And the Moment to Expand

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One week before conceiving our daughter, Chris and I walked twenty miles across a ridgeline. At the trailhead, we slept in our Jeep and woke at the darkest black of predawn. My eyes tracked ground, trees, and cliff as we began uphill. I saw shapes moving ahead of me. I stopped, clicked on my headlamp, what? Mountain goats. These white silent animals stared at us like ghosts as we stomped through their home. We reached the top, found an edge of the world. Pink had filtered through the dark.

Soon the sun would rise.

I had timed this walk with intention.

I wanted to do something symbolic with my body before becoming a vessel for someone else’s body. That someone else had begun to float nearby. I could sense a presence, an approach.

There had been a hundred thousand moments where I thought, once I’m living there, once I’m doing that work, once January comes around, once Monday comes around, once sugar takes leave of my diet, once my ass is smaller, I will step into my beauty. I hated when other women talked that way because I did. My beauty had been a separate shell waiting to be inhabited. As each stage passed, I mourned it with a subterranean ache—well, I guess I’ll never get to be a hot teenager, or flit unmoored through college, or power-dress it as a she-woman, or dye my hair blue, or feel my lungs pull me and a bike up a steep trail, or lounge around like a slender cat newlywed. Now would come motherhood.

Once you’re a mother, you’ve crossed a threshold.

Order of operations.

I believed there would be no chance for recovery.

I needed to find my body, my beauty beforehand.

Let me define what I mean by beautiful because the word is as empty as it is holy.

It means nothing until it means everything.

Strong. Lean. Flushed. Awake. Exposed. Mystery. Graceful.

I’d found so much of that, but not all of it.

Chris thought the timing wasn’t ideal for a child. We didn’t have a house or place of our own to live, other than a yurt. We didn’t have enough money. We were cranking with our self-employed work but not quite at a steady plateau. I told him to relax and get into it. We would both be right—the timing would be the worst and the best. I knew our child, a teacher, was coming for us.

Though I told him it could take months to get pregnant, we both knew it wouldn’t.

“If anyone’s fertile, it’s you,” he said. “It’ll take one shot.”

“We’ll see.”

We had waited to try, and part of this walk through dark, moonlight, and pink and eventual bright sun was about me willing myself to feel something. Time had run out, and now on this walk, carrying a backpack heavy with water bottles, I was trying to call beauty to me. I wore my shortest red shorts and spread my arms up to reach a cloudless sky. I couldn’t distinguish the difference between pretending and being. If I had known that in a year, I would no longer be able to carry a heavy pack, maybe for the rest of my life, part of me would have died right there. But layers and layers of green brown mountains spoke something about myself to me, as they do to everyone.

The last half was downhill. My knees throbbed by the end.

So much downhill and no one expects the downhill.

It would take, as Chris knew, one shot.

On a bright summer evening, I moved over the top of him. Though wasps had stung him the day before, though his hands were swollen red, my mouth met his ear and I said, “Let’s do it anyway.” He didn’t disagree.

Her cells multiplied as I continued living—camped on matted-down grass, drank bourbon in a small rural bar, wrote in my journal, prepared for my fall writing workshops, and danced at dusk with a friend visiting from Europe. I didn’t know my daughter was beginning her life within me at that moment. I didn’t feel it or sense it. I also had yet to consider that a woman’s body grows humans (eyelashes, gallbladder, toes, femurs) without having to think about it.

Our female body is an art form.

No matter what messages it sends.

We took photos, my friend and I, before she headed home. We set up her advanced camera and ran ourselves out into the field above my future house to leap and jump and dance at dusk. Holler. Hoot. Spun, spun, spin. Our hips swung, our arms stretched up, up, up. Let’s do it again. Okay. Then out of breath. Forty photos.

Shadows.

Such shadows—two women leap up and out against a dark blue sky.

I saw beauty in us, in me.

My shadow spoke: your daughter knows the drill and has grit. She comes from the divine and the divine requires both light and dark. Please remember, when you collapse, that I am your friend. No sore breasts. No food strangeness. I had not skipped my menses yet. No reason to take a pregnancy test yet, but I had noticed one thing: my pelvis had moved, deep incremental movements. Like tectonic plates, the flint of me opening to make a crater in the earth.

“I’m not sure I’m not pregnant,” I told Chris.

Pregnancy would soon be full of sickness, but also of dreams of women lovemaking, me lovemaking with other faceless women, only women. Lesbian sex dreams the entire pregnancy. Woman, love yourself, love your mother, love the daughter growing with you, but start with love of self and all women. My body sounded a deep bellow, asked me to make it the sanctuary it was.

I could hear but not fully yet.

I had been born in winter on the ocean.

My mother had been born in summer on the plains.

My child would be born in spring in the mountains.