Ground

____________________________________

My long pause over the summer means simple focus: move, eat, nature, love each other. I want to arrive on the continent—no more unwanted pee—without having to trek across a dangerous and slippery glacier. Is there a way to effort less, to be gentle? Warmth calms me. Summer is my season.

“Mama, sing ‘She’ll Be,’” Eula asks.

My mom has taught her the song “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” She remembers songs I forgot existed. At least four times a day, outside on the ragged green grass, inside on our floor couch, Eula asks me to cross my legs so she can sit on my foot and bounce her way into the song.

What will she be; what will we be; what will I be? The other day, I inched my car up the driveway after a long solo hike in the mountains. It’s my intention for the summer: to process less and embody more, to play, to act as if my body is already healthy, as if I am beautiful and can wear shorts and not be shy about my more-plump legs, as if I can be kind. Eula ran fast across the grass/dirt to me, leapt into my arms, hugged me, and then pulled my face to hers, so close, and took me in, almost made a move to ingest the whole of me.

~

At my new pelvic therapist’s office, I sit on a brown massage table and tell her about my incontinence. It’s better but not over, linked very much to my cycles, worse before menstruating. Also, there’s the small prolapse and I might like to have another baby one day.

“Okay,” she says, “tell me what you want to be able to do again, what movement, what—”

“I want,” I interrupt, “to leap, dance, climb trees, run down the driveway with my daughter. I don’t need to run a marathon, but I want to be able to go on a fifteen-mile hike and feel good at the end, not like my organs are protruding out of my vagina, not sticky with urine.”

She beams at me, nods with the vigor of a boxer before a match. I’m amused that her mouth is so full of joy about all of this. At least I am far more accepting of her than I would have been a year or two ago. It’s possible. Not a problem. Not a problem at all. We can fix that for you. No, surgery is definitely not necessary. Really? Yep, we’ll get you feeling great and back together.

Those words don’t compute. She is so sure.

It is a foreign language I don’t know yet.

Somewhere, later, on a forest walk, Holcomb and I stare at each other and make a collective decision. Let’s not connect over our brokenness anymore. It’s so easy to do so. This is what women do. But it tires us now. It is enough, we say. I don’t know what her body tells her in this moment. Mine screams, “Revolution!!!!” We make sure to assure each other of exceptions. Of course, there will be times. She is my doctor. We are friends. We became mothers together. Nothing is absolute.

But woundology is sneaky.

Strapped to our backs, our daughters absorb the sun, perhaps also our words.

Do they hear us?

This is where time speeds up, because when healing accelerates, time hitches a ride and then spins out of the molasses and into a space so vast and thin there is no resistance. Nothing to push against.

~

What I learn: My purple kidneys attach to my bladder—and that bladder looks much like a leather purse. Imagine the beauty and design of it. Pelvic dysfunction is often attributed to already-weak pelvic muscles, but how we define weak is a common misunderstanding. We think of weak as not strong. Many women have a “strong” pelvic floor, often too tight, rigid. It may be a form of protection and this, in effect, can cause weakness. The ideal for pelvic health, like life, is to find a place of supple and strong flexibility. Many body-workers believe a misaligned pelvis can be directly linked to postpartum depression or rage.

Makes sense to me after everything.

What we don’t speak is a curse. Our collective history wants a full-powered speaker system. To speak it is a hurdle, but how to speak it is the greater challenge. We don’t want to misdirect it to wound others, yes; but more importantly, how can we speak it so the healing within us can actually take place? This continues to be my biggest learning. It’s my practice now. Spewing feels good in the moment but it does not do the work of sustainable deep release. That work, for women or men, comes from an attunement to the feminine.

~

In our weedy pond, Eula recoils in my arms, unsure of the slimy grasses for her first open-water swim. Goose bumps creep along our naked torsos. She grips my nipple. The sky spreads a pale blue. I tell her the pond is magic.

“It is?”

“It is.”

Minutes later, she splashes and paddles the grasses toward her, invites them to rest like snakes on her body. We are covered in grass snakes. I scrunch my toes in the loam beneath and send my energy down just as I draw it up into me. This has to be a daily remembrance. The earth can instruct me in the feminine. Eula has begun to communicate, at length, about what she remembers—when we crawled through our fence last autumn as cottonwood leaves fell, how she cried out, “Need Mama, need big hug,” in the night and how Mama came, when Holcomb checked Mama’s vulva under the big white sheet and Mama was okay.

I don’t know how she remembers events from six months or even a year ago.

“You remember,” I coo at her.

She leans forward, as she does, to touch her forehead to mine in recognition.

“Mama loves you,” she says, as the grasses sway around us.

By you, she means me and her.

~

Every summer Wednesday, I trade half of my workday for a long solo hike. I read for my clients at night. The mountains embrace me into whatever pulses: rain, heat, silence. For over two years, almost three, I have not exercised fully. I haven’t been able to move without discomfort or grief about the discomfort. It’s been easier to avoid movement. I’m done with avoidance. My legs move over rocks, up steep, across creeks, and I change my thoughts from My body is broken to My body heals itself with ease.

Practice required.

My question evolves.

When will my body heal?

To not effort is still a stretch for me. I believe I must lift weights. I must eat arugula and chicken and avoid sugar, gluten, and eating chocolate in the privacy and peace of my car. I must sweat. I must transmute my anger when I am triggered by something Chris does or does not do. I must conserve my emotional energy. I must keep my writing workshops afloat and reinvent a few. I must do yoga, not sit and stare at the wall during Eula’s one-hour nap. I must use my evenings for my own writing and then rouse myself at five forty-five every morn to meditate and, at least three days a week, drink a green smoothie before driving to the hot springs at dawn.

It’s hard to do it all, but I must, must, must—in order to be healed.

