Written by: Sophie Wallis Buckner
Winner of the 2025 Edwin Way Teale Award for Nature Writing
The experience of the body as part of the self is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. Neuroscientists have recently begun to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying this sense of body ownership. This research…raises fundamental questions about how the brain represents the boundary between the self and the environment.
–Ehrsson et al.
You’re in a white room with wires connecting machines to your temples. A man in a lab coat places a rubber hand on the table in front of you. The hand glistens under the naked fluorescent lights. Its color is too orange to be realistic. Your hand—the flesh hand—lies behind a screen, separated from view, from your body, from your mind. The man in the lab coat runs a paint brush down the index finger of the rubber hand. You feel the black bristles prickle your flesh hand as a second man brushes it behind the screen. The first man taps and brushes the/your rubber hand and your mind discards the flesh hand as your rubber hand receives more and more stimulation. After half an hour, the man in the lab coat puts the paint brush away. He brings out a sewing needle, thin as a strand of hair. The corners of the man’s mouth twitch upward as he presents the needle to you, presses it gently to the pad of his own thumb to draw a prick of blood. A drop of sweat begins to form on your temple as the man glances toward your rubber hand. He draws his arm back and thrusts the needle toward your rubber hand. Blood pounds through your body, and you jump out of your seat and away from the man. You fall backwards over your chair. From the ground several feet away, you watch the man plunge the needle into rubber. Your gaze twitches down toward your flesh hand, unscathed, by your side.
***
I’m in a parking garage, returning to the car from some appointment or other. Lizzie hugging my neck. I feel the crotch of her pants and can tell the diaper is expanded beneath the fabric. It’s grown thick with the urine soaked up into its material. As I stand outside the car, I position her buttocks on the edge of the seat closest to the door and remove her pants and diaper. I wonder if she feels the breeze from the open door. I lift and fold her legs to meet her chest and run a disposable wipe over and between her labia and down toward her anus. As I do so, a car hovers in my peripheral vision. It’s waiting to claim the parking spot my car door partially blocks. I stretch a new diaper around my daughter’s waist and haul her to her feet in order to pull her pants up again.
The man in the car waiting sees the maneuver and from his open window says in an understanding tone, “Ah. I see. A diaper change is taking place here.”
I reply politely, strap my daughter into her car seat, and drive away.
Do you remember the time your body belonged to everybody and everything but you?
We have no ownership of our bodies. Our bodies belong to gravity. Our bodies belong to time. Often, our bodies belong to other people. As infants, we struggle to command our limbs, they only flop around our worm-like torsos. Our bodies belong to our caregivers who maneuver our arms, legs, heads, in and out of sleeves, sweaters, swaddles and diapers. We grow and gain command of our muscles and ligaments. We learn to dress ourselves, feed ourselves. However, ownership of our bodies is only a mirage as age will soon inform us.
***
Julia Kristeva states that individuals identify the self as they encounter that which is not the self. To find the borders of their identity, they distinguish what is not part of their identity. Abjection is the particular disgust for those things that hold a peripheral position between self and not self. Kristeva describes abjection as a common reaction to anything that is expelled from the body–namely “refuse.” All our lives we expel parts of our body in order to survive. Eventually the only thing we have left to expel is the whole body:
“…refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being.”
Kristeva says at death “[i]t is no longer I who expel, “I” is expelled” (231). Is the “I” Kristeva speaks of the self or is it the body? Or, to Kristeva, are the body and the self the same? I reach to understand her words. Why is the language around the self and identifying the self so tangled and unclear? The self is the body, is “I”, me, [name removed]. But I’m separate from all those things. I know that some essence of myself exists separate from my body because I am painfully reminded of how out of sync I am with my body.
Something is expelled, though. Whether Kristeva means this or not, something is expelled from the body, and that something is what makes us more than a collection of cells that form organs and limbs. What is it, though? Some say the soul or the spirit. Consciousness perhaps. If my body is not me, then what am I?
As I contemplate Kristeva, I think of the one dead body I’ve ever touched. A hand faded to a yellowy white. It was already cold, even though blood had pulsed through it not so long ago. I held the hand expecting the same comfort that hand had provided when it was more than an it. That body, to me, had always signified the individual who had animated it. I was surprised that when I touched the cold thing, it no longer contained what I had loved. The dead body had once housed my father, a gentle man. Who told me stories of castles in the mountains near our house. Who marched around the kitchen with my entire (giggling) body clasped around his calf. Now his body only housed accumulating gasses and coagulating blood. When I see that body dressed in a suit and laid in a coffin, the connection between this dead thing and my father has completely collapsed. It is not him. Perhaps it never was.
***
Snapshot, circa 1997
An old childhood friend texts me some photos of the three of us—her, my sister, and me—all riding my family’s horse bareback. We’re in our dress-up clothes. My sister and our friend are in gauzy nightgown-like dresses. I’m wearing a long black-and-white striped sleeveless dress hiked halfway up my thigh. I’m shocked to see how radiant I was. Blonde hair brushes my bare shoulder—bronzed by a summer of playing in the creek and running through the tall grass. I’m leaning forward and tilting my head back, my eyelids in the middle of a blink—ruining my model pose.
I’ve heard somewhere that over the course of seven years all the cells in your body die and are replaced. I wonder if my body contains any trace of that little girl, laughing and posing for the camera. I wonder if somewhere inside me even a particle of her lies dormant. Maybe she’s trapped inside some blank-walled office inside me. Maybe I can revive her by jumping on a dusty old gelding and kicking it into a gallop.
I know that over the course of two decades, I have slowly left bits of that girl behind. Everything I touched stole her from me as dead skin cells broke off and nestled into every sweater, handrail, and paper towel. I try not to think about how much of her I sent swirling into the sewers. Bit by bit, I’ve sluffed off that little girl.
While she is gone from me, she is not gone entirely. Bits of her—her cells—remain embedded in the walls of my childhood home, in the carpet of my elementary school—probably torn out, rolled up, and sitting in a dump. Bits of her washed off in the stream I played in and floated down to places I’ve never been. As I think of the cells of my body existing in places beyond myself, I wonder if more of me exists within my body or outside it.
I’m twenty-eight. Divided by seven is four. If the seven-year rumor is true, three other versions of myself are scattered everywhere. Decaying on the sides of the sewage pipes, eaten by bacteria, absorbed by plants. Transforming as time passes. Becoming part of something else.
***
We don’t like to think about our bodies becoming something else. We try to keep it separate, even when we sluff off our entire bodies, when we die.
When my father passed away, my mother created a ritual of visiting his grave. She’d uproot the grass that encroached upon his headstone, updated decorations for every season, and every now and then, she left a Wendy’s jr. bacon cheeseburger–his favorite–next to the engraving of his name.
