Mama Says Om: Ache

Madam's hand minutes after birth

You thought you knew; were a little smug about it, in fact. You’d read all the books--Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child; The Happiest Baby on the Block; Nanny Wisdom; The Baby Whisperer; the oeuvre of Doctor Sears. You prepared yourself meticulously, getting ready for the most important event of your life. You worked feverishly, trying to quell the voice inside that warned of prior failures, disappointments. But no...this was way too important. You could not screw this up. And you wouldn’t. Your pregnancy passed by like a happy parade.

This is what you’d been seeking all along, after all. Motherhood would fill the empty spaces, wallpaper over the cracks of your history. The dreaded boredom that lurked, gray and sodden, on the edges of your life would be banished forever--what could be more fascinating than this majestic unfolding of a whole new life?

Oh, sure, you are still a modern woman, vowing to light a candle at all of your pre-motherhood shrines. Surely you’ll continue to be the same multifaceted woman you are! So you check in with yourself regularly during the weeks leading up to the blessed event; re-read an old manuscript and half-heartedly try to revise it. But you can’t seem to muster up the interest. This secretly pleases you, because you were hoping motherhood would finally rid you of this pesky desire to be a writer, with all of its frustrations and silences. Forget the manuscript, you are the one who is being rewritten.

Labor should have been your first clue that your ideas were off. You expected it to be painful; in fact, that one fact was the only cloud over your nine months of bliss. You’d spent most of that time braced for it. You searched for the perfect metaphor to dissolve your fears (ah, still a writer after all!). Labor would be like a "baptism of fire, brief but searing". No, still too scary. How about "an orgasmic oneness with the universe"? More optimistic, but doubtful. "How bad could it be?" you reasoned. Everyone else seemed to have done it, and most even more than once.

Labor came like a churning ache, a ceaseless stabbing pain, leaving you unable to do more than gasp. No metaphor could have softened this experience. This was just pain, unambiguous and eternal.

Still, you got through it, and you thought that was the end.

Until the silence slithered into your tired ears. No crying?

Those weeks in the NICU were a different labor, protracted, unrelenting. Somehow you had failed--divided your own heart and left the weaker part to her. But she recovered, in her time, and you allowed yourself to breathe again. The ache subsided. All would be smooth from here on out.

Except not.

At first, they are all physical--the pains of recovery, sleep deprivation, and change. You are weary but cheerful, thankful that the black cloud of postpartum depression has seemingly passed you by.

Until that day it started. Your old selves began to ache like phantom limbs, surprised into being by the catch in a singer’s voice on the radio; by a glimpse of a photo of a leaner, sexy you; by a cheerful pre-baby memory shared with your husband (and oh, you don’t want him to know). You are stunned by a desire to write so intense it shakes you from your skin. You watch it fall around you like snow.

You try to shush these voices, feeling incredibly guilty. Your baby could have died! How could you long for the past so strongly? Do you wish her out of existence?

Adjust, they all say, impatient. But you can’t, not quite. Your daughter’s beautiful face is full like the moon; it crowds out your vision. You yourself are quite small.

You hadn’t expected it--to feel so lost. You hadn’t expected to feel so unborn yourself--mushy, the borders between you and your daughter liquid and translucent. You weren’t yourself, not anymore, and you weren’t quite a mother either. And the ache counts off your days like prayer beads.

As you cuddle your small baby like a shield in front of you, you hear them, the voices like a Greek chorus of chaos. They pull you back and forth in time. Only a blessed few in monks’ robes sing of the now--of the lovely ache of walking your growing child in the twilight, knowing that soon she’ll walk herself. Every moment alone, ripe with pleasure pain. The ache of two new lives stretching past their margins.

The ache of knowing you know nothing at all.

Mama Says Om

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Mama Says Om-Juicy (a fictional vignette)

I’m here to speak for the body.

Yeah, I’m surprised about it too. It’s not something I really think about, well, much, anymore...not since my Henry passed away last spring. I look at these new tree buds and I don’t understand why they’re here anymore. My Henry loved spring, so it’s wrong that it should be happening and he’s not here to enjoy it.

But enough about that...I said I came to talk about the body--the body in all of it’s juiciness, its soft places, hard places, and everything in between. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but...I’m juicy, too. Or, I mean, I used to be. I don’t pay much attention to that now. Or I didn’t, but I do again.

I work in the library--that’s where I met Henry, all of those years ago. I’d see the kids come in, with their piles and piles of paper and books...but that wasn’t what was on their minds. No, they were like little trees, sap rising and pooling all of the time inside of them. I watched them watch each other, and I tried to stay out of it. Not that it was hard. They were in the dance, and I was on the sidelines again, with my too-old body, nothing extra anywhere--practical like an ironing board that slides back into the wall--that was me. It was like working inside the TV, on one of those nature shows.