On these woods walks, I construct bubbles of possibility and plan my schedule, bubble up, bubble up. I can do it. My friends start to hear me talk about resilience. We saw our overly resilient mother and grandmothers package and bury the hard emotions, then decided we would be wise and feel and process every small emotion that surfaced in whatever way we wanted. Let’s be sad and broken and angry together because that is real. Let’s be real. Let’s be deep and unmasked. I’m not the only one of my female friends with intense rage: other women with fists slammed against glass windows, phones thrown, screams hurled, punches into walls, whole-body shudders and wails. We’ve revealed these moments to each other, afraid at first and then relieved to know we are not alone. It is not our solitary experience. I hear us discussing how hard the ubiquitous it always is. Pendulum swing. Necessary.

But we didn’t know how to reframe it: how to feel the feelings with a resilience and practice of connecting to cycles. There’s an art there. It’s old too. Women long ago knew how to engage ritual and move energy.

That knowing is in all of us.

I want to invite her back into me.

Look at her muscled legs. Look at the way her tree-bark hair falls thick, loose around her shoulders. Between her hips, a red glow no one can take from her. Nothing in her way. At the top of my climb, I consider her and sit in a peephole cave made of rock. The hike has a different name but I’ve renamed it Womb Rock. From here, layers of unbroken green mountains.

Some days Eula calls her vulva “my body.” I don’t correct her language.

Some days I wear a pad; some days I don’t.

Some days I pee on myself, especially on the downhill; some days I don’t.

I also go to a place I’ve named Deep Lake, a cold blue large mountain lake. I sneak around to a pine-needled stone beach and strip my sweaty clothes off, plunge in, down, into what feels like a pelvic bowl, wise, watery, calm. My limbs go numb. I kick around, float, swim back to shore and lie naked on a rock.

“I don’t want to be a woman disconnected from her pelvis,” I explain to Chris.

“I am falling in love with the female form,” I say.

“Good, babe,” he says.

As cottonwoods and firs fan down over me—they so unaffected—every new thought feels like a spark from an old thought. Over weeks, the earth shoots a deeper awareness up through my feet. It settles between my legs. I can hear it. But I won’t be able to receive it into my body until cool weather moves in and leaves start to blow, fall, and tumble from trees.

~

Over cantaloupe and eggs, I stare into Eula’s eyes with a serious love. Bright sun blinds our wood kitchen table. I communicate without words that I love her this much. She smiles and spreads her arms wide to show me that Mama loves her this much. We are humans becoming animals who need no words to express.

~

Three families. Five kids under age seven. Two or three miles. Camping gear. Bear country. Fathers haul double packs or pull a packed hiking stroller from behind. Toddlers scramble over rocks, dawdle, run and then get swooped up and carried by mothers who also wear packs on backs, one of whom, Holcomb, is also pregnant with her second daughter. We have somehow become this intense. I don’t tell anyone how proud I am for not peeing while carrying Eula on my belly and a pack on my back, fifty pounds total. Eula says it for me. “Good job, Eula,” she speaks to herself with each pull over a tree root, each run down the trail toward her friends, each run back to me. Mosquitoes and food and dogs and a campfire and the distraction of getting kids asleep in tents so we may catch some adult time which doesn’t happen because everyone is mostly exhausted and there is so much to say and so little breath to say it with.

Twenty-four hours later, on our hike out, I hold my bladder up with each footfall.

I don’t care if anyone sees.

I must tend.

I hear myself notice that I’m the largest woman on this adventure, and then I hear myself say, Old story, keep walking. My prolapse is much worse after the hike yesterday, but despair doesn’t lure me over to her cozy bed. I become practical. Over two years ago, when we first understood my pelvic floor was an issue, Chris suggested I treat it like a broken ankle. Do your exercises, and it will get better. He became an alien to me then. We were talking about my root, my woman essence, not an ankle. But now I’ve gone through a passage of my own creation and will do my pelvic-floor exercises and all will be well. It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.

We emerge from the woods feral and missing one dog.

Fathers go back to look for the dog. Mothers wrangle children into shade, break out leftover food, bags of granola, seaweed, what else do we have. We have them, these little whole people who delight in their scratches, tangled hair, bruised knees, faces smudged with dirt, earth.

I am done with my own catastrophe.

Please may I be.

~

The whole world changes in July—trees reach out, grass blades sturdy, creeks full of birds. Cottonwoods have shed white cotton all over lawn. On the cabin’s porch, my mom and I sit and watch naked Eula. She waters the potted geraniums.

“Pick off the dead flowers like this, Eula,” my mom shows her.

We prune. We are such worker women when we want to be.

When we step off the porch back toward our house, summer caresses us more.

Overhead, one, two hawks fly. The creek bumbles along, a sound we don’t know we are hearing because it is constant. Heat, my beloved heat, imprints ease on me, on us. Barefoot. Bees buzz everywhere. Eula knows to let the bees be. She struts through the warm grass, then starts to sing, “Bye, Mare, I love you, Mare, bye, Mare!” Her nude strut turns to dance turns to jog as we meet the gravel driveway and continue on. My mother waves from her kitchen door and off we go. This scene. Can I preserve it? It has all felt so hard, but this is easy—this grandmother, mother, daughter scene on a hot midsummer day. I wonder if I was born a person who wills everything to be hard.

There are many partial truths. The world is made of these partial truths.

My daily ministration is to ask my feminine side, the left, to lead my masculine side, the right. Does it mean something that all of my challenges, small and large, are on the right side of my body—right ankle, right hip, right pelvic bowl, right eye. It has worked to be powerful. It is tired. We were never meant to be symmetrical, though.

I re-pattern.

My left hand holds my right hand.

My left leg leads up the ladder instead of my usual right leg.