As a fifteen-year-old, standing on the ground that held his preserved corpse, I decided I wanted to be cremated. Watching my mother fuss over the grave’s maintenance, I felt no closer to my dead father than standing anywhere else. Whatever made him himself was not there. The idea of graves and cemeteries started to feel like a practice in futility. Why try to designate a space in the earth for a lifeless husk? Why dig numberless cavities in the land? Why line those cavities with cement to create a container for a casket that is itself a container for the vacated body–another container?
Perhaps the body never is separate from its surroundings in the first place. Gerald N. Callahan writes that skin is what keeps us separate from the outside world. He explains that skin is never impenetrable, though. When things, especially things that can hurt, from the outside enter our bodies, our immune systems gather and store bits of those things. They store the invaders in order to remember them and defeat them faster the next time. But it’s not just viruses that are stored.
Enveloped viruses—like those that cause flu, cold sores, and AIDS—are so named because they carry with them an “envelope” of lipids and proteins taken from the host cell (the cell they grew up inside of). Each time we give our flu to our wives or our cold sores to our husbands, we also give them a little bit of ourselves. And when our husbands or our wives get hold of those bits of us, they don’t just discard them, they pack some of them away inside their lymph nodes. Pack them away, sometimes for the rest of their lives. (11)
Not only are we constantly losing pieces of ourselves, we are constantly picking up pieces of other people, pieces of the world around us. Those pieces help form who we are.
***
Snapshot, Spring 1991
Hanging on the wall of the family room in my childhood home were two small pictures in oval frames. Each contained the images of baby girls in lacy dresses. The dresses looked almost identical. Both of a sheer, flowy material that billowed out from underneath a lace collar and ended in a lacy trim with pink ribbon accented by satin rosebuds. Bunched up, bonnet-like sleeves capped each of the baby girls’ tiny shoulders. The only difference between the two dresses seemed to be the color. One dress was white and gleamed in the lighting. The other dress was a light, dusty blue. The girls in the dresses were me and my sister, Jennifer–called Jenny–when we were blessed in front of our church congregation. When I was very young, it was impossible for me to distinguish which baby was myself and which was my sister–I couldn’t recognize myself.
The baby photos seemed to represent that phase of my life when it was difficult to untangle my identity from my sister. Jenny and I grew up very close, although we were three and a half years apart. We shared a room and even shared a bed until I was 13. We bathed together and, when we were older, showered together. I often catch myself narrating any childhood story from the point of view of “we” without designating my sister, just saying, “we did this,” “we did that” because I was always part of the “we” that was Jenny and me.
Jenny and I debated about the identities of the babies in the photos–apparently, she didn’t recognize herself either. Each of us wanted to be the one in the white dress that was deemed the prettiest. Of course, my sister, as eldest, almost convinced me that she was the one in the white dress. Our debate about this seemed to last years, but it’s hard to know how long because time is so stretched out when you’re a child–everything seems to last longer, to span more time. Whether it was years, weeks, or days later, we eventually heard from the source herself–our mother–that I was the baby in the white dress, and Jenny was the baby in the blue dress. I felt a little shaken by this new knowledge. I felt the shift in my identity. Even though I had wanted to be the baby in the white dress, it unsettled me to learn that I actually was that baby.
Sometime after the revelation that I was the baby in the white dress, I began noticing the faces. I’m not sure if this is a developmental progression in young children or if this shift in focus was spurred by the discovery of the babies’ identities. While before this discovery, my sister and I had been obsessed with the superior beauty of the white dress, after learning the identities, I found that the baby in the blue dress–my sister–was actually much cuter. She had cherub cheeks and gazed calmly into the camera, her lips parted almost into a smile. The baby in the white dress looked past the camera with black, glinting eyes, and her arm half-extended out with the pointer finger curled like a hook. The more I thought about it, the more the baby in the white dress looked like an extra-terrestrial–her skin was too pink, her forehead too exposed, and those eyes. Those eyes looked like staring into a black hole.
***
In Jacques Lacan’s mirror theory, an infant sees themselves in the mirror and, at some point along their development, knows that the reflected image is them. The observer knows that the infant has reached this phase in development when the child begins to watch the movement of the image in response to their own movement and will often show delight in the mimicry. The mirror or the reflection seems to be the first place an infantgains an external awareness of themselves. That external awareness becomes important to our sense of self, since we can never view ourselves entirely, except through reflection. We can look down to see our arms and hands, then our stomach and legs, but it is impossible to see our whole selves except through the lens of a reflection. We piece together the fragmented vision of ourselves we gain by looking down at our bodies, perhaps twisting to see the backside. Then we combine that with the information received from the mirror, photos, and video. The reflections are vital to our visual construct of self because we are incapable of peering at our own faces. When we look down, our bodies are headless because of the positioning of our eyes inside the skull.
It is unnerving for me to think that I have never seen my own face. Those around me seem to have a better understanding of my visual features than I do, especially family members who see me every day. It’s tempting to think that my husband, my kids, my mother, have a better sense of who I am than I do by the mere fact that they have access to a part of me that I never will.
We rely on reflections through mirrors, photos, videos to construct our self-image. Lacan doesn’t address photos or videos in his work, but they are an important tool in capturing past images of the self, where the mirror can only show you the present. A photo in particular creates a distance between the image of self and the current self. This is apparent when I think about my experience with the baby pictures that I couldn’t recognize myself in. While I may have recognized my image in the mirror at 6 months, as Lacan states, by the time I was 5 or 6, I had lost the recognition of my past features so much that the baby in the photo could have been anyone. Only when my mother taught me to see myself, pointing out which baby was me in the family albums, could I begin to reconstruct that image of myself as a baby–learning the features of my past self and recognizing them again as part of me. I relearned to recognize my image not through the mimicry that Lacan describes but through the instruction of my mother until, by repeated observation of the photos, I could recognize myself on my own.
Once I have an awareness of my own likeness, my features continue to change, and I receive that input, constantly constructing and evolving the image of myself. For example, the crow’s feet that over the years, have grown and deepened at the corners of my eyes, have become part of my ever-evolving self-image.
The information we glean from outside sources is not necessarily an accurate representation. Photographs, specifically, are especially susceptible to inaccuracy due to visual tricks, editing, and even just the passage of time. The intentional distortion of photographs can be a way to protect the self-image we have created for ourselves.
