vole. We bury it and allow the moist dirt under our fingernails. It is her first burial.

We all must bury an old way so a new way may grow up.

I am learning this about my life.

She will learn this about her own.

I watch my daughter, industrious under the gray sky. I will no longer make choices that compromise my own energy. I will take an uncharacteristic deep pause for the summer. Can the summer be a healing one? Eula will toddle back to the vole every day for over a week, on her own, to check in, a vigil for the dead creature.

The days tumble forward.

I’m off progesterone with Holcomb’s approval. It has done what it needs to do. I toss the packet of unused troches in the trash.

My body starts to ovulate with the full moon.

My cycle matched to a natural cycle—again, at last.

As we make rice pasta and salads and bison, as we meet friends at the park and I roll down a hill and don’t break, as baby robins hurl themselves out of nests into the world, my ovary releases an egg.

Eggs appear in one of my dreams. In an underground bar, a faceless bearded man, the oldest and kindest of grandfathers, approaches me. What does he want? I’m leery. He opens a paper towel to reveal a tiny, bloody egg. It’s from my ovary. Why does a man have my egg? He reads my mind.

“I have your egg because I want to show you what they look like,” he says to me.

Then he hands me another paper towel. It is heavy with all of my eggs. They look like rosehips. They are all here. They were in me in my mother in her mother in her mother until the beginning of time. Holcomb appears, glances over my shoulders, and gasps at the beauty. She didn’t know they looked like that.

My seeds. My possibilities.

Multitudes.