My left pelvis, please teach right pelvis how to hold herself, how to open but not collapse. It is another new conversation with my body—not an intention written down in a journal, but an actual physical holding and change.

Eula flits around the house these days clutching her bear Mo-Mo and whispering, “I’ve got you, Mo-Mo, I’m here,” into his ear, a phrase she repeats and repeats because she’s heard it from me. Her repetition offers it back to me.

“I’ve got you,” my left side says to my right side.

And then on the Fourth of July, while my man and daughter sleep, I lead my parents up the hill at dark to watch fireworks. It takes your full animal self to walk at night in Montana. Our eyes sift shadows from movement from wind. We sit on grass and gaze out over a valley gone primordial. Sounds echo far away. It looks like war. It could also be heaven. I hold my arms and think about how hair, skin, nails, consciousness are made up of where you live. The cells of the earth beneath my butt and the air around me make up the cells of me. Bru leans his long tiger body closer to me. In this company, I become a girl who watches. I am on the search for models. There are teachers everywhere. My parents talk and, at the exact instant my neck turns, an eagle coasts low right behind us in the dark. No one else sees her. No one else hears.

~

We’ve made a long effort at a very gradual teaching of how to sleep—rocking to holding to patting on back to sitting next to bed to sitting near doorway. It has worked, but then we hit these impasses where Eula is getting a tooth or growing and our tidy plan unravels and we’re back to one of us sleeping on a worn-out mattress in the hallway next to her room. When she wakes up, we tell her we can’t go outside until the sun rises. She watches for the sun out the window and then yells, “Yay! Sun is up! Yay!” She’s been clingy lately, unlike herself, wanting to be sure that I will come back when I go away. So now I just lie down in her twin bed—for naps and night—and let her tweak my nipple, my arm heavy over her body, our faces pressed sweaty together as she whispers, “Mama is here,” and I repeat, “I’m here,” and we fall asleep together and eventually, twenty minutes later, I wake and sneak out.

I mostly love it.

Instead of reading sleep books, I am doing what my body likes.

“Do whatever is easiest for you,” Chris says. I don’t have to do anything but be all snuggles with my daughter. When I feel myself loving it too much, I counsel myself that she won’t be a fifteen-year-old who needs to hold on to her mother’s nipple. This will end. This, right now, allows me to keep some energy. But I also pay attention to an intuition that, sooner or later, I’ll have to wean her from this ease too—and maybe that will be even more exhausting.

At this point, though, I give in.

“Why?” everyone asks.

Because I want to reorganize my relationship to effort.

~

One Wednesday, I go up to Deep Lake with a friend. Normally, I would wear my black nylon skirt with no underwear. It’s how I play these days and how women once sat, with vulva to earth. But I’m not alone. In the presence of someone else, I wear pants.

As our feet pound the ground, we talk.

“I don’t think I’m all that connected to my body,” I say.

“I don’t think that’s true about you,” she says.

“It isn’t true. I don’t know why I said it.”

We walk on, over rocks, roots.

“What I mean is,” I continue, “I don’t feel I have a right to say I’m connected to my body because I feel fat. I think I have a core belief that fat people aren’t connected to their bodies. I know this is wrong, incorrect, mean.”

A rocket has launched out of me.

I don’t remember what she says.

She listens, though.

I listen too, to the oldest parts of me as they surface and leave and travel beyond in me and eventually lose steam. Once that rocket makes it past our galaxy, away, I start to make specific changes at home. I cut underwire out of my three bras. I ask a dentist to remove the metal lingual bar from behind my bottom teeth. I am done with metal on my body. I schedule a haircut and a bikini wax. I don’t care about the cost anymore. After a shower, I brush my hair and Eula mimics me with her brush—our heads cocked to the side, slow strokes. Then she shows me how Mare does it in fast motions, a fluff from behind. So this is how we learn movement. When I start to pull my hair up into a loose bun, the only way I ever wear it, Eula stares at me.

“Don’t put pony in, Mama,” she says.

Okay, I will let my hair down.

At bedtime now, Eula crawls around my bare legs to get comfortable in bed. I sit surrounded by her animals and tell her it’s okay, no more nipple, but she can be close to my legs. She clutches them, as if they will protect her.

She came from these legs.

Her benediction for them becomes my own.

Okay, I will let my legs out.

I have so often heard older women say something like, “Oh that’s back when I was skinny, when I was beautiful . . .” They engage in a grief of change. I know that grief. I can make comments about back when I could run and cartwheel. But my beauty story is a grief of never having the experience. It’s one thing to have it and lose it. It’s another grief if you never had it. And it’s a deeper clenching grief when you understand that you actually did have it but you never let yourself feel it.

Okay, I will celebrate this body I have.

~

Eula continues to ask me to sing “She’ll Be.” The more often the words come out of my mouth, the more I remember how when we think we’ve become something “new,” life gives us a hurdle, small or oversized, to deepen our unfolding. Maybe my fear has woken up again. Maybe it has wet feathers and wants to dry them off. But time and a series of choices still seem to have catapulted me toward health. I’m midair. I can see where I’m headed.

Toward the end of August, nausea returns to me.

I don’t know where it is coming from.

I’m not pregnant again.

“So, do you think it’s strange that I’m feeling nauseous just like I did when I was first pregnant with Eula?” I ask Chris. “I mean that was almost exactly three years ago.”

“Huh,” he says, as he makes his coffee, “what else could it be?”

“The symptoms are identical. I can’t tolerate the smell of coffee grounds or burnt bread. I don’t want to eat much.”

“I don’t know then.”