In the height of my adolescent insecurity, I shied away from photos–loathing whatever image of me they created. When forced into a photo (usually by my mother), I developed a strategy. Instead of trying to be beautiful, I leaned into the grotesque. I contorted my face, lifting one corner of my upper lip, pulling my chin into my neck and creating a ripple of skin and fat cascading from chin to clavicle. I felt that if I didn’t try to be beautiful, if I contorted my image enough, I could dissociate with the image I saw in the photo and continue imagining a different kind of self.
Now, I find myself always falling for the clickbait claiming to know the secret to looking good in photos. These articles always seem to focus on tricking the camera into showing your body differently from reality. I read things telling me to push my chin forward like a turtle to hide an unseemly double chin. People telling me to angle my body to the side to make me look thinner and put my hand on my waist to accentuate the smallest part of me. Then, I read tips about what to wear, what will bring out my curves and hide any rolls. Black is always a good option for clothing. It camouflages any imperfections. If you do it right, it’s almost like your body doesn’t even exist. These strategies aren’t much different from the strategies I used as a kid. Both strategies meet the same ends: manipulate the body to produce a falsified image, allow the psyche to dissociate with the photo, and therefore, protect the construct of the self. Therefore, we cannot trust the photo because of the obvious deceit.
***
I remember a childhood and adolescence plagued with embarrassment and shame of my body. I could never run as fast or for as long as the other children. My lungs would flap furiously as they expanded and collapsed inside my chest to capture enough oxygen and fuel my body to go farther, faster. The constant rush of air—in and out, in and out—burned, started a fire in my ribcage. Even as early as 6 or 7, I remember the shame of the way my stomach and love handles bubbled over the waist of my jeans. My shame burned hotter whenever I had to wear a swimming suit around my peers.
In fifth grade, the students were rewarded with a class trip to the swimming pool in town at the end of the year. I felt nervous about wearing a swimming suit in front of my classmates. I entered the changing room and walked into a stall to undress. I pulled my purple one-piece over my 10-year-old body and the material snapped tight to all my folds and curves. Before I exited the stall, I pinched the flesh of my love handles and ran a hand over my tummy that seemed to protrude too far. I noticed my ultra-white, almost blue legs and felt a tinge of nausea at their ghostly shade. I tried to position the straps of the swimming suit around the little roll of flesh under my armpits that always formed under the strap in sleeveless clothing. It was no use. I took a deep breath, trying to ease the heaviness that had formed in my chest.
As I exited the stall, I heard a murmur of voices as a group of girls gathered in one part of the dressing room. The girls huddling together were the popular girls of my fifth-grade class: Fallon, Chalet, and the two K/Cassies. Cassie Polite and Kassie King. Kassie King was their unspoken leader–tall and thin with budding breasts, perfectly rounded. I had admired those breasts and always felt embarrassed over my own, which were not so much budding as peaking like two mounds of ice cream melting on a hot day. Thinking of Kassie’s perfect breasts, I had asked my mom for a different kind of bra, made the mistake of asking in the presence of my sister, and earned myself the nickname “Saggy” which would persist longer than a decade. I never got the new bra that would make me look like Kassie King.
Cassie Polite was Kassie King’s physical opposite: pale, brunette, short, plump, and curvy. As I walked past the group of girls, I saw that Cassie Polite was the center of the hushed voices, and at once, I knew why. Cassie was wearing a two-piece swimming suit, something gutsy leaning toward scandalous for a fifth-grader in a conservative, religious town. Cassie didn’t appear gutsy, though, as she stood with her chest caving in as if she was trying to crumple herself up. I couldn’t help but stare at the exposition of so much skin. I felt sorry for Cassie as I took in the glowing white stomach rolling over the top of the swimming suit and the deep belly button that disappeared in the folds of her flesh. The girls’ voices escalated in excitement, and I imagined they were egging Cassie on. I just felt pity for poor Cassie who obviously regretted her choice to wear the revealing suit. I couldn’t join in on the excited encouragement from Cassie’s friends because I identified too much with Cassie–projected my own insecurities onto her and felt the shame that I imagine she must certainly have felt.
***
The day I first began
to bleed. I felt like my body
had betrayed me.
I didn’t tell my mother.
Instead, borrowed sanitary
pads from my sister,
who, to determine the heaviness
of my flow, asked if the stain
on my panties
was dark red or pink.
Pink, definitely pink.
She gave me a few of the lightest
pantyliners. I couldn’t bear
the shame when the stain
on the pantyliner grew
dark red.
We went on a family trip
to the city, and I ran out of pads.
Too embarrassed to ask for more, I stole
away to the bathroom every hour to wrap
toilet paper around the crotch of my underwear.
Mom figured it out by the time
we got home.
Once Mom knew, everyone knew.
She tucked me into bed in the middle of the afternoon.
She could never keep a secret, and I felt dirty
when she told my dad in front of me.
I imagined he felt as betrayed
as I did that I was no longer
a little girl.
I was a woman.
The kind of creature
who brought sin and sex
into the world.
My body was no longer
angelic and pure, but stained
red. The red
between my legs
was the sign that my body
would transform: curve and swell
into man’s greatest temptation.
***
In high school, my crush, Greg, and I had an on-going argument that I’m sure he thought was friendly. The argument started over a folder my mother bought for me. It had the image of Raven Simone on it, and although I was a little embarrassed of toting a folder with a Disney Channel star, I still brought it to school.
In my class with Greg, he pointed to the folder and said, “She’s fat.”
It felt like a personal attack on my own body. This boy I had so desperately wanted to notice my body and take pleasure in it was calling another female body “fat,” using the word in such a cruel and condemning way for a body he had only seen on TV. Somehow it upset me so profoundly. Maybe he knew how much it upset me. Maybe he liked the power he held to disparage the female form, to render me sputtering with rage, and still remain adored.
Looking back, I’m happy that I didn’t hide my anger from him—even though anger may have been the reaction he had wanted. I’m glad I didn’t just smile and hide Raven’s face under my elbow. I told him to his face he was a jerk, and soon after, I allowed my secret affections to pass on to another.
I did not articulate my anger elegantly then, so forgive me for attempting to do so now. This boy, 15 or 16 years old, seemed to think he had ownership over Raven’s body. So much that he could define and degrade it. He saw, he owned, he abused it and then dismissed it. Over 10 years later, I’m still angry.
***
I was a flat-
chested teenager. Flat-chested, flat hearted
A flat heart flattened
by a flat chest—unable
to bend and curve. Flat heart unable
to expand and fill with blood. Unable
to thud thud.
Thud thud was too close
to flub flub
like rolls thumping together.
Rolls thumping to be seen
Thighs thundering to be heard
Breast pounding to be loved.
Thud thud. Thud thud.
Am I more than
the sound of thudding
in my ears? Am I more than
this skin, this hair, these limbs?
Am I more than the body
with which I’m always at war?