But I still loved the library. It was quiet, and devoted to books, and, well, quiet.

Henry walked in one day. Of course, I noticed him...tall, distinguished, impatiently flipping through one book and then the next and the next.

Of course, he says he was looking for me. He always said things like that. But it’s true that as soon as he looked up and saw me looking back at him, he stopped looking at the book and started looking right at me. A strange kind of look--the kind I saw the kids giving each other all the time over their notebooks, but not the kind anyone ever directed at me. I always got the intercepted looks...the ones that never met their destination because I was in the way. But it was obvious that I wasn’t in Henry’s way at all. It makes me blush to this day to think that I was the way.

Nothing special happened during our courtship. It just changed my life, that’s all, and everything in it.

Marriage to Henry was like being a Persian kitten...he stroked and nuzzled everywhere, lengthening my shadows by sliding his own inside of them. You’re so juicy, he used to say as he nibbled and kissed. Like a peach, a mango, passionfruit. I tried to tell him how I felt right back, but I was wordless. A whole library of words, but not a one that told him how I really felt...how he made me who I always wanted to be. I wish I could tell him he made me feel like an orchid...all rare and unfurled and glistening. I’d like to think he knew that even without my telling him.

But then the day came...the day when the shadows started to overtake him--little things. A pallor. A cough that caught in his chest and exploded. I know the doctors told me what it was, but all I remember was white. And red. The whole world boiled down to those two colors. A buzz, a bad hum like an angry nest of wasps.

And then the day came when I had all the words in the world, but no one to tell them to. The spell he put on me was broken...I was never that heedless orchid, that Persian cat. I was just...me. Like knotty pine, like a piece of driftwood all gray on the beach.

I would have lived the rest of my life this way, too...making sure to stay straight and plain and quiet. My time as a tempting morsel (another of my Henry-isms) was over. And what good had any of it done, after all? Just showed me what was out there, only to take it away?

Oh, I was plenty mad at this body. I stopped speaking to it after Henry’s funeral. Just clothed it and kept it clean and dragged it around like an unwelcome sack. It hadn’t done anybody any good. A transplant might work. I tried. It didn’t. Useless, useless me.

I don’t remember how long this lasted, this divorce.

And I don’t remember where I was when the tears started. I think I was at work, and bumped my backside into a book trolley. Like a jukebox, it started humming Henry back to me, and it was like he was right there, touching me. It startled me out of myself, and liquid rushed to my eyes like a summer shower. I could feel this old body of mine quake in thankfulness. Finally.

I was curious, wanted to see if it was one time thing. So I put my hand, gently, on the small of my back. Oh, Henry was there too. His words were sliding all over me, his hardscrabble hands so soft, like furred paws. He was in the hair that rose on the back of my neck. He was in the watery sunlight that leaked through the thick matted library windows. And most of all, he was in the tears that fell and fell and fell endlessly.

I went to his grave the other day. You know something? It’s the one covered in flowers. Did my tears do that too? I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.

But I’m here to speak for the body, because Henry always did. He always said it was juicy, and I finally agree with him. Juicy with his memory, juicy with our history together. Juicy with my new moist grief...the grief that gives him back to me over every part of my body.

No, my body couldn’t save him. But maybe it didn’t have to. Maybe it was enough that we saved each other every day of our time together.

Maybe that is enough.

Mama Says Om

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Mama Says Om-Delight

(Alas, I won't be around much for the rest of the week...family OHT is going on a trip! More when I return...and have a wonderful week, my bloggy sisterhood! Sorry for the hurried nature of this post.)

Go through the window and open the door
Look left when everything points right.
Nobody expects you to climb up your own damn balcony,
Young Juliet
But the tealeaves and runes foretold endless overwhelm

So you go
Stealth maiden

With honeyed oils spread thin like desire
By fingertips and eyelashes

With spellcast words
Poetry feels new and passion tingles electric
“Gather ye roses while ye may”
Look, its still good advice.

With blurred impressionistic palette
And new eyes

Your bag of otherworldly delights in order
Slung cutting into your back as you climb
Hand over hand
On the same vine that swirls up and burrows down

It is good for you to ponder this

Open mouth
To let the cosmos in

Open hand
To catch the lightning strike

Go through the window and open the door
Piñata world bursts open
Young Romeo
Awaits

Mama Says Om

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Mama Says Om--She's So Unusual

In my grammar school, there were two types of girls--Cyndi Lauper girls and Madonna girls. Madonna girls wore makeup early, and dressed in ways that caused the boys to occasionally drop their books low and blush. Cyndi Lauper girls got their own share of glances, but those were usually accompanied by whispered comments, "she’s just weird, man."

I was a Cyndi Lauper girl, due to the influence of my adored Punkish Middle Sister. In my admiring eyes, she was everything that embodied Cool, and I circled around her planet like the worshipful little moon I was in those days.