“Or,” I say, “it might be the new adrenal herbs.” With another recent test, Holcomb has told me my adrenals are very low. She wouldn’t say flatlined, but almost. In some cases with these levels, she would consider cortisol. Adrenals are linked to thyroid. She explained the adrenals are the car tires and the thyroid is the engine. If the car tires are flat, pressing on the gas gets you nowhere. Point is, even though low adrenals is common for new parents, it shouldn’t go untended to. She asked whether I’ve had enough energy to get through my day. I didn’t know what to say. I make do. Other than herbs, adrenals heal with routine and ease and low stress and not a whole lot of effort—like a vacation.

Exercise needs to be tapered too.

Nothing strenuous.

It occurs to me to be frustrated. I’m suddenly capable of exercise because my incontinence is better but now can’t exercise because of adrenals. I walk up our hill and stomp my feet around for half an hour, punch the ether like someone who knows what she’s doing. That helps. No need for melodrama.

Eula sits on the counter and licks paprika from the spice bottle.

“Want some, Mama?” she asks.

“Sure, sweets, sure.”

~

What I learn: The adrenals sit above each kidney in the middle of the lower back. One is triangular and the other looks like a half-moon—both are the size of an infant’s palm. They make many hormones, like cortisol, a name semi-common for most laypeople. Cortisol fluctuates in response to stress and can affect immune function, blood sugar handling, and inflammation, thereby affecting metabolism.

Many of us have taxed adrenals.

Our lives don’t accommodate slowness and space.

I’m on that mission now.

~

Holcomb and I take our girls to the hot springs. We wiggle them into swimsuits and slip together into the shallow pool to find warm water and steps for them to play and test themselves on. They love to jump in our arms. The big leap. My pelvis tells me it is heavy and ready to bleed. I know it’ll come tomorrow. The cycle of it feels good to me. Holcomb is almost seven months pregnant with another girl.

“How do you feel?” I ask.

“You know,” she laughs, and she means not you as me, but you as all of us.

We talk. The girls splash, so close to being able to swim solo but not yet. We wonder aloud how her still-nursing daughter will do when a newborn wants the boob. Who knows? I tell her how I’ve been going to Eula in the middle of the night when she calls out, “Where’s Mama?” I can’t not go; I end up sleeping in her bed. I get it, she says. The breast is still a focus for us, though milk stopped what feels like ages ago. I tell Holcomb about this morning when I woke to a gray light and Eula was already sitting up. She ran her fingers slowly from breast to breast, down my sternum to my belly button and back up, like a blessing or honoring. I opened my eyes and we smiled at each other. I asked her whether she remembered how she came out of me. “Out your vulva, Mama,” she said.

“They know so much,” Holcomb says, and we laugh.

“Can you believe you’re going to do that again?”

“It feels so far away.”

So much feels far away and yet it’s not.

I too am getting closer to my laboring woman.

I can feel her speaking to me, even though I’ve stopped going to the pelvic therapist. Our insurance didn’t cover it and the bills became mountains. But it gave me hope that my pelvic bowl can restore itself.

Two hours pass and, surrounded by steam, we become red-faced, all of us. As we lumber up and out of the water, we enter the world again—wet, slick, warm, the blood of us pump, pump, pumps.

~

My mom and I pull apart a roast chicken. She yanks it apart. In the bright light of my kitchen, I stand beside her and cringe. I’ve never been adept with dead animal parts.

“It’s easy,” she says as we toss carrots, celery, onion and all the chicken parts into a pot of water. I’ve made broth before but not with any sort of knowledge or repetition. She is teaching me. People pay her to show them how to make a pork lemongrass meatball, green soup, or pear cheesecake, and then how to invent their own creation. I’m letting go of my limitations—too domestic, too my mother, too quaint, too oppressed women throughout history.

Now my interest grows like wildfire.

I will un-oppress myself by feeding my body well.

As we skim gray stuff from the boiling water, I am sure a shift is happening: onset of fall, cottonwood leaves turn yellow, amber, Molly makes a broth, emboldened. Four days later, I make another roast chicken, chicken broth, ghee, sweet tahini balls, pumpkin soufflé, chia seed pudding, and arugula pesto. All in one day. Eula helps. When she naps, I keep going. I am unstoppable.

My full refrigerator says, “Finally, thank you.”

In my recent blood test, I learn my hormones have stabilized—estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone are in balance. My adrenals, thyroid, and pelvic floor suddenly feel like almost no burden at all: only three elements now. I can’t run, but I can move faster, and do a decent cartwheel. I’m fucking alive. Could it be this all might settle into a less front-and-center place, or even go away?

I cook and cook.

I can’t stop making food and eating it.

I start to feel some version of unbroken.

~

After a hard late-summer rain, we drive country roads with the windows down.

“Mama, Mama?” Eula calls from the backseat.

“Yes, smooch?” I’ve begun to call her smooch, my smooch.

“What is that smell, Mama?” she asks, cranes her neck toward the outdoors, nose up, wants more of fresh.

“Rain on pavement, sweets, the best smell.”

“What is it for?”

“What do you mean?”

“What is it for?”

“It lets us know rain came and rain might come again.”

“Oh.”

~

On the night of the blood moon, I lose about 85 percent of the hearing in my right ear. We are camping with friends and when I sit up after putting Eula to sleep, the world spins a notch, then so many notches, and my hands fly up to hold my head in place. I stand around a campfire and try to pay attention to conversation. My brain becomes a melon; strange underwater sounds swirl around and around and around somewhere within. I don’t say anything to anyone. It will pass.

But it doesn’t.

Standing makes me dizzy, sometimes, not always. This is my chance to act dignified in the moment of my body crumbling. I’ve grown, haven’t I? I tell Chris and I am calm and un-triggered. I want him to say “I’m so sorry” but he can’t authentically validate me yet. Our tension is still a sea monster under our sea. I don’t push it. I let it be. This is all major progress for me. A few days later, Holcomb meets me in a parking lot at my request and pulls her otoscope out of her purse. As our girls play in the backseat, she investigates my ear.

