Like a Stain
Part III: Marriage and Motherhood at the Soggy Edge of the Earth
A Cottony Fate by Jane Hirshfield Long ago, someone told me: avoid or. It troubles the mind as a held-out piece of meat disturbs a dog. Now I too am sixty. There was no other life.
1
Three times within the last three years I tried to end my marriage and my relationship with my children as I had always known it. Three times I attempted, then failed to annihilate what my husband, Ryan, and I had created over eleven, then twelve, then thirteen years. Really seventeen years if you count down from the time I first saw him walking down the hill near the university cafeteria with my roommate, and told him he looked short for a volleyball player. After the third and grand attempt to divorce him, I changed my mind, came home, and have quit trying since.
I believed then and I still believe now that I could have destroyed our marriage in a good way, the way fire destroys dead underbrush for new growth. I could have divorced him, maybe even should have based on our obnoxious differences. If I were writing the screenplay for my own life, I would have written the wife out of the marriage and into Greece, on a commune with friends and their dogs and their pomegranate trees. I would have written her out of marriage forever, and into late night dancing with older Greek men and Finnish men who gave her fried feta cheese and sex in saunas, which is a funny detail to include considering I have never enjoyed wet sex–pools, hot tubs, showers, especially baths. In my screenplay, though, I am the kind of woman and body that enjoys wet sex. I would have written her into many easy partings, something I’ve rarely been able to do myself in my real life, and she would have become an expert in separating without the agonizing longing, always returning back to herself, to her friends–one of the purest forms of love–and her children and her pomegranate and let’s add in some lemon trees.
Ryan was my first kiss on the lips as opposed to the cheek, and my first real as opposed to imagined boyfriend. After one year of dating, he went on an LDS mission to Spain and became my faraway love, a sort of sexy priest to my fleabag self. Back in Provo, Utah, where I continued my BYU studies, I sometimes wore a long sleeved flannel dress when I most missed him because I joked the frumpy flannel made me unattractive to other suitors and, therefore, more likely to be around and single when Ryan returned two years later. (There were few suitors.) Ryan, the boy I married a year after he came home, when we were both barely twenty-two; the child I married when I was a child, the child with whom I created a child, then another child, then another child.
We lived in a suburban home in an accidental Utah town I never planned to stay in near a hobbled creek. We walked along that creek with our kids during all seasons, watched the way it rushed, gleamed, trickled, and froze. We made our kids German pancakes on Sunday mornings, perfected the recipe until we got it just right, and we knew it was just right by the way our second daughter, Eleanor, smiled. We sat near each other on lawn chairs, watched our first child Lydia sprint down the soccer field with long dirty blonde hair and without hair ties, and he listened to me remark yet again, “Why doesn’t she wear hair ties?” To which he nodded again without saying, “You always say that, you don’t need to say it again.” Sometimes our family shout-sang lyrics made up on the spot around the kitchen counter, stared into each other’s faces while we sang these lyrics until we belly laughed. This is what we had created, and a shitload of mismanaged tantrums and rebellions, and I didn’t want it anymore.
I had grown up seeing many painful and boringgg lives everywhere I looked. I used to scan older faces, trying to find proof of their aliveness, of sparks that ignited, but didn’t also burn, then engulf them into ash. I rarely found the fire I craved, except in books and movies and my own head leaned against the car window. So to find myself at middle-age, living an unexceptional and un-book life, I became exceptionally disappointed. If fire was something you got or did not get, the go getter I was was gonna get me some before the shame of a discontented life got to my marrow.
An internal soundtrack played as I walked away from the life I had lived so far, toward open land along the edge of the sea. I took my wedding ring off because, unlike Ryan, I no longer believed in institutions that decided what is and what isn’t–I declared myself unmarried! I booked a plane ticket to England for my birthday because I craved, I suppose, water and wings. And also a big chunk of our shared savings before we’d have to split it.
So much of my life didn’t feel like my own as a wife and a now stay-at-home mother, and it was only recently when I discovered (through a therapy assignment to list at least two memories for each year of my life) that my life did not feel like my own even before I married or had children. This was not just a perspective, but an evolved belief in how one forms a sense of self. One must have the physical and psychological safety to explore what makes up who we are: our bodies, our thoughts, our feelings, our needs, our passions, our values, our faith or lack of it, etc. Mormon dogma, which I had been born into and immersed in for thirty plus years, instilled an omnipresent fear of a father god who could create hell for me if I was not particular about who I became. Who I was, what I was supposed to do and be, and what I shouldn’t do and be had been revealed by god through his Mormon leaders, and I believed them.
To know who I was and what I was meant to do, I believed for a long time, was a “blessing.” I didn’t have to wander in order to find a promised land. I had been born onto it. It never occurred to me until I tried to uproot my whole life that the exploration itself might be the blessing I never received, never realized I needed. Turns out I still need space to stretch out and time to taste the fruit of many trees.
