The Body is Loyal

Originally published in Ruminate in January 2023.

“Choose someone to be the Mother.”
- Rules to the game Mother May I?

In one variation, the Children ask the Mother for permission to move their bodies in certain ways across the field. She’s across the field, a figure turned away from them, gaze fixed on something in the trees. The Children are limber. The Mother, unpredictable. Sometimes she says yes. Other times, no. The Children play with the size of their requests. Two leaps forward? Five baby steps? One lamppost? Yes, you may, says the Mother. And the Children come to their knees, lie on their bellies, stretch their bodies as long as they will go. Where their fingertips reach –the buttercup, the acorn, the yellowing blade of late summer onion grass – this is where their feet are allowed when she gives them the signal to stand.

*

I am the mother, almost the mother, desperate in the belly of the night. These waves strike at one minute apart and last a minute each. No reprieve for twelve hours. I feel chased up a ladder, and the ladder is very tall, and the ladder is very loose, a set of stilts. I stand over my bed in the birthing center, fists in the mattress, moaning so forcefully that my voice is hoarse. Behind me, Maureen, the midwife, flanked by nurses. One places a white cotton washcloth, rolled up, between my teeth. Bite this. They promise that what is about to happen will be quick, but it will also amount to the most intense physical pain of my life. Far worse than the birth itself. Far worse than the ring of fire or the torn perineum I’ll endure several hours from now. “Are you sure you want us to do this?” asks Maureen. I grunt my assent through the cotton, my teeth are tight. My tongue rubs the bumps of the cloth, exaggerated taste buds, no longer a cloth but another tongue I gnash with my molars. Maureen holds my hips, keeps my pelvis still as the nurses prep the four needles. In my periphery, I see each one widen her feet, find a soft plié, bracing for the peak of the next contraction. Maureen counts to three.

And they are exactly right. The pain is utterly blinding, the worst I have ever felt then or now. I scream like a woman lost in time, like a woman biting a stick, a woman tortured, set to burn or left to drown, a woman whose scream will carry into the hall, the yard, the village, the future. It is one scream, and it ends. I let the damp towel fall from my mouth and crawl into the bed. I say thank you. I have manners.

The magic is in the pain, not the injection, which is only sterile water. It’s a slight-of-hand, a swap. To shock the nervous system, to disrupt its inventory of prolonged, relentless back labor, by flooding it with something worse. To force a mother’s endorphins to rush, to drug her from within. To buy her some time before the transfer to the hospital. For a spell, the body and mind are mere neighbors. The pain gate between them can be open or closed. Or open but so overcrowded that it’s rendered functionally padlocked, impossible for one version of pain to pass through.

*

The Winner is the Child who reaches the Mother first. The Winner touches the pattern of the Mother’s sleeve and they swap roles. The Child figures out how to stand, where to look, now that she is the Mother. The tagged Mother, now a Child, runs back to the other Children, some of whom hold grudges about her earlier behavior. They suspect she had favorites. They feel she enjoyed her power too much. That she kept the Children in the sun too long. She stood too far away, remember that? And they could tell she was moving even farther away from them, taking baby steps she tried to mask with her long floral dress. The Winner vows to be different, to be her own kind of Mother. 

There is no version of the game where the Mother is the Winner, although some Mothers will claim victory when they have been too cruel to let anyone get close and so the Children give up, or when the game runs out of time, when their own mothers call them inside for supper, noodles, and there is enough for everyone to have seconds but not thirds.

*

I am the child. Not growing properly. I am naked from the waist up, humiliated, while the doctor and my mother discuss the flatness of my chest and the curve of my spine. I try to cover my chest with my wild hair, an appropriate mermaid, who will never have to worry about never getting her period. But then I have to touch my toes, and so my hair sweeps the floor, and my doctor’s hands are cold and clean and damp on my back. Seven degrees, she says. A touch of scoliosis. Something to keep an eye on. As I dress, I twist, try to see it. On the drive home, I accept that I am Judy Blume’s Deenie. Who would have thought, of all the medical fetishes in my pre-teen books – leukemia, epilepsy, several pink paperbacks about cystic fibrosis – that I’d be a girl with a twisted spine. I make plans to hack off my hair, like Deenie does when she gets diagnosed. I find myself looking forward to a back brace, some surrogate body to inhabit. One afternoon, I pull on a green turtleneck, trapping my hair inside. I tug it loose a few inches, simulating how I’ll look when I work up the nerve with the scissors. But the scissors never happen; the brace never happens. No mother, no doctor ever says scoliosis again. I don’t cut my hair short for several years, and when I do, it is against my mother’s wishes.