No sign of infection.

“In fact,” she says, “your ear canal is perfectly shaped. It’s beautiful.”

My options are (1) get an MRI, or (2) get bodywork and wait for it to shift. She asks me to keep her posted if anything changes or gets worse.

I make a decision. I will go to the hospital only if I fall over or my vision goes blurry, because then we’re dealing with brain issue. No reason to overreact. Meanwhile, I have just started the Wilson’s T3 protocol, under Holcomb’s supervision. It’s a naturopathic way to try to heal my thyroid and permanently elevate my body temperature to normal. It requires an increased-over-time dose of the thyroid hormone T3. It often doesn’t work, but if it does, wow. Side effects: You might become irritable, tired, and/or aggressive. I don’t know if I can afford to be any of those things, but I can’t afford not to try the protocol. The ear issue happens on day two of the protocol. It’s unrelated, but the timing compounds everything I am feeling. When I report the situation to an old healer friend, she says, “I’m so proud of you, it’s a lot what you are doing, I’m so proud.” I swallow and try not to cry into the phone. My head throbs in public. My parents host a dinner and I spend the evening unable to sit, walking around because the sound of conversation is like thousands of pinballs banging on my skull. I can’t focus. The pressure behind my face hurts. Sometimes all I hear is a low beep beep beep beep. I don’t complain. I am kind and pleasant. But this is a never-ending drive through an underground tunnel to nowhere.

So far, I haven’t snapped.

Two weeks later, I still haven’t snapped but nothing has changed. I make an appointment: acupuncture. It’s an indulgence. With the exception of Holcomb and some Mayan abdominal massage, I’ve tried to go it alone without bodywork because how much money can a woman spend to try to heal? After it takes me over an hour to get Eula to sleep, Chris tells me my parents are coming over to eat dinner and watch the stars with us.

“I can’t deal with that,” I say, and two seconds later, they walk through the door. Wrapped up in her red down jacket and a furry baseball cap over her ears, my mother puts plates of food on our counter. My dad senses my mood and skulks back out to the dark. His reaction to me flashes me back to pregnancy. We all step outside. Cold. I explain I’m not feeling well. I try not to be mean, just quiet. They came over earlier and my mom swept and played with Eula while my father brushed the snow off my car.

They stay outdoors.

I go to bed. Up in our loft, under a heavy down blanket, I try to send my overwhelm out the window, toward the trees, where they can absorb it and send it off with the wind. “I love and accept myself completely,” I repeat in whispers until the ache and regret in my throat subside. When Chris slips into bed, both the distance and closeness of his body set off a switch in me.

The sobs come fast.

“I’m trying so hard,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. He can’t understand my fear because it isn’t his own. From the smallest oldest youngest most scared part of me comes the old question again: “What if I never heal?” He holds me and says back to me what I have said to him and others—this is my opportunity for a deeper healing.

The stars brighten out the window. Chris falls asleep and I curl up and watch them emerge from the dark. My head swells as more sobs usher out, as I consider that my family constellation has been exactly what I need, how both my body and rage have destroyed and healed me, again.

What am I not hearing now?

Why my ear?

As I fall asleep, my ear seems less plugged. In the morning, Eula will call out to me from below, “I had a good long sleep, Mama,” and my memory will remind me of the previous night and the throb will inch back, until I am back, ear plugged, head thick, part of the process.

~

I make an appointment with rage. I’ve contained it for a few weeks now. As we make breakfast, the sun warms our earth and I ask for what I need.

“I need to go on a walk.”

“Okay,” Chris says in our white and wood kitchen. “Go for it.” He doesn’t ask why. He never asks why. I wish he would.

Eula, though, is curious. She puts her spoon back in her oatmeal and glances up at me. Why a walk now? Why is Mama going on a walk?

“Mama’s feeling frustrated that her ear hurts,” I explain, “so, I’m going to walk and stomp around.” It sounds ridiculous saying it aloud but I am practicing a new language: less intellect, more body. Maybe Eula can grow into a human who knows how to articulate her feelings if she hears me try.

On the way up to the top of our hill, I start to whack at the air. These are gestures. I am warming up to the movement. It is also cold enough. We are on the descent through autumn toward winter. I know this is about my ear and everything before and now and after. I know I need to do this more often. I want to get ugly. I want to make myself a viper. I want to scream. We don’t have many neighbors but sound here moves like wind, over hills, across meadows, and even in and out of the folds of mountain ranges. But here’s where I have to go full throttle. I can’t half bake this situation; otherwise it will lose power. My feet move faster. My energy builds.

Somewhere between trees and sky,

Somewhere between me and everywoman,

I become a weather system.

Body fumes.

Hands crash.

Face smashes into earth.

Yell.

Pound.

This is private. This is my mystery. One day I want to share it with others. One day I want witnesses. I’m not ready for that yet. On my way down the forested hill, with heat and sweat on my cheeks, I smell a sweetness on the breeze. Sniff. Sniff. Animal me. There are many ways to work an energy: build up, express, release.

This way is a good one.

I emerge from the trees and move toward our house.

I am a primordial human headed toward the home fire.

When I push open the front door, Eula beams up at me.

~

When Lauren arrives, our life clicks into fluorescent. She has come for a five-day visit. Eula wants to know what happened to her aunt’s black jeans. Why are they broken? They are ripped, on purpose. She plays with Lauren’s long necklaces. She watches how this woman with almond eyes moves. Later, when Lauren is gone, Eula will hike her pants up the way Lauren does. She is being introduced to punk chic humor emotion love.

“My sole purpose,” Lauren says to Eula, “is to get you to say, Yas, Queen, and, Speak, Woman, by the time I leave.” Eula smiles, unclear on the phrases but clear about a sense of inclusion. There is so much ease in our togetherness. We make faces in our cozy femaleness and I see in my daughter a flare for the dramatic. She has always gazed at herself in a mirror and practiced faces: happy, sad, shy, surprised, fierce.