How do I end the combat?
***
I’ve spent a good deal of my life hating my body. Starving my body, hiding it, making excuses for it. As I’ve grown out of my teenage years, I felt like maybe that was behind me. I realize now that I’m not more comfortable with my body. I’m just better at pretending it doesn’t exist. Being a graduate student makes it easy to pretend my body doesn’t exist. I spend hours immersed in online library databases, consumed by imaginary lives of others captured in books, or tapping my fingers over a keyboard to paint black symbols onto a white page that only exists on my computer screen. Often at the end of the day, I emerge from my digital exploring and find myself surprised by the poorly lit office with its white walls that have surrounded my body for hours. I’m surprised by the twinge in my lower back and the stiffness of my shoulders. Have I really been here in this dingy place the whole time?
***
The weather is finally warming up in Connecticut.
I itch with the desire to leave
my desk, my office. As if the tiny particles that make up
my body are collecting just under my skin, pushing
me toward any source of natural light.
I finally escape
the barren office and burst
out the double doors into the outside world.
I find it all—the tangle of bare,
gray-brown branches, newly relieved
of their snowy loads; the husk-like
grass; the sky layered in ash; the world
painted in shades of dun—
uninspiring. No wonder
we’d rather live
in the realities we’ve created for ourselves.
***
I listen to the audiobook of Braiding Sweetgrass as I coax my daughter to sleep. I lie on my back with her on my chest and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s voice sounds through my earbud as I try to hum a lullaby and listen at the same time. Kimmerer states, “In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us” (16). When I read those words, I can see how my own settler mindset has disrupted my relationship with the earth and thus myself. I have rarely sought a connection with the land because I have never owned land, never felt it was my responsibility. Even now, the home I’m currently in is a condo where the regular maintenance of the lawn and surrounding trees is provided by the condo association. Perhaps if I built my relationship with the land, I could understand myself. I don’t even know where to begin. I am a thousand miles away from the land with which I had the closest relationship. The land that nourished my childhood and made me who I am. I’m thousands of miles away from mountains and apricot trees and my mother’s garden. I feel I don’t even have a right to a relationship with that land, though, because my ancestors stole it from the Ute and Navajo tribes that populated it when the Mormon pioneers first arrived in covered wagons to that desert that is now called Utah. My ancestors pushed the indigenous people from their homes, spreading disease and hate while just trying to survive themselves. Now, I live on the east coast, still occupying lands stolen from the Wangunk, Podunk, and Nipmunk tribes. Though, these lands might not have been directly stolen by my ancestors, at least not any ancestors I can name. How can I repair my relationship with myself when I can’t repair my relationship to a land that I occupy only as a result of oppression? How can I repair my relationship to myself when I carry so much shame for my heritage of oppressor?
I look down at the form on top of me, now heavy with sleep. I stroke her wispy hair and wonder if I could possibly move her to the crib without disrupting her sleep. My back aches, and the arm that her head rests on is asleep. As I consider transferring my child, Kimmerer writes of indigeneity and “becoming indigenous.” She seems to think that settlers can become indigenous to the lands they now occupy by fostering a gratitude and respect for the land. She talks of the positive relationships humans can create with the earth by caring for it as it cares and provides for us. I have my doubts. I can’t even grow a tomato. Every plant in my home withers after a few weeks in my care. Perhaps Mother Earth would be better off if I left her alone.
There, I can see how the lack of ability to care for the land is really a lack of ability to care for myself. I have inherited a culture that is distanced from the earth that sustains it, a culture that not only barely acknowledges the means that make life possible but also can’t even comprehend how to begin a semiotic relationship with the earth. That void of understanding creates a rift in the self.
White culture, by distancing itself from the land, seeks to detach itself entirely from the physical realm–ignoring the body and what sustains it. Valuing the nonphysical above the physical is an explicit teaching in white Christian ideology. I grew up hearing that the flesh is an enemy to God, and its needs and desires should be feared, must be denied in order to transcend my earthly body and become a spiritual being. I was taught that my body was made from the dust of the earth, and dust of the earth was understood to be the lowliest of all creations. I was taught that the earthly realm was below the spiritual and not to trust myself or the earth.
Kimmerer compares the Christian creation story to its Native American counterpart. Sky Woman fell from the sky, and the animals banded together to protect her and provide for her. In thanks, Sky Woman brought and scattered seeds that populated the earth with plants to sustain the animals. She and her children tended to the plants to ensure their survival. In contrast, Eve was chastened for feeding her body with the fruit of the land, banished from the garden, and “instructed to subdue the wilderness” to survive (7). The Christian god punished Eve beyond the punishment of Adam by cursing the life-giving functions of her body, creating internalized shame of the female body. Kimmerer states that Sky Woman would have told Eve that she “got the short end of the stick,” and I agree.
I want something better for this sleeping bundle that resides in my arms. This creature whose only claim to indigeneity is indigeneity to me and the body that now serves as her bed.
***
Sometimes I feel my body begging
me to take care of it. Begging
me to exercise, eat vegetables.
I sooth this feeling away
by throwing some frozen
peas in the microwave.
And once in a while I find
a yoga video and wobble
through sequences of poses
named for animals: cat, cow, cobra.
I haven’t done yoga
in a while. Last time I tried
downward dog—my body
bent at the hips, palms planted
in the carpet, my heals reaching
to do the same—my one-year-old
came up behind me, hugged
my hips and nuzzled her face
between my buttocks.
***
At this point in my life, my motherhood defines my body. I wonder if my body has always been defined by my motherhood—the potentiality of my motherhood. How my breasts began to grow in 3rd grade and my hips widened to accommodate a fetus that wouldn’t form in my womb until years later. Motherhood was already in my body’s plan, whether it was my plan or not. Then, according to plan, my body stretched and ballooned to form something new inside me. And for 9 months I negotiated a space for myself in my own body.
***
Watching The Office postpartum
Everyone is eating lunch in the break room. Pam gets up to buy a protein bar, and Toby says how great it is to have a “young fit” presence in the office. He’s talking about the temp, Kathy, who will replace Pam while she’s on maternity leave. Pam turns away from the vending machine and toward the camera. She wears a dun brown dress that billows over her bulging belly. Her oatmeal colored sweater lays loosely over her swollen breasts. I remember the times Michael publicly and loudly “complimented” those “jugs.” And when Toby pined for the prematernal Pam. Now Pam’s cheeks puff out to hide the contours of her face, and her chin slopes down and backward to meet her neck.