*

In another version, the Mother says yes every time. But don’t mistake permission for generosity. The Children remain bound to her choreography. Crabwalk back to Phillip, she says, or Do one cartwheel forward. And it’s not enough for the Children to simply obey. The Mother demands doubt, a double check, Mother May I? She’ll say yes, but without fail, some Child forgets to ask, starts her cartwheel before Mother confirms her wishes, and the Child is sent all the way back to starting line, which might be indicated by a pair of birch trees, a jump-rope stretched on the ground, a dropped cardigan, or, in my case, a stack of firewood where one evening I find a half-starved coyote poking around. She studies me, checks over her shoulder, looks at me again, then leaps over the barbed wire fence, into Henchion’s pasture, where milk cows wander and nibble at grass.

*

I am the stack of firewood, the sack of bones, the undertrained dancer. I’m just a few years older than the undergraduates in this advanced modern workshop, but already I feel like their big awkward sister, their clumsy great aunt. It’s a heavy-limb day, a body-is-a-chore day. With every combination, I lose my breath overthinking my breath. Then we break into groups to observe and scribble notes on one another’s improvisation. When it’s my turn to move, I try to suspend my self-consciousness, adopt an agenda of authenticity, doomed to buckle. When I finish, the girl in the perfect messy braid says to her notebook, “You neglect your back body.” The other girls agree. In this moment, I feel both totally seen – Yes, I do! I do neglect my back body! – and utterly wounded. Neglect? That’s the word to surface in the room when I move? For the remainder of the semester, I try to inflate the paper doll Marianne, to give her dimension. I close my eyes and awaken my trapezius, invite spaciousness into the links of my cervical spine. My ribs are not a ladder, or a line of piano keys. They wrap around me, hold me, contain me. I can send my breath between them and around them. I can let the breath go.

*

No, it’s not the same basic game as Simon Says because Simon is nobody’s Mother. Plus Simon talks about himself in the third person. Also, Simon faces you like a fool, no mystery, no chase. Simon only clocks your obedience. Mother measures your loyalty, your love.

*

I am the third person. The first person is the speech therapist who specializes in newborns. It’s not that newborns should be speaking, but apparently eating is like speaking and this is where you go when the lactation speacialist runs out of patience and the fenugreek has failed to up your milk production but has made your baby’s urine smell like maple syrup in a bad way. The baby, Nolan, is the second person, though the therapist and I discuss him in the third person. She holds him, even when I hold him. I nurse him. She does not approve of the sounds he makes. They are the wrong sounds. She takes him in her arms and moves to different furniture. She offers him a bottle and he is happy drink, doesn’t care that she is not me. She wants me to watch. She says a lot of things but I only remember two. The first is that he won’t be able to play contact sports. I should be skeptical or alarmed, but instead I feel impressed. She seems to know my baby much better than I do. She’s some kind of wizard, predicting his future with a glimpse of his neck flexion. My neck works but my arms are empty. I begin to think that my arms will always be empty, that she will never give him back, that she is becoming his mother right in front of me. This possibility fills me with both dread and relief. If she walked out of this room with him, would I have the energy to follow? Would I be the mother who is devastated? Would I be the mother who takes a nap on a stranger’s small office couch? The notion of sleep fills my chest with milk but I don’t leak. I never leak, another way my body is wrong.

The second thing the therapist tells me is that I need to support Nolan’s chin with every gulp he takes. When she says this she gives him back to me so I can prove I am capable. I hold a finger under his little jawbone and she teaches me how to push up into it, to encourage him to maintain suction. It is a dance, my hand, his chin, this rubber nipple. She says, “More pressure. You won’t hurt him.” I don’t believe her.

I stand to leave and I thank her for whatever this was. She says this was a consultation. That I should come back. That I should keep coming back and she will keep holding my baby and showing me things about his mouth. But I carry him away, away from the nap on the couch, through a doorway, away from smiling office manager, the fourth person. I don’t stop at the check-out window, and the first and fourth persons are saying things back there but they don’t chase me down. I am a lost cause. On the long drive home, foggy thoughts gather in my head, in my mouth, and I share them with Nolan. He coos and chirps, a string of perfect sounds.

*

Nobody wants to be It but everybody wants to be Mother. Except for the real mother. When she dreams up the game at a birthday party, she whispers it to a Child and takes no credit. She makes herself small and runs to the pack who will ask, Mother May I? She has no interest in standing alone far away, being pursued, granting permission and doling out punishment. Nevertheless, she has a long stride she fails to shorten. Before long, she outpaces all of the Children and nearly wins. When she tries to throw the game, omits the magic words, the Mother won’t allow it. You win, fair and square, she is told. And because she failed to love their rules, the Children gang up on her or lose interest in the game, switch things up. They make her It. She has no say. It is all they want for the Child’s birthday, for all of their birthdays, and she obliges. She chases them and does not catch them. She runs as fast as she can run. She follows them to their own front doors, which they slam. Under a streetlight, she shouts, “Olly Olly Oxen Free!” but by then the Children are dreaming.