Within twenty-four hours, we are picking animal cards. I get Otter: accept the feminine.

Within forty-eight hours, we are making dance videos. Lauren and I pump our arms and sway our hips as Eula run/dances between us squealing and yelling, Speak, Woman! Speak, Woman! I dance and don’t pee on myself. It might be because I’m mid-cycle pre-ovulation, but I’ll take it as hope.

Somewhere in all of this, I leave the house for two hours. At our first visit, an acupuncturist listened to my story and my pulses and offered this: my body has a lot of strong Chi to work with but is so deeply fatigued from the past three years it has forgotten it knows how to heal or that it can heal. Yes, I said, that sounds accurate. Now I tell her about my ear and the needles go where they need to in service of the unplug. We shall see. If it doesn’t work, she will do some neuromuscular jaw and neck work next time. Okay, I say. I have to trust someone and she, with kind hands and deep voice, is an excellent person to trust.

With Lauren around, I haven’t noticed my ear as much. It’s present but doesn’t assault me the same way. The days blend and we wonder aloud about Pat-Pat. What would she feel seeing us all here together? She is seeing us. In her physical disintegration, she must have softened. She must know that her great-granddaughter’s un-shamed awareness of vulva, body, naked is a good thing. Maybe even the true sense of Catholic.

Pat-Pat must know so now, right?

Yas, Queen.

The night before Lauren leaves, we sit under the stars around a flickering pit fire. We may as well be the last humans on earth. Our one fire is surrounded by darkness everywhere. Crisp fall air. Eula snoozes inside. Chris has emerged. Where was he? Around. We each light a candle and speak a truth/want/prayer. I hear my man and remember his way with spirit is what drew me to him. He is so earnest. He doesn’t falter. He almost cries, as he has done in many moments like this. I don’t remember what any of us say, only what it feels like to be watching our blue candles melt into wood, fire, rock.

“There it is,” one of us says.

It. The it of forever wanting.

Owls hoot nearby out into the blackness. I glance the stretch of silhouetted evergreen trees. They have witnessed so much recently.

Lauren gets on a plane and every plane Eula sees overhead for the next week is “Aunt Lolo going back to New York.” We feel her absence. She has reminded me that joy is also a truth. Some bolt of energy has left with her and I feel responsible for ushering it up within my small family. It comes from history and lineage and shared blood. Shared blood, though, is broader to me now. It is woman-love-blood, any woman. I don’t know what gender is anymore but do know what the presence of trusted women does to me. Whenever my mother leaves, I feel the same absence.

~

When I return from a full day of teaching, my mom lingers in the kitchen. She and Eula went on an adventure to town and then made a chicken vegetable soup. They also swept our concrete floor. With her hand down my shirt, nipple grabbed, Eula listens and nods and tells me about the day.

“We saw those big things, Mama, the big wings.” She means the massive butterfly kite strung to the ceiling of the children’s library.

“You did?” I say, and nuzzle her close to me.

“How’s your ear?” my mom asks. I can tell by the softness in her voice she knows to tread with caution. Doesn’t want to flip a switch in me. The ear has become a serious roadblock.

“It isn’t much better,” I say. “I don’t know.”

“Moll,” she offers, “I think you need to slow down. Go back to basics. Food. Water. Exercise. And just focus on that, nothing else. You have so much going on. What if you start with feeding your body well, resting, going on long slow walks, that’s it?”

For the first time, I hear this advice.

I hear it.

I hear her.

Two weeks later, the floodwaters open. After the acupuncturist works on releasing my jaw muscles, the sounds of the world start to integrate between my temples. In tandem, my pelvic floor shifts and now I pee on myself every day, often, without pressure, just by standing. Jaw. Pelvis. They are not separate. Another box of Always Extra-Long Pads with Wings takes its place in the backseat of my car. I surprise myself by not overreacting. I hear the familiar crinkle of unwrapping a pad and try to trust that I won’t always have to wear them.

Changes mean changes everywhere.

Life moves in cycles.

This is an opening.

The plug is gone, but my ear sounds come and go like tinnitus. When I’m tired or overwhelmed, it’s loud, a built-in alarm system telling me to slow down. Even so, once it’s better, I want to exercise. I hear my mom on the slow walks, but this creature also needs some amplification: weights, hot yoga, push-ups, core strength, rediscover my muscles. Because accountability helps, I tell Chris and sketch a weekly plan on a piece of scrap paper.

Yes, yes, yes.

Holcomb is on the verge of birth, so I go to an interim naturopath. The new doctor speaks plainly to me. She tells me there is only one way to heal my adrenals: rest, sleep as much as possible, eat well, create routine, and easy exercise. Go on walks and do only restorative yoga. Holcomb has said the same but I haven’t been able to hear it until now. Really? I can’t sweat? She doesn’t want me to do any vigorous exercise. But what about losing the weight I want to lose? There is no way your body would lose excess weight right now with your adrenal and thyroid panel. It’s in survival mode. My post-birth body is holding on tight. When I leave her office, part of my body shame evaporates.

Slow.

Simplify.

Old world.

I’ve been told that to heal I must not effort. My mom has had the answer all along. She would say I’ve had all the answers for her all along, even the uncomfortable ones. This is what we do—mothers and daughters. Her directive explodes everything I’ve known about how to be in the world.

It is so inconvenient.

It is also a way of personhood I’ve wanted to know for years.