Pam pouts and says, “Yeah, it’s going to be nice to have someone hot at Pam’s desk, huh?” This is an obvious grab for compliments, and she quickly assures everyone she’s kidding. All present clamor to tell her how beautiful she is. She glows, more beautiful than ever. Nothing more beautiful than a pregnant woman. And while they’re at it, aging women are beautiful too. Pam seems to miss the subconscious connection made between her maternal body and the aging body. The conversation moves too quickly to praise the elderly Helen Mirren. Of course, the hottest thing would be a pregnant Helen Mirren.
Dwight breaks in from the corner, waving his arms. No. Disgusting. And the voice in my head, in every woman’s head, a voice that echoes and reverberates around the world repeats, disgusting, disgusting, disgusting. The word becomes a hissing mantra that coils itself around our ribcages, up over our necks, reaches our faces and covers our mouths. Dwight continues, “There are universal biological standards of beauty and attraction, and you are purposefully celebrating the opposite of them to mollycoddle a pregnant woman.” Murmurs of no, no, of course not shuffle through the break room.
Afterward, Pam approaches Dwight to form an alliance with him to find out if Jim thinks the temp is attractive.
***
Snapshot May 2017
My husband and I grin at the camera in front of Cloud Gate–colloquially known as “The Bean.” It’s supposed to reflect the Chicago skyline, but in our picture the giant legume-shaped sculpture mostly captures all the tourists crawling under and around it. I remember the feeling of my bulging belly pulling down as I walked miles all over Chicago that day. The fetus inside me shimmied downward with the constant swing of my stretched hips. I swear that day is the reason the baby came a month early.
The reason she came smeared in white with wrinkled skin hanging from underdeveloped muscle. When she came out, I saw her two skinny legs flailing. That’s all I could see of her over my deflating paunch. The nurse scooped her up and rushed to the other side of the room with her. I was left desperately wanting to hold my baby. Why wouldn’t they give me my baby? What were they doing with her? I assume they were measuring her, checking her vitals, cleaning her up. Couldn’t all that wait until I after I held her? See her for the first time?
***
The Dissociative Childbirth Experiment:
Childbirth may be considered as a major and sometimes extremely stressful event in the lives of many women. Some women experience intense pain, a long drawn-out delivery, loss of control, fear of losing or harming themselves or the baby, poor emotional support, lack of information or support from staff, and intense obstetrical intervention. Dissociative experiences during childbirth can have an adaptive function, helping the mother to cope with the situation. Dissociative symptoms allow individuals to limit their pain or distress, and protect themselves from awareness of the full impact of the event.
–Zambaldi, et al
A day after giving birth to your first child, you agree to fill out a survey. The nurse thanks you and hands you a clipboard. You’re tired. You still have the needle from the IV in your hand when you pick up the pen. Your sleeping baby is in the bassinet beside you and all you want to do is sleep too.
Please answer the following questions to the best of your ability no longer than 72 hours after giving birth.
During or directly after childbirth you:
Experienced moments of losing track of what was going on/”banked out /”spaced out”
Never Sometimes Frequently
Found yourself acting on “automatic pilot”
Never Sometimes Frequently
Experienced confusion and difficulty making sense of what was happening
Never Sometimes Frequently
Felt that what was happening to someone else was happening to you
Never Sometimes Frequently
Felt the sensation of time change during the event/things seemed to be happening in slow motion
Never Sometimes Frequently
Felt as if the event were unreal as in a dream or a play
Never Sometimes Frequently
Felt as if you were floating above the scene
Never Sometimes Frequently
Felt disconnected from your body
Never Sometimes Frequently
You stare at the questions, unable even to comprehend your own experience enough to circle a single word.
***
Snapshot June 11, 2017
Before my baby is handed to me, my husband snaps a picture of her while the doctor holds her up with a gloved hand. She squints at the light with her eyes black as well-water. She’s sticky with amniotic fluid, puffy and misshapen from the birth canal. When I see the picture hours later, I think of the orcs from The Fellowship of the Ring breaking from the ground. Their skins dripping with sticky fluid, hair wet and straggling across their faces. As soon as the first orc bursts from the muddy translucent sac, it kills whatever it first sees. This happens to be the goblin that oversaw its birth. The one who labored with a shovel to unearth the hulking beast. The one that helped it tear through the amniotic sac.
Finally, my baby is wrapped in a cotton blanket patterned with tiny handprints in primary colors. Nurses pull a pink-striped beanie on her head and place her on my chest. I can’t remember how I felt when I first held my daughter. I have a picture of me red-faced and smiling with her bundled in my arms. The only thing I remember about first holding her is seeing an image of that little skull bashing against the metal equipment nearby. I’m afraid to realize that in this waking fantasy, I am the agent of this infant head-bashing. I remember seeing my arm, sheathed in the pastel green hospital gown, stretching forward while holding the tiny bundle by the feet and causing the soft skull to slam against metal. Somehow, the imagined act is both a purposeful and swift motion and also a fumbling accident. Either way, the result is the same. Dead baby. Self-revulsion creeps into my heart. I’m scared of myself, of all the ways this tiny creature in my arms could get hurt, of all the ways I could cause that hurt.
***
The days following my daughter’s birth, I obsessed over my daughter’s nourishment. She wouldn’t latch to my breast, and when she did, she fell asleep before finishing her meal. The lactation consultant insisted that with a premature baby, the breast pump would be my best friend. I pumped and pumped, watching my nipples elongate as they got sucked into the clear plastic tubes. It was never enough.
I can’t write about my experience breastfeeding. I’m too disturbed, too confused by it. My memory is too riddled with contradictions to be accurate. My memories exist too much in the liminal space between love and hate. My story is too complicated. My story is filled with self-doubt that erodes the memory like a stream beating against the earth that makes up its banks. I keep asking myself, but did that really happen that way? My fingers tremor as I hold the pen and force myself to write.
I can’t.