*

Say you are the magic. Say you are the balm. Say you are the one they ask to map the field where mothers go. What on earth can you do with a lump in your breast or a shadow in your heart? What can you do when you are barely a wind-up toy needing a turn, when the knobs of your spine are impossible to grasp? One afternoon you are floating on your back in the Mediterannean. You are free. You are shining into the sea, into the sky, out your limbs and the tips of your hair, your crown. And you find you are too far from the shore to swim back. You are too tired. And there is no panic, just a pulse from somewhere. A whale, a star, a dead relative. Who can tell? You stay on your back, find a way to kick your legs so gently, barely, aiming your body for land, for your husband burning on the shore. The pulse might be your children, a decade away from arrival. And remember some summer in high school, running alone on the track at dusk. The sky too beautiful. The bounce of breath at the end of a sprint and some sudden grief, flooding love for your future children wrapped up in the love of your own child self. How you wept and wept and could explain it to no one. That you had met them on that field. That they came to you.

*

A bored Mother might be inclined to dare the Children. Steal, she might say, a healthy piece of bark from that maple tree. Chase the smallest Child until he falls. Count the sounds in the most forbidden word you know and walk that many steps forward, then say the word out loud that many times. Carry your supper into the woods and fall asleep with the bowl on your belly, noodles warm and fragrant. Last. At first light, emerge. Wash the bowl in the sink of any strange house. Find Mother, an early riser herself. She is tender in the morning. She will fill it.

*

Share, I say, your weapons. I don’t call them guns because I don’t allow guns. I do allow blasters, squirters, shooters, and Epic Battles. Gun, Gun, Gun, say my boys. No, a gun is never a toy, I say, filling a blaster with water. Even if it is pink plastic and every surface of the gun says Toy Toy Toy. Even if you are gifted one at your birthday party from the kindest child in the class, the child who tucks her trains into little beds at night, the child who will surrender the swing at the first hint of your want, the child who takes her time on your birthday card, using every color crayon, sounding out every word she writes. Frend. Day. Happy. Even then. Now, aim for the belly or the middle of the back.

I confuse them. One afternoon we walk home from the park and they find sticks of promising shape. They make shooting sounds, blast each other’s white bodies, perform their wounds. They point their sticks at cars driving by and I grab the sticks. I shout. Never! What if someone thought these were real guns? They would never think that, they say. They can tell. My boys are comforting me, proof I am doing this wrong. There are children, I say. And somebody thinks they aren’t playing. Somebody thinks they aren’t children. Somebody has a real gun. Only I stop after there are children. What children? The boys want to know. I kiss them to fill the silence. The sky whitens, weighs its options. I fail, fall into my own imagined innocence. I change the shape of the story, pretend it’s about permission. Tell myself this is age-appropriate. But for whom. Just. You can play with play guns. You already do. Call them guns. A blaster is a gun, a stick is a gun, a pouch of candy is a gun full of rainbow-colored bullets. 

*

Of course, there are days when the Mother must be ready to catch a raw egg in her hands. To cradle it in a spoon and run, run, run without dropping it. Days the Mother shimmies into a real potato sack – a couple of Ida Golds forgotten in the corners – to hop across the field. Some days the Mother’s ankle tires of the twine that ties her to the Father, ready for some race. She can be restless. In the woods, I’ve heard, is the Grand Mother. And when you get to the river, the Great Grand Mother. Great Great roams the mountain, flies a kite along the ridgeline. Triple Great knows the valley, has rested in every hollow. And so on.

*

At the base of my spine is a four-cornered diamond of bone, a dormant kite. It’s called Michaeli’s Rhomboid. It’s where the needles go on that day I am almost a mother. They enter just shy of the lateral corners known as the Dimples of Venus. And while the circle of the cervix is doing its magic, this wedge of bone is moving, too. It floats up and out, bulging from my back, opening space in the pelvis. Midwives say that, when the kite rises, the mother will raise her arms above her head, instinct guiding her to hang on anything to keep her steady while whatever stability she has left in her pelvis falls away. 

It’s good. It’s supposed to fall away. 

When she reaches, the mother might find a bar above the bed, hung for this purpose. She might find a door frame, a husband, an exit sign, a tree limb, a lamppost. She might find there is nothing to hold, not yet, but that her arms reach anyway, that the body is loyal to more than itself.

*