~

What I learn: I learn what kind of woman I want to be. One who engages in periods of action and reflection, based on the seasons and her menstrual cycles. This woman is a sort of Amazon woman. She learns about her femaleness with her own hands and heart and voice. She learns about her femaleness in all relationships. There is no other way. Could there ever be? My mother has taken great care to remind me that I’m not and never have been one big ball of rage: “You are so many other dimensions, Molly.” It’s true. But rage is also a truth. In my devotedness to being a truth-teller, I wanted those around me to feel and know my rage. So few people actually show it. I would show it. I would crack my shadow open.

In the process, I became devoted to my rage. It was me and I was it. It was mine. My rage. This was dangerous. This ownership was aggravating it and making it worse. It was mine to manage but it wasn’t actually mine. It wasn’t me. It was an energy that needed to move through me: gray cloud, viper, tempest, hot fire. I imagine helping Eula through her own anger one day. It’s okay, sweets, it’s okay to feel it. It’s passing through your body, what are you going to do with it? Keep it light, Janice had said to me about the incontinence. Don’t focus on it. Don’t make it yours. Do not identify with it. Do not clutch it to your chest. Thank it, though, this friend and other friends like sadness, for they are friends. They are the ones who led you to begin the emancipation of your feminine. Rage will cycle back to me again. I will meet it with a rhythm now. I will try to acknowledge, welcome, feel, and release it. My female body has shown me how to do so.

I will call it my postpartum awakening.

~

Eula catches a cold. We eat our breakfast together with the blue-black sky dark, and she says to us, “I’m gonna take my cold and throw it into the trees.”

“You are?” I ask, laughing.

“You are?” Chris echoes, and squints at me.

“I sure am,” she says.

She glances out the window at the swatch of green trees, her compadres who dance in wind and watch her while she goes about her day. You do it, girl, you send that hurt and illness back into Mama Earth. As we ready for her nap, she complains of her nose hurting, so raw from snot.

“I’m sick, Mama,” she says.

“I know you are, sweets, it’s hard to be sick,” I say. The look on her face reminds me we all simply want to be seen when we are down. I lean over her bed, rub coconut oil on her nose, and she clutches my neck.

I say what I’ve been saying since she was born.

“I’ve got you, sweets, Mama’s got you.”

Later that night, we run through our usual bed prep. We peek out our wooden door to look for the moon and any shooting stars. As always, she asks me where, where, where are the shooting stars, Mama? I try to imagine how a child who has never seen one might envision a star shooting itself across the sky.

“It’s got to be super dark to see them,” I explain. I want her to grow into a person who knows that darkness is what illuminates stars.

They need each other.

Well before the next morning, before birds have woken up, Eula calls out for me. I climb down from the loft and crawl into her bed. We fall asleep holding each other’s faces. When she wakes up, I pretend to be asleep. She sits up, arranges her animals, and then glides her hands over my bare chest like a manta ray.

“I’ve got you, Mama,” she says, “I’ve got you. I love my mama.” It becomes a chorus, a repetition of meaning and heart. When she stops, I open my eyes and smile up at her fresh face perched over mine.

“Mama,” she says, “I was crying for you last night. I feel better after my crying.”

“I’m so glad, smooch.”

“You know what?” she asks.

“What?”

“My tears were falling like shooting stars.”

~

At the end of October, we move through a strange sort of warmth. Wasps have infiltrated our house. They come in our open doors and hover at windowsills. Buzzing. Eula helps me trap them with a wine glass and release them back outside where “they will be happier.” Because we can’t bring her up to a loft with no railing, I sleep with her for the week she is sick.

We wake in the mornings to Chris who has been stung, again, by a wasp hidden in our bed. It happens enough times and he swells up enough times that I get my old EpiPen out so we have it on the ready.

“Oh, babe,” I say.

“Oh, babe,” Eula repeats as she strokes his cheek.

It doesn’t escape me that so much of what I have done is sting him; we’ve stung each other. These days, in my evening prayers, I ask for help. I know to bring my requests (ideally) to Chris during pre-ovulation, after any hurt or anger has been moved through my body on my own. It may not always happen that way. I may need to say, “I’m upset/frustrated/angry and now I’m going to leave and take myself on a walk.” Self-care. But how do I take extra care to say it the right way when I do bring it to him in full? I used to believe this question was a function of bending over backward unnecessarily for someone. Now I believe it’s about dignity for self and others.

Here is the answer that comes:

You don’t say anything unless you can be sure you have fed, watered, and moved your body well that day.

Wow. Okay.

A younger me would have said, “Fuck no. I say what I want to say no matter what. He can handle it.” Now I know my mood is sculpted by how I engage with my body. Don’t move it, I want to bash the walls in. Water it well and my thoughts flow like a peaceful creek. Create as clear a vessel as possible for your feelings so that you can identify what is authentic. Anger born of a sugar overdose may become destructive. But clear anger has an important message.

I hear this.

You, my dear, are the only one in charge.

This, my dear, is how we mature.

~

Frost covers the grass. As we shift into winter, I lie in bed at night and tell myself and the world I am willing to change. Are any of us really willing to change? If I want to change, I must again let go of the specialness of my story. My pain has made me so very special. Let me tell you about how I threw up for ten months of pregnancy, got transferred to the hospital then pushed for five hours, then peed all over myself for a few years, my thyroid gave out, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t walk with my daughter in the woods without smelling of urine, then my hormones, and then my adrenals, then my ear, and the rage overtook my body like an old lava deep in the earth, it could not be suppressed and my husband got it but didn’t get it, and then . . .

Enough.

I want to refocus.

My mom teaches me how to make beef broth one cold late afternoon. I am trying to understand old ways. I am trying to slow down and name what kind of food, touch, and movement actually nourishes my body. We roast organic marrowbones and a gnarled-up joint with onion and carrots. The smell turns my stomach but I choose to like it. We stir a large pot as the broth boils.

“It has to cook for five hours,” my mom explains.