Let us pretend instead. This isn’t my story. This story is about a woman named Penny who just gave birth. So this is Penny’s story:
Because Penny’s daughter, Izzie, was born a month early, Penny’s breasts didn’t fill with milk right away. Still, in the hospital, nurses woke Penny up every three hours at night to press the baby to Penny’s chapped nipple. The baby was too drowsy to latch properly, not ready to have to work for her food instead of having nutrients delivered directly to her bloodstream through the umbilical cord that had to be severed too early. In her hospital bed, Penny cried with relief when the nurse brought her some infant formula after days of complying with the hospital’s “breast is best” policy. Just hours before, Penny had been attached to the breast pump that whirred and pulled her nipples painfully too far into the suction cup and into the tubing. Penny had watched a tiny drop of murky yellow liquid dribble from the left nipple and slide down the side of the cone shaped cup suctioned to her breast and down into a cylindrical container for collecting breast milk. Penny had never heard of colostrum before. This sticky yellow fluid was nothing like the pure white milk she had expected to flow unseen from deep inside her and directly into her child’s stomach. Supposedly, this colostrum was particularly dense in nutrients and played a critical role in starting a child’s development. It wasn’t until over a year after giving birth that Penny learned that Medieval European lore called the colostrum witch’s milk and considered it dangerous to children. Newborns were denied this vital source of nourishment for decades. After fifteen minutes of pumping with no other excretions, Penny detached the pump and sucked up the drop of colostrum with a tiny syringe. She brushed her finger over Izzie’s cheek until her tiny pink lips began to root around, like a fish gulping at the air as it lay in a fisherman’s icebox. As Penny fed the colostrum to her child, she felt a pain in her chest, as if someone were pushing on her sternum from the inside. Trying to escape, tear through. Pushing, pushing. How could a baby live off this? She stroked Izzie’s thin arm and noted it was not much wider than a ballpoint pen. This child needs food.“But that’s all I have,” she whispered with a sob. She tried to remember what the nurse had said. “A newborn’s stomach is only the size of a quarter?” Or did she say a nickel? A stomach isn’t flat like a coin, though. No matter how you measure, the drop that Penny pressed into Izzie’s mouth wouldn’t even fill a dime.
When Penny got home, her breasts hardened as they filled with milk. The feedings were still unproductive. “It’s harder for the baby to latch to the breast if that breast is overfull,” the lactation consultant had said. Izzie screamed but wouldn’t eat, so Penny pulled out the pump again. She massaged her sore breasts to coax out more milk as the machine pulled at her nipples. She had seen a lactation video where a bare-breasted blonde woman squeezed her breast with her bare hands, and a stream of milk flowed into the waiting container, filling it to the brim. The woman looked like a Viking fertility goddess muscling the milk from her body. Penny couldn’t seem to get her body to cooperate, like this woman did. Penny’s body did not obey the commands of her mind. Refused to release the “liquid gold,” as the lactation specialist called it. Even with the pump, Penny’s milk only filled the container a half an inch.
Penny felt guilty for pumping and not taking advantage of feeding times as an opportunity to bond with Izzie. Even when the feedings went well, Penny felt a resentment toward the tiny squished face gnawing on her breast. She felt like the tiny thing was consuming her alive. But when Izzie was detached from the breast, Penny felt the pinpricks of love as the infant stretched her skinny, yellow arm and yawned. Those pinpricks were what made Penny offer her sore, swollen, and bleeding breast to Izzie when she howled in the dark hours after midnight. Those pinpricks compelled Penny to offer her body up to the tiny howling child over and over again, even though Izzie kept rejecting it for the rubber nipple.
Like I said, Penny’s story isn’t my story. My story is filled with more doubt. Was I really unable to breastfeed? Or was I just being lazy? Was it really that bad? Breastfeeding is supposed to be the most natural thing in the world, according to the mommy bloggers. So Penny’s story couldn’t be true.
Writing Penny’s story gives me the distance to be able to understand my own story. Perhaps we could call writing Penny’s story an “out of body experience” where I look at my experience as if floating above, watching someone else going through what I went through. When I do this, I see that Penny’s story is my story. I see how Penny was plagued with severe postpartum depression and that affected how she saw herself. I see that, although in deep pain, Penny loved her baby and did the best for her. Penny is me.
***
Three months after the birth of my daughter, I start graduate school. Every day before I head out the door, I zip up my winter coat, slide my arms through the straps of my backpack, and loop the satchel-style diaper bag over my head. Then I bundle my daughter in her coat, buckle her in the child carrier, and hook my arm under the plastic handle. I open the door and lumber out to my car with the child carrier banging on my right leg and skewing my gait. Under all the things I’m wrapped in, carrying, it’s hard to tell where the stuff ends and my body begins. I’ve become a hulking, lopsided creature that I don’t recognize.
Everdene Incubating
Tangled bank entangles me, swallows
Hardy, Woolf, and Summertime. Passing quaint
houses and wondering if I’ll ever
have a real kitchen. The swamp is a womb to incubate a broken
being. How will I emerge? Poison and
peril when the sun rises, and I’m in the hollow of a rotting
tree. Lost my voice, my sex. Gain…gain what?
***
Gregory Bateson writes of the Ecology of Mind and how “the individual mind is immanent but not only in the brain. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body.” In other words, there is no separation between self and that which surrounds the self. There is no self. My consciousness, my mind, my self is “not limited by the skin.”
Bateson brings in Darwin, argues with him. If the self is inseparable from its environment, the unit of survival is not the organism or the species. It is the “organism-in-its-environment.”
“Now I suggest that the last hundred years have demonstrated empirically that if an organism or aggregate of organisms sets to work with a focus on its own survival and thinks that that is the way to select its adaptive moves, its “progress” ends up with a destroyed environment. If the organism ends up destroying its environment, it has in fact destroyed itself.”
Bateson illustrates his idea by reasoning that if we cannot cut down a tree without knowing we cut ourselves, we cannot avoid the destruction we create for ourselves.
Bateson chops at the base of his tree
and doesn’t realize it’s me.
Chop, chop, chop with the thudding
of my heart. I chop
at the base of my tree and don’t realize
it’s you.
We all chop, hacking at the tree and watching
ourselves bleed. Oceans of blood–
slick, black blood shimmering iridescent,
floating on the surface and catching flame at night.
Our blood oozes and burns. Rises
up the chimney and rolls
through the sky. Blistering streams
of gray. Clotting in heaps
of wadded Walmart bags that
bulge our arteries until they—we burst.
***
As the weather turns warm, the trees explode with bunches of pink, white, and purple. Tender leaves peak out amidst the branches. I start to remember what it felt like to dig my bare hands into the dark dirt and embed it into the cracks of my skin and under my fingernails.
I’m in my mother’s
garden. I’m supposed to be
weeding but I’m playing
in the mud. Digging for worms, poking
at potato bugs. I watch the many tiny legs scramble
under their hefty potato bodies.
My finger touches its outer
shell, and the bug rolls
into a ball. I sit still
waiting for those squirmy, translucent legs to push
out against the shell, and emerge
again as the body straightens.
My mother’s garden is wild. Weeds sprouting up all around, squash and pumpkin tendrils expanding and looping into each other. The chickens who wander all over our half acre property have pecked at the brightest tomatoes leaving them still on the vine, gushing slimy fruit and seeds onto the ground. There’s a stubborn rhubarb plant that Mom has cut down several times. It sprouts back up every year. Growing bigger, greedily slurping up the water from the weaker plants surrounding it. Jenny and I love to grab a stock each, right under its big, ruffled leaf and pull. We grind the reddest part of the stock between our teeth, shredding it into stringy fibers. The sour taste puckers our lips and brings tears to our eyes.