She had the gift of telling an enthralling story--finding the extraordinary in all of the small events that made up our day. I credit her with my interest in mythology, because she always had a way of connecting our lives to something larger, more exciting. Bigger than our often humdrum working class lives.

She introduced me to punk (of course!), safety pins in my ears, all black clothing, defiantly short haircuts, and the East Village. She listened patiently as I babbled happily about the stories I was writing, my "pretends" as I called them, and gave me valuable advice. We created fabulous fantasy lives for my Barbie dolls (a fact that would have mortified her if I’d ever spilled to one of her few close friends).

My Mami and Papi, though, were desperately chasing after the Usual. Anything to paint a smooth smiling patina on our own fragmented experiences as immigrants, as outsiders. They wanted so much to give us that deep sense of belonging, the confidence in our new world that they lacked. Punkish Middle Sister came to this country as an eleven year girl, so bright she was skipped forward into high school. They pinned their hopes on her intelligence, not considering what an American high school really was, or whether a sheltered eleven year old from another country would fit in there.

I guess she decided that if people were going to stare at her, she would find a way to be REALLY unusual. Needless to say, my parents absolutely did not approve. "Why can’t you be normal?!" shouted in Spanish across the dinner table. But she couldn’t. She wanted to have salsa AND the Sex Pistols; she longed for the warm tropical childhood she had even as she adored the hard angles of New York City. She wanted to be an ultra femme Latina woman, but was drawn to the idea of self-creation through androgyny.

So they tried to stifle my sister, tried to force her into acceptable interests, like school, and cooking, and silence.

I think that’s why she loved spending time with me back then, her little sister seven years younger. Because I loved exactly who she was; I wanted to be exactly like her. Unlike the world (and my parents), I wasn’t concerned about her lackluster grades; I was too busy being in awe over her enormous pencil drawing of Conan the Barbarian, so passionately and sensitively done that her art teacher didn’t believe she could have created it--it had to have been done by a boy, right? I would beg her to sing to me; she had a lovely, clear alto voice she couldn’t find any use for. To me, she was good at everything artistic--she was the undisputedly best dancer in our family (and for Latinos, that’s really saying something), sang beautifully, drew gorgeously, and possessed a serious native gift for language and storytelling, all the more surprising considering she learned English in her teens. I modeled myself after her in every way, imitated her style, her charisma, her passion for all of the arts. I drank deeply from all of her dreams of bohemia and freedom.

It wasn’t all roses and absinthe, though. My sister resented me almost as much as she loved me, this native born little sister, much petted by my parents. The sister who achieved straight As almost effortlessly, and who could please Mami and Papi almost without trying. Mami demanded that my sister give up all of her afterschool activities to take care of me; after all, she had to work the second shift at the factory, and my older siblings were both in college and thus unavailable. She got her revenge in little ways--subtly stepping on my own stories, reminding me that all of the good things in our family happened before they came to this country (i.e. before I was born), upstaging my nascent attempts to sing, and dance, and draw like she did (making sure that I knew I’d never be better than she was). I was so in thrall that I never considered how hard she had it--high school in a new country, a new language, culture. Being ripped away from everything she knew and not feeling connected to my parents at all. Maybe being weird was better than being ignored, or unsure. Maybe it was her way of taking all of her awkward bits and turning them into something important, into something beautiful.

It didn’t matter what she did to me, though. I still worshipped her. And I hope, in some small way, I gave her a safe place to be fully and completely herself. I applauded her, depended on her advice about boys, creativity, life.

We’re both still struggling--trying to reconcile who we are with wanting approval from our parents, spouses, and the world. She’s given up on those bohemian dreams from long ago, but left those seeds in me. It’s hard for me to watch her disavow all of her desires from back then--I miss having her lead me there. But she has different dreams now, and maybe it’s time for me to find my own path. I’ll always miss that time, and always be grateful for her inspiration, even if she doesn’t value those ideals anymore.

Some things haven't changed. She's still moody, and creative, and defiant, and insecure. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life. She's remained a fabulous storyteller. She still drives my parents insane with her ideas (only now about parenthood). Still, she’s so unusual.

Mama Says Om

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Mama says Om--Foundation

Feet planted on the earth
Wide, cause space is generous
Thighs sway
Heavily
To ancient tidal rhythms
Modern as yesterday

My mother’s murmurs
Echoing inside my own exasperations
And my daughter’s mewling cries

I plaster over the cracks of my stories
With astonishment that becomes
Stronger in the broken places

All in all
My all is all

Feet planted on the earth
Wide, cause I learned
From every loved memory
Dreamed in the inbetween time
I hold my daughter
Aloft
She sways with the palms
Swallows the moonlight whole

I am my foundation

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