Mother

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Every Sunday, Eula helps me water our houseplants with a mason jar. She knows the glass could break and holds it close to her body as she waddles across the concrete floor. Her small body leans over the palm, then the leafy fig. Water pools in the center. Stooped over at prayer, she goes about her task and hushes the plants.

“Ohhh, sweet little plant, I know you’re thirsty. I’m here, I’m here.”

These are my words. These are her words now.

She is two and a half years old.

She is a branch from my tree, her father’s tree, and also her own tree altogether.

Ever since we’ve bathed together, ever since she’s been capable of sitting up on her own, I’ve sung I’m washing my body and watched Eula watch me soap myself. I tried to adore my body even when I didn’t want to. The example mattered to me. We are now in the flow of our evening routine. She is in the utility sink full of bubbles. I’m folding laundry next to her as she plays with her elephant, seal, and zebra. We are mother and daughter sharing alone moments together.

Then I hear her.

“I’m washing my body,” she sings, “I’m washing my body,” as she moves a washcloth up and down her leg, then her foot, belly, vulva, neck.

I feel her reverence.

I say nothing at all.

I pretend not to notice, until she catches my eye and grins. She knows. We know.

~

Mother can be a verb. It’s orchestrated that our children teach us to mother ourselves. This is no inadequacy of our actual mothers. People must learn how to mother themselves. No one can support me but me. No one can support my organs but my own pelvic bowl. Interdependence within the mind/body, however, does not exclude interdependence with other humans. Do you know we are made to heal? My body had called out to me since the cold July day I was born on an island of eucalyptus trees.

I listened and didn’t.

It called louder.

It had to call even louder.

This is the language of the body.

It wanted to be in conversation. My conversation with my body began as a girl on the ocean and soon became a dialogue with woundedness: for decades. My wound was me, made me clever and beyond my years and connected to realness in a world that seemed artificial. But when my body grew another body, it staged a protest. The wound had taken up too much space. We now needed that space for my underdeveloped parts (joy, sensual self, beauty)—they stood together and shouted, “What about us? We want to be heard!” And yet, the wound had been around for thousands of years. It had grown so large. I had to stroke it and spend most of my days with its myth and monologue. I had to introduce it to my friends and family. I had to thank it. At last, the wound had been heard. It was ready to take up less space.

I’m glad Eula saw me fall. One day, she will know her own falls are okay.

My daily question has become: How can I nourish myself? My slow-down has sped my healing up. Our modern world does not want anyone to slow down. You will miss out big time without the current herd. The herd moves fast across a varied landscape, creates community and exchange and learning and electric ideas. I want to be in the herd. But the herd has forgotten how to value the body.

I must unlearn that part.

Because here is the final verdict:

Healing doesn’t happen in neat rows or columns. I will hold on to the possibility of miracles, that it can happen overnight for some people; but for me, now, it has been gradual. My incontinence has improved—non-issue the first fourteen days of my cycle. After ovulation, it appears and increases. So, I must continue my pelvic-floor exercises, sit as little as possible, squat, strengthen my core, and, then, see where it stands. If we have another baby, it might worsen before it gets better again, but I’ve intended a second birth and postpartum to be a healing one for me. I recognize that toning my pelvic bowl is a lifelong experience, just like keeping my legs or back strong and supple. If my incontinence isn’t gone by my fortieth birthday, I will consider surgery. That is me softening. My adrenals will realign when I get out of fight-or-flight mode—as our routine settles, as Eula grows older and goes to school, as my sleep pattern goes back to normal. My thyroid is unclear. It’s stable with medicine. I can try some naturopathic protocols to try to shift it, but my practice will have to be attention to food choices and self-care. The hypothyroidism is a state to monitor, not necessarily one that will go back to how it used to be. To prevent thyroid inflammation, I probably won’t eat gluten ever again and I’m okay with that. And the ear, well, it’s an expression of the whole package. It shows up when I’m overtired or overwhelmed. Otherwise, I don’t notice it.

I don’t see this as a failure.

My breaking has made me stronger and more agile of heart.

I’m no longer interested in whether I will, bar none, heal.

I’m interested in what a healed self now looks like to me.

It isn’t going back to whatever my body was before. It’s an integration of what was and what is, of choosing where to put my focus and light. Would I want to still be full of unexpressed rage and spewing it everywhere? No. Am I okay taking thyroid medicine every morning forever? Probably. Am I okay wearing pads to catch my urine for the rest of my life? No. Do I need to be able to leap and dance and run with my daughter? Absolutely.

There you go.

I didn’t want to be a broken mother. I didn’t want to be a broken woman. I didn’t want to be a broken human. Who does? But to be broken isn’t mutually exclusive from being whole. We’re all broken.

It’s okay.

It’s okay.