Next to the garden, my mother has what she calls the fruit orchard. It is ten or so fruit trees haphazardly situated around each other. In the fall, we have apples and plums, apricots and pears. The peach tree never produced more than a few hard balls every other year. The apple trees, however, sag low to the ground, heavy with green apples filled with little brown holes. We eat them anyway, cutting out the tunnels dug by worms or just eating around them. Most years the fruit is so plentiful that we can’t pick it all. The fruit covers the ground, turns brown and mushy. Sticks to the soles of your bare feet if you don’t watch where you step.
I compare the life I lead now to how I lived then, and I’m ashamed of my 900-square-foot apartment surrounded by pavement. I think of the blinds in the windows that are always closed. We even put tinfoil up in my daughter’s window because she couldn’t sleep with the parking lot light on all night. I think of the Del Monte cans of tomatoes in my pantry and miss helping my mother peel home-grown tomatoes and bottle them with her pressure cooker. I miss making spaghetti with her juicy chunky tomato sauce.
But I’ve chosen a life that values the mind—the one that only exists inside my skull—above the physical. Above the body, the earth. I’ve chosen a life that plays out mainly in my head. Therefore, the physical condition, my body, my home, my environment, take a secondary position to the world of the intellect.
***
I think of Bateson’s tree and try to imagine a tree as part of myself. I understand that my thought pathways extend out into the world. Like Bateson says, I am just one sub mind in the larger Mind of the world. Pathways that don’t even begin or end with me pass through me. I can’t feel the blade of the ax that bites into the bark of a tree, though. My physical nerves do not extend past my skin. So how can I be part of this tree, the sky, this stranger passing by?
Bateson says, “In the world of mind, nothing—that which is not—can be a cause. In the hard sciences, we ask for causes and we expect them to exist and be ‘real.’ Remember that zero is different from one, and because zero is different from one, zero can be a cause in the psychological world, the world of communication. The letter which you do not write can get an angry reply; and the income tax form which you do not fill in can trigger the Internal Revenue boys into energetic action…”
Perhaps if we leave the world of “hard science,” as Bateson calls it, we see the non-physical can have physical results. I may not have nerves extending to the infant who rolls off the bed and hits the floor, but her impact with the ground, which would be considered “nothing” physical to my body, causes a physical reaction in me. My pulse quickens. I feel a pinch in my chest. My arms instantly reach out to try to catch her. “It is the attempt to separate intellect from emotion that is monstrous, and I suggest that it is equally monstrous—and dangerous—to attempt to separate the external mind from the internal. Or to separate the mind from the body.”
***
My daughter, now almost two, is beginning to differentiate her body. She is separating her flesh from the outside world, recognizing it belongs to her. Kristeva mentions how the child needs to reject the mother in order to build their selfhood.
One day, as I’m getting Lizzie out of the car, I swoop in toward her face to kiss her cheeks. She squawks, and it takes me a minute to realize she’s pushing me away. As I back away from her, she holds her little pudgy hand out, palm flat and parallel toward me, elbow locked. I had never been denied access to that little body before. I had always stroked, kissed, hugged, and pinched that body as much as I liked without asking permission.
I’m carrying Lizzie and we walk past a lilac tree. I’m not paying attention, just trying to get into the apartment building, thinking about my finals for my courses. The smell breaks into my thoughts of books to read and papers to write. At the same time, I hear short, quick sniffs, and I turn my head in time to see Lizzie scrunch her little nose with each sniff. I carry her up to the tree. Reach up to bend a branch down so she can touch the purple star-like flowers. Let her sniff sniff. I’d never noticed her smelling anything before this moment. Her sense of smell was completely alien to me. Sure, she’d repeat “stinky” when we told her she had a stinky diaper. I hadn’t thought she knew what that meant. Now she takes a part of the outside world into her body through her nose and finds a new sensation. That sensation is replicated in my own experience.
***
While living in Connecticut, I’ve heard about how my home state of Utah has been burning. Every year it gets worse. This year, a fire erupted near my hometown. As I drive with my in-laws back to my childhood home, I see thousands of charred tree carcasses on either side of the highway. I sit next to my father-in-law, and now I wish I remember what he said on the drive. Something about the fire. How it burned up the mountain by my family’s old cabin. Something about his words make me want to go see it. I want to drive up the switchbacks to the place the fire touched the most, the blackest place. To touch my hand to the dead trees, to feel connected to them and the land that had been my family’s home for generations–a land that I never appreciated until I had left it.
I never get that chance. The next morning, my father-in-law is found dead in his bed.
After my husband wakes me up sobbing, I run downstairs. I peer into the room where my father-in-law slept. His head rests on his forearm, and I can almost pretend he’s just sleeping. His face, always tan with undertones of gold in life, is now tinged with the faintest green. I back out of the doorway and hold Lizzie on the couch. She doesn’t understand. She wriggles off my lap and tries to push herself into Grandpa’s room. My stomach lurches. I can’t put into words what made me so queasy about my daughter going into the room where a dead body lay. I think it has something to do with her possibly mistaking the cold flesh wrapped around bones for Grandpa.
Seeing my husband’s family’s grief spurs me into action. I find myself doing all I can to help. This feverish helpfulness leads me to the local flower shop. I’m looking at sunflowers and lilies and thinking about how the tradition of funeral flowers began in order to hide the smell of the rotting body. I’ve never smelled a rotten human corpse, but I can’t imagine that even a thousand arrangements could entirely cover the smell. Nowadays, due to embalming practices, we don’t need to cover the smell. Still the tradition holds.
I point to some lilies in the catalog and say, “How much is this one?”
I remember the owner of the funeral home talking about pumping my father-in-law’s arteries with embalming fluid. How he could tell that it had been a heart attack because the embalming fluid couldn’t pass through as easily where the artery had been damaged.
“That one is about $35.”
“Can you make the ribbon yellow? That was his favorite color.”
Embalming not only gets rid of the smell. It also invigorates the flesh and can create a rosy—well, rosier complexion. There are other things we do to bodies to make them presentable. Makeup, wiring the jaw closed, massaging the flesh. Anything to make the corpse look like its former occupant still lives there. And flowers, well, I guess they just help distract us from the disappointment when we see what’s inside the casket. The aversion we feel to the body that was once beloved.
At the end of my father-in-law’s viewing a few days later, when everyone is saying their last goodbyes, I can’t force myself to stand, walk to the casket. Something like fear sits like poison in my belly. Something like fear keeps me in my seat.