“Okay, thanks, Mom,” I say with an arm around her shoulder. “I’m excited to try it tomorrow.” We are evolving our matrilineal lineage—women from other eras and landscapes and languages, women we don’t know the names of and then Mary to Betta to Rosa to Ethel to Patricia to Mare to Molly to Eula. Our thread. We move shame, fear, and disassociation from the body out and out and out. The legacy morphs, lets go of colors, takes on new ones, releases limbs, grows new ones, breathes out rules, breathes in questions. This is always our gift to those who come after us. There are gifts from those who come after us too. Eula made a request when her elbow ripped an opening down my left side, my feminine side, from cervix to vagina. Wake up, Mama. Wake up to yourself. What would we say to each other if we could gather?

It is now past ten o’clock at night. Everyone has gone to bed. I tend to the broth and arrange mason jars on the wooden counter. Our small dark house smells of the deepest part of an animal body. To be slow and full of a simple pleasure is the most feminine thing I’ve ever done.

I strain the broth into a separate bowl, then strain it again, then pour.

My mother saw in her daughter an urge to dwell on the body. Concerned this tendency would prevent her daughter from ease, she steered her as best she could away from such focus. Don’t worry. Don’t think about it. She couldn’t know that the body was her daughter’s teacher. Her stubborn daughter dug heels in further because she would not let anyone tell her how to be. Her daughter had to grow into a woman and then a mother before she began to understand what her mother meant all along.

This is how it often works, isn’t it?

Honor thy mother; honor thyself.

At some point, I start doing a little broth-dance as I pour. Windows, silent trees, and Bru watch me. I am making broth. I am making broth for my family. I’ve got this. I’ve got this until my right hand pours scalding water all over my left hand and even still I’ve got this. I yank the freezer open and grab for a frozen item, pea bag too massive, what can I use, oh, chicken sausage. With a frozen package of meat on my hand, I continue to pour broth into mason jars.

So much meat for a woman who only started to eat meat six years ago.

So much body for a body.

There are moments we can see what once was and what now is.

Thank you, Mary, mother of mine. No turning back but to say thank you.

~

One afternoon, we tend to our home. I stuff clothes in the laundry. Eula runs around with her small red broom. My mother was surprised when she saw me teach my daughter how to clean. Why? It’s an essential life skill. I now want to take care of the mundane and domestic. I would teach a son the same. If we can keep our rhythm at a clip today, I can actually deep clean the kitchen cabinets and scrub the shower floor.

“Mama, Mama, look.”

She has plucked a swimsuit from a recent hand-me-down box.

Navy with ruffles along the top edge.

“Wow,” I say with a stack of dish towels in my hands. “That looks fun.”

“I want to put it on now, Mama.”

Beyond our home, blustery weather has taken over. I glance out the window at a layer of frost over the world.

“You do?”

“Yeah, I sure do.” It doesn’t take her long to transform with some of my help. We drag a rug close to the woodstove and agree she’ll be warm if she stays there. I continue to scurry around, but my eyes watch her—the way she strokes the straps, pulls at them, stares down at her new costume, the way an idea takes hold and suddenly blossoms on her face.

“Mama,” she says, “Mama, you put your swimsuit on too!”

“Really?” I answer, about to yank out the mop.

“Yep, Mama, your stripey one,” she says with an eager sparkle-smile, “we can do it together.”

When I sit down in my swimsuit, goose bumps start to cover my legs. Huddled next to the fire, we grin at each other. I rub and warm my limbs up and realize there is nothing I would rather be doing than this—half naked on an indoor beach with my daughter on a winter’s day. We are enjoying ourselves and we are radiant for it. Isn’t this the true nature of the feminine? We point out the freckles we each have. Then Eula reaches over to my legs, strokes each one up and down with the touch of a feather.

“Mama, look, your legs are beauuuuu-tiful.”

“Thanks, smooch. I know,” I say, and I lean toward her, because I want her to believe I believe it’s true, and maybe I’m starting to. “We love our legs, don’t we? They do so much for us.”

“They do,” she says, and nods, an emphatic two-year-old, and then leaps up and darts toward the open pantry, where she has made a kitchen for herself on the bottom shelf. She grabs a small pot and wooden spoon and runs back over. The straps of her swimsuit slip from her shoulders.

“Oh-kay, I made some lemongrass sugar for us,” she says, and thrusts a spoon at my mouth. How did she come up with that? Lemongrass likely from the essential oil I rub on my thyroid every morning.

“Mmmm, delicious, how did you make it?”

“Well, I poured it and make-d it, Mama.”

And there we stay, for a few hours, under the gaze of our un-clean shed house, as we eat lemongrass sugar in our swimsuits and talk over the past week and stretch our long legs and make no effort to do anything but be together.

My daughter knows about pleasure.

I must also have known about pleasure once upon a time.

We know we are done when she tells me she’s cold, even when curled in my lap. I am cold too. When we roll up, my body enters a world that has, it seems, over two decades later, turned upright.

~

Eula starts to see her future.

“When I am a woman,” she says, and elaborates on how she will do the following: ride a horse, fast, fast, fast, go writing and teaching in town, ski down mountains all by herself, bleed like Mama with a string hanging from her vulva, read books with a lot of words, drink wine and eat chocolate because chocolate is strong, have long legs to run fast, jump rope, have lots of conversations because “I’m really into conversation” and climb high in trees.

Then she follows her bucket list with an important reminder.

“Mama, you know, I get to choose if I want to be a woman or a man.”

“That is actually very true,” I say.

“Who knows?” she laughs, and runs off.

I have done so much as a woman.

I have been a woman ready to abandon herself in the process of defending herself.

What kind of woman am I to be now?

She’ll be a woman who listens when her body requests a slow-down.

She’ll be a woman who plays with her own beauty.

She’ll be a woman who climbs trees with her daughter.

That’s what she’ll be.