These days, under dark covers before sleep, I ask my hands to beam and hold them over my adrenals, thyroid, pelvis, and ear.

“I’m here,” I say.

My laboring woman is here too. She assures me she never went away. She’s been with us all along—helping Eula and me, together and separate, go the deep. We are always in labor. Labor isn’t toil. Labor is growth. Labor is where you meet your essential self. We are always birthing ourselves. She nods toward a woman who stands on a porch, legs sturdy as trees. Watch her, she says. You know her well, she repeats over and over. The woman holds her young daughter’s hand. On her hip is space for another infant one day. She gazes across the grass toward a weather-beaten wooden gate. She passed through it to get here, where she is now: splinters, splinters often come in kindness. A breeze blows. Dirt pushes around. Stillness. Then hawks, the grasshoppers, then voles, then the earth. The woman turns to smile at me. She is radiant. She speaks the unspoken with care. Every day, she teaches herself again how to honor her taproot.

~

One evening, I sit next to our woodstove and listen to my husband. The candles from dinner still flicker and our pup sprawls nearby. Chris leans forward on the wood-and-canvas couch he recently built. He starts to speak in soft words.

We are reckoning.

“You wanted me to see you as the goddess during pregnancy and after, but you weren’t the goddess, Molly. You were the opposite of that. And I could never tell you because there wasn’t a safe space.”

The bud at the base of my throat starts to bloom.

He never got to have a mood.

“And afterward,” he says, “there are intense moments I’ve blocked out. I have my own trauma about what happened during that first year after Eula was born. I tried to help you but you wouldn’t let me.”

He’s talking about me throwing laundry and “The Event” and probably others. So begins our shift into a more balanced exchange. My sad tears start to fall. I don’t want to weep because I don’t want to make this about me, but how can I not weep? Feel the feelings. Even when I wanted to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him. He never judged. He retreated to protect himself.

“I’m so sorry,” I cry. “I felt out of control and I didn’t know how to share with you what I needed to share. I needed your attention, but I lashed out instead. I’m so sorry, babe.”

He looks at the ground. I think he is receiving what I’ve said. For an instant, I consider adding how the goddess actually comes in all forms: both flower and death. All parts of her are divine. All parts of her have a message.

This is definitely not that moment, though.

Now I know about when and how—even when I forget.

Instead, I move toward him and we fall into each other’s arms. His relief relieves me; his face is open and wide for the first time since my pregnancy. I think he has been heard. I won’t apologize for my feelings or rage. Just like he doesn’t need to apologize for his. He was mean too. But I am sorry for expecting him to rescue me. I am sorry for having pointed a significant portion of my anger at him. My unprocessed or misdirected anger hurts him and drains my brightness.

I want to move it through my body alone now.

It’s okay to feel angry. It’s not okay to attack people.

Who are we together? I have always been a woman who wanted to hug her husband while he was tromping somewhere in the mountains, trying to shoot an elk, an act he does not like but does for sustenance and to be with his brother and for the ritual of closing an animal’s eyes, holding the heart, blessing over it. Once, when her menstrual cramps overcame her a few years into their togetherness, this man gave her a bath. He washed her body, unwrapped an o.b. tampon, inserted it in her, and tucked her into bed. He was not scared of a woman’s blood. He was so attentive—for a decade. When his attention waned at the exact moment she felt life had thrown her into a ditch, her claws started to grow. He focused on his own survival. His hands were numb because he was building their house and up at night with their daughter, doing his share, as his wife had requested, as they had agreed, and yet she wanted more.

She, this woman, is learning how to make requests.

She, this woman, is learning to see what is good.

Before bed that night, on the floor of our loft, I lie on my back and do pelvic-floor exercises. One of my writing students recently shared that she has been forever altered by her hard postpartum period. Years later and she doesn’t think she can ever be the same. We pause and sigh. I hear her. The applesauce sours. The grenade blasts open. I don’t think any of us are ever the same. I don’t think Chris and I will ever be the same.

But that change was necessary.

I can, for once, listen and not bite.

I had to shatter part of myself.

He had to shatter part of himself.

When I zoom way out, I see the purpose of it all. It’s good to apologize but we should probably also thank each other. Thank you for pushing me to the edge and then off the cliff. I needed to fall and meet my falling self.

As we wrap ourselves together, I feel his body release into slumber and gratefulness washes over me. He has been an integral part of us raising our daughter to be wise and proud of her body. My man can operate and see people separate from gender. He always has. When people asked if, as a man, he wanted a son, he responded by saying, “I want a human.” Before my meetings or workshops, Eula watches me lean toward the mirror and put my cranberry lip stain on. She pulls at my leg and requests, “I want lipstick.” I lean down, kiss her lips, and she licks them. Then, as if we are coworkers offering each other sandwiches, she asks Chris, as he pulls on work boots in the mudroom, “Papa, you want lipstick?” to which he says, “Sure,” and she kisses my lipstick from her lips onto his and we are all, each one of us, set.