***
The Virtual Out of Body Experiment
In this paper we concentrate only on the OBE [outer-body experience] aspect of a NDE [near-death experience]. Blanke, Landis, et al. defined an OBE ªas the experience in which a person seems to be awake and to see his body and the world from a location outside the physical body. In fact, OBEs are considered to be one of the key phenomenological characteristics of NDEs, and it has been found that people experiencing NDEs show reduced fear of death and enhanced belief in life after death. The goal of the experiment reported in this paper is to examine whether an experience of the centre of perception of people being located outside their body might influence their fear of death. Metzinger argued that the experience of OBEs may be the origin of the idea of the soul, i.e., survival after death. Our idea was that if we could put people in a situation illustrating the possibility of their consciousness being outside of their body, then this would provide implicit evidence (but not necessarily explicit belief) that survival beyond the body is possible, and hence produce a reduction in fear of death.
–Bourdin, et al
A woman hands you a black suit she calls a “body tracking suit” and asks you to change into it. Once you return from the dressing room. The woman straps sensors to your hands and feet. Then she guides you to sit in a chair and sets your feet up onto a small coffee table. She places a black hood over your head and virtual reality goggles over your eyes. At first, you don’t see anything. Everything is black. Then you hear a masculine voice say they’re going to start the simulation now. A virtual room, much like the one you are in, appears before you. A beige couch against a brown wall. A coffee table with a vase. You can see the arms and legs of your avatar as you sit reclined. The only difference is that the woman is gone. In front of you, you see the whole avatar reflected back to you in a big ceiling-to-floor mirror. The avatar is dressed in black and wears the goggles and sensors too. You turn your head and your view of the virtual room swivels seamlessly with your movement.You lift your left foot, and the avatar’s left foot simultaneously lifts. You also see the avatar’s reflection do the same in the mirror. You spend a few minutes turning your head and moving your limbs, marveling at how the avatar and the reflection mimic your movements. Then a blue ball drops from the ceiling and bounces off the avatar’s shin. You feel a soft thud on your own shin. Another ball falls from the ceiling and hits the avatar’s shoulder.You watch it in the mirror and see it hit the avatar’s reflection. Again you feel the soft thud on your own shoulder. Ball after ball falls from the ceiling, and as they make contact with various parts of the avatar’s body, you feel the impact too. As the repeated sensation matches what you see virtually, you begin to perceive the avatar’s body as your own.
Then the balls stop dropping, and the room turns dark. The masculine voice informs you that the next phase of the simulation is about to take place. After several moments, the room brightens, and everything appears as before–the couch, the vase, the mirror, all in place. Then just as before, the blue balls begin falling and you feel them as they impact your body. After just a few balls hit you, your perspective changes. Your vision swoops up and backward leaving your body behind. You see yourself, hooded and dressed in black, from above. You watch the balls hit your body below you. You do not feel the impact. You watch as a bodiless entity the balls hitting a body you once thought your own, but now, you don’t feel anchored to that body. You feel detached from any tangible body. Completely unmoored.
Everything goes black, and you’re asked to remove the goggles. The woman hands you a survey, and you fill it out still sitting in the same chair. The survey is sectioned in two tables of likert scale statements. The first table heading states, “On a scale of 1-5 (1=not at all, 5=very much), please indicate to what extent you felt each of the sensations that follow.” What follows is a series of statements asking about whether or not you felt ownership of your body, things like: “I felt as if the body I was seeing was my own body” or “I felt as if the body I was seeing belonged to someone else.”
The second set of questions surprise you, though:
On a scale of 1-5 (1=not at all, 5=very much), what level of worry or anxiety do you have for the following aspects related to your own death?
The total isolation of death
The shortness of life
Missing out on so much after you die
Dying young
How it will feel to be dead
Never thinking or experiencing anything again
The disintegration of your body after you die.
You’re surprised by the questions and wonder what death has to do with any of this.
***
I knew something was wrong with me before my father-in-law’s death. I couldn’t feel. I distinctly remember a moment I walked on campus before our trip to Utah. I took in the hallmark beauty of springtime as I walked past the pond that reflected the blue sky, stared at the green lawn stretching all around the pond like the walls of a shallow bowl. I saw the trees bursting with pink and white blossoms–something that used to stir up a thrill in my chest year after year. That day, I felt nothing. My body neglected to respond to the beauty surrounding it.
After returning to regular life in Connecticut, after the frenzy of arranging the funeral, consoling family, traveling with kids and everything, I come home and still can’t stir up that thrill for anything. I dread spending all day with my toddler with so much energy. I spend the daytime hours trying to rouse myself–trying to go to the park, the library, anywhere that will entertain Lizzie and distract me. By the afternoon, I always end up letting her play by herself while I rewatch The Office and Parks and Recreation. I spend the nights with nightmares of Lizzie dying–left in the car for hours, or left in the rain overnight, or left without food for days. My nightmares frequently interrupted by her real screams for mama. Exhausted, I still pull my tired body out of the bed because that is the only thing that will calm her. She still screams in Daddy’s arms–wants mommy. Wants proximity to her first home in my womb, wants to hear her first lullabye of my heartbeat, wants the pillows of my breasts, even though they failed to nourish her in infancy. I have to give my body to her–she demands it and nothing else.
I finally get into therapy for the first time in my life. I visit the middle-aged male therapist every other week and respond suspiciously to anything he asks, side-stepping even the simplest of questions. At the beginning of every session, he asks how I’m doing, and I respond that I am good and ask how he is. I try to act like I’m okay, unwilling to give up information that would make his job easier. The therapist tells me about mindfulness. Tells me to try to be present in the moment. I’m cynical of this practice. I feel irritated when I try the “band of light” exercise that entails checking in with each part of my body from my toes to my head as if there is a band of light highlighting each part. I feel a resistance to checking in with my body–not wanting to think about it. Not feeling connected to the toes at the end of my feet that seem a mile away.
After an episode where I locked myself in the bathroom crying on the cold floor, while Lizzie banged on the door screaming, my husband urges me to tell my therapist. What do you gain by keeping things from him? We’re paying him to listen to you, aren’t we? We’re paying him to help you, aren’t we? He urges me to seek medication, and I know I can’t keep holding out like this. I keep having thoughts of hurting myself, of running away, of simply disappearing. My mind is plagued with all the bad things that could happen to Lizzie, all the bad things that would be my fault because I’m broken.
I feel cold and shaky when I finally tell my therapist, then suddenly very hot when I broach the topic of medication. He agrees that medication seems to be the best path forward. It takes weeks for me to feel something like hope. Sensations slowly creep back into my body, tethering my mind to the physical realm. One day, I look at a fall tree, dressed in orange leaves, and I feel a slight quiver, like a small flame in the dark cavern of my chest.