Smiley Jo
My daughter started smiling at me this week. As the weeks go by it astounds me to watch my body and my husband’s body appear in our child’s developing body. Not only do I see the two of us in her, but I see aspects of both of our families as well. For instance, she has my father-in-law’s eyes. Additionally, my body continues to help her body grow. Every day I think to myself, “Wow, I’m still growing a baby.” It’s just now I can actually view the result of my efforts. I am a walking vending machine…with only one kind of snack.
Pregnancy was tough for me. Three and a half of the nine months I was pregnant I bled. During that entire time I worried I was going to lose her. December was the absolute bottom after two incredibly scary incidents both requiring trips to emergency care. Perhaps even scarier was the doctors’ bafflement at the cause of the bleeding. I’ve always been very conscious of my body. Always in control of it. Now I wasn’t and no matter how I changed my behavior, bodily, it didn’t matter. The most terrifying aspect of this whole chain of events was that it was not just my body that was suffering. I couldn’t bear the thought that my child’s body might also be suffering. My body was no longer singular, but plural. Pregnancy is an amazing rehearsal for the responsibility of being a parent. You can no longer be irresponsible about your body when you’re pregnant. For me I gave up not only alcohol and lots of caffeine (I still drank one cup in the morning) but due to the bleeding I also gave up exercising, baths, and sex, blindly grasping at anything that might make the bleeding stop. None of it worked.
On the pregnancy online group I am a part of I asked one mother of five how she managed to be pregnant and still take care of her other five children. She told me it was her faith in God and to get used to worrying all the time about my children. My response to her was that was all fine and dandy, but to me there is a huge difference between being pregnant constantly fearing a miscarriage and having children fearing for their safety. The difference is my body’s interaction with the child’s body. I told her that at least at the end of a long day coping with my two-year-old I could sip some wine. Or if I became frustrated or needed to cry I could leave the room. My body could be physically separate from my child’s. During pregnancy that separation of bodies doesn’t quite work. I was never alone. My mother-in-law kept telling me I would miss having Jo inside me, constantly feeling her move and being reassured of her presence. I haven’t missed it once.
While I haven’t missed being pregnant, having a baby certainly is not what I expected as far as my body’s relationship to her’s. My relationship to my own body completely shifted after labor. No matter what I was told I have to say that at a certain point I stopped being in the driver’s seat. Rather than spending tons of time sharing the whole story I’ll just share this one piece. My contractions went from relatively minor to ridiculously intense in a very short amount of time. I was one half centimeter away from being fully dilated. The nurse decided to wait to see if we could get that last bit taken care of and she told me we’d wait like fifteen minutes of so before starting to push. After five minutes my own body gave me no choice. It started pushing on its own to the point where I started trying to hold it back. Yeah right. While I do take some credit for helping push her out I definitely think my body did a good deal of the work on its own.
When she finally flopped out and they put her on my chest I think some kind of Freaky Friday thing happened. I can really only describe it as an out-of-body experience. Like I’m more a part of her body than my own. Only this has lasted since she was born. I’ve always really liked taking care of my body, especially with lotions and yummy things like that. I’m incredibly diligent about weird things like keeping my eyebrows groomed. No more. I could pawn this off on the lack of time I have to do such things, however, I really don’t think this is the case. I am much more conscious of her body than I am of my own. Her cries ellicit a much more visceral reaction from my body than my own cries. When she squirms in the night it’s my body that wakes up. When she smiles my body gets much more of a rush than any beer or cappuccino could possibly give me.
Through my daughter I’m beginning to understand my own mother’s obsession with her daughters. I don’t exagerrate when I say a truly believe my sister and I probably saved my mom’s life. My mom has never really cared much for her own body. As a young adult I watched her take the anger and rage left by years of horrific abuse out on her own body because she could not express it to those who hurt her. She abused her own body, but she always survived. She survived, she says, for my sister and I. I never felt a lack of love or support from my mom. She never had any qualms about expressing it. However, it was never really expressed physically. The terror exacted on her body, I think, somehow always kept the door to physical attention closed. But I always knew I was loved. This kind of love, where a mother lives for her children, is a difficult road to hoe sometimes. While I never felt unloved I grew up bearing the burden of my mother’s happiness. See, when my sister and I came into her life she passed her consciousness into our bodies to the point where I think my mother lives more through our bodies than she does her own. While this transfer allows her to take great joy and pride in our achievements, it enables her to continue her own abuse towards her body. Now, her body has finally begun to give out.
My mom was diagnosed with stage 3a ovarian cancer a few weeks ago. Now she cannot escape her own body and she clearly feels trapped. I seem to be dealing with the news well, but I think it’s because I can’t actually see the toll it is already taking on her body; we just speak over the phone. As she can’t come to see her grandaughter, my sister and her husband have given me a plane ticket and we’ll be going to see her this week. I want her to see that pieces of her are written across not only my face but my daughter’s as well. My mom has a very unique nose; she calls it a ski jump. It’s long and skinny and at the very end it turns up slightly like a ski jump. On her nose the cartilege is so pronounced it’s almost like the tracks of the last skier have been etched into the skin. I have her nose. The turn-up is not as pronounced and my nose (unfortunately) is much fatter, but it is definitely there. My daughter’s most prominent feature in her first days of life in the world was her nose. It’s much more in proportion now, but the turn-up is still there. Her nose was so prominent after birth that it came out squished against her tiny face. The womb could not make room for such a unique feature. The feature my grandpa had, my mother has, I have, and now my daughter has.
The Nose
In marriage it is said that two bodies become one. In childbirth one body becomes two, but it doesn’t end there. I considered my grandma a matriarch. She could rattle off the names of her many, close to a dozen, great-grandchildren all the way to her last days. I’m beginning to realize that my body not only splits when I have a child, but will continue to split when she has a child. In death, the body rots, but the soul, in most faiths, continues on. I say the body achieves immortality through our children. While my mother’s body begins to break down it gets stronger through her daughter and granddaughter.
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