Later we will decide on a phrase to make passage across treacherous waters, as they will come again, as they do.

Tell me more about that.

Tell me more about what you mean, what you feel, what you have need to say. I actually invite you. Chris says I have never invited him. He recognizes he hasn’t invited me either. A few weeks later, we will use the phrase in a tense moment and it will work.

Tell me more about that.

How would I retell our story for Eula? Your mama’s fire grew so hot it shone on all parts of the cave, parts they’d never seen before. All at once, she and your papa could see all the clutter and dust in their home. They cleaned it up. It was hard work, many days and many nights, and their muscles grew tired and sometimes they gave up. But they did it. From time to time, the dust blew in again. They learned that dust always blows in. But now they each had a strong fire, and they swept as they went and all was as it was.

Our love for each other is good animal love.

~

Here’s what my body song could become: squat, sit as little as possible, untuck my tail, hang upside down, explore my core, use my menstrual cycle to process emotions, dance around for most of my day, nap, feed, and water myself well, talk to my pelvic bowl every day, decorate myself, be among women, be among men, value gut and pelvis as much as brain, lay hands on myself, move up and down mountains, hug the center, feel into an earth-based, pre-language way of being, respect the self, move the rage through and through and through.

My song could sound effortful—do x, do y, do a, b, and g—but it’s only about one impulse: what my body longs for.

There has to be a body song.

We all have a body song.

My body is a safe and lovely place to be.

~

On an ordinary day during an ordinary week of an ordinary month, we eat bison burgers and salad as a family: my mother, father, husband, daughter, and me. Eula sits in her own chair on a big green box of old toys from my childhood. It’s an impromptu dinner at the cabin, our familiar intergenerational living. I watch their faces and think of how we’ve all gone through a sort of earthquake together—the epicenter being me—and survived. My father pulls out the old photo albums because they crack him up. We kids look so European with tall socks and sandals.

“Eula, there’s your mama,” he says.

“There I am,” I say.

She stares at a photo of me at her current age. On a lawn, my mother lounges back in her mauve swimsuit. There are other people nearby. She is laughing. I crawl naked around on her legs. My daughter puts her small finger on the photo and nods. We both have curls, big blue eyes—but we are wholly separate creatures. Somehow she seems to understand her mother was once a girl. That girl never expected this moment. That girl didn’t know she would need to mother herself through many cycles until death.

We ready ourselves to go home: coat, hat, shoes, and goodbyes until tomorrow. The door opens and we step out of cozy and into the dark lead of night.

“It’s so dark. Ooooooo, I love that,” Eula says, and we walk past the guesthouse holding hands under a cold moonless sky. Papa and pup run and play out ahead of us, shadows among shadows, my man, my man-dog, my appreciation for them a deep thump in my chest. Trees watch. Eula keeps on and I say nothing but am impressed at her willingness to be so small on the ground in such a vast dark. When we reach the far out, near a stretch of cottonwoods and field, darkness consumes us. She asks me to pick her up, hurry, fast. Arms around my neck, she presses as close as she can to my torso.

“Mama, I don’t love it anymore,” she says.

“I understand that, sweets.”

We look for shooting stars, flickers of light making their way to earth. Eula is scared of and drawn to them. Will they hurt her? No. Okay then. Her cheek warms my own as we walk down the long black driveway toward our home. Cottonwoods lean toward us and rustle. I have created every moment of my life to be a teacher for me. I hold to that early belief. How do I thank this child created from my body? She invited me into my female wound. I was both scared and drawn to the change.

There were so many small deaths.

But I have left nothing unfelt.

I want to welcome my dark and act with my light.

I have so many prayers for my daughter, for all daughters.

On the dark path, we watch watch watch for stars all the way home.

~

What I have learned: Every woman could catalogue the mystical convergence where her body meets her rage meets her shadow meets her facts meet her myth meets her joy meets her body again. There is no one narrative. The pelvis creates life. It must be true it can heal life as well.

I choose ceremony with my body.

I choose the healed ground.

Our female body, Eula, is both broken and whole. Does that sound heavy or hard? I want to repeat it to you. It is what I have learned. Do you hear me? We are broken and whole. We are whole and broken. They are both parts of a healed woman. We must tend to that language. There are no linear paths and we’ve known so by the asymmetry and symmetry of our body. Trust me. Do you hear me? Do you hear me as I call out to you now, and later, when I’m gone one day? Trust yourself. Trust that you will birth yourself over and over again and that’s normal. Trust your ancestry beyond me, beyond bloodlines, all the way back to the sacred female in all of us humans.

She is, after all, the understory from which everything in our world grows.

She is, after all, the greatest story of all time.

~