Because I was a girl, Mormonism said I was a soon-to-be wife and mother, and that a mother was an exceptional being in a world of beings and creatures, a sort of Christ thing who gave up her body and time and “worldly” desires for her children. And so I set out on a trail already paved for me. So many had labored with their hands and sweat to form this smooth, refined stone path; how could I not be grateful for its ease?
I met Ryan during our first week of college when we were both eighteen. We became what they said we already were, the only thing we were meant to be, which is another way of saying, the only thing we could be, or else. He left on an LDS mission. I wrote to him. I dated other guys, but waited for him. I married him when he came back. Three years later we had our first baby weeks after his last volleyball game, weeks after he graduated with a degree in teaching, which he hated. He figured out how to be the main breadwinner. Then we had two more babies.
There are many gifts I received from my Mormon upbringing, including the opportunity to explore spirituality and scripture as poetry and a tight-knit community. Sometimes I wake up remembering my childhood congregation, the way I felt so known and loved by many kind people. Oh the way we sang! Our Christmas parties! I want this for my children. But it is Mormon dogma, which coerces the identities and lives and livelihoods of those in the congregation that I cannot excuse or have compassion for. The self, a pearl of greater price, our way of thinking and feeling and interacting with the world and communities around us, is possibly the only real thing that is ours to claim. Essential parts of myself were butchered out of me like they are out of so many born into or manipulated into dogmatic systems or ideologies. It is only now that I am opening a freezer door, defrosting the meaty parts of myself that could have been, that can only be if they survive the freezer burn. Some meat, it turns out, can never be restored.
My life, my identity were not over, but how much time did I have left? My little brother, after all, died at the age of thirty. On the one year anniversary of his death, I kicked Ryan out of our house the first time. If there was only so much of a life to live, I refused to live with anyone who made me feel worse than I already did.
To face your one life only to discover a life of fear and avoidance when you always thought you were brave. To discover that the thing you’ve feared and invested so much in protecting yourself from all your days is nowhere to be found, probably never existed, most likely is a lie, a manipulation. To discover that so much of what you created out of your life is not so beautiful in the afternoon light, even at times ugly and undesirable, a Dorian Gray sort of thing. You were given acrylics in someone else’s favorite colors. Residual paint sticks to your underarm like a thorn.
Has your whole life so far been merely discovering who you are not? You know what you want to flee from, but do you know what you want to flee toward? Many will ask you this accusingly, as if not knowing is a choice you set out to make. As a mother of three, will there be a way around and in between everyone else’s desires and needs and potentials to find what it is that you, just you, want to be? That’s the thing about parenting. Your life, your self happens to you while you try to foster lives and selves for your children. You hand them whatever scissors, paint, glue, paper you can find around the house. You sit at the table to join them only to find scraps. Perhaps you should have sorted the materials better, left some for yourself, guarded the supplies from their sticky hands. You thought there would be enough, afterall, this is what everyone seemed to say, that you could have it all, the world is your oyster. But this is what’s left of whatever you had to begin with. What will you make? Or rather more precisely, what can you make?
I never felt so simultaneously grateful to still be alive, and devastated over the life that seemed to have merely happened to me despite all my deliberations.
Grief looks down a hall of what ifs and closed and closing doors. Grief is the residual heartache after stumbling upon absence. Grief is an empty room with empty bookshelves and a trash can overflowing with ripped out pages. Grief is the thing that looks you in the eyes, sees the reflection of an imagined crackling fire, a colorful gallery wall, an embroidered book stitched in gold; grief is the thing that tears open your plans, your blueprint. Grief is a way to see clearly what it is you want, what you long for, but it is also the thing that in the end says no.
And so I hold this tender organ called a heart, though some call it a soul or an identity or your one wild and precious life, massage the pieces together and knead them like bread, like Friday night pizza dough for a movie night in. I oil and incense it, this heart, this life that has so far been, sprinkle in all the holey places with homegrown herbs. I wrap the heart in white linen, let it warm, and hope for it to rise in the coming day.
2
I was seven years old when I found the small, dying ground squirrel in the field. I picked her up with bare hands before I learned to fear germs, and laid her on the lap of my white dress, the dress I was supposed to wear for my eight-year-old baptism, but didn’t. The blood shimmered through the squirrel’s brown fur and stained that dress. We never could get the stain all the way out.
Our golden retrievers, Mose and Allie, often found ground squirrels and rabbits in the five acres surrounding the home my parents rented for only two years of my childhood, but which spans a much longer time in my memory and formative years. The dogs had once come home with their cheeks bulging from a morning hunt. I pried open Mose’s clenched jaw, and reached down the back of his throat and pulled out a baby bunny, then another, his teeth scraping my forearm as I pulled the bunnies out. Allie, too, harbored baby bunnies in her mouth until I wrenched them out of her, a total of four baby bunnies and my skinny arm covered in saliva and blood.
In a moment of adrenaline, my mother, witnessing the motherless bunnies and our distress, ran to the coat closet and retrieved a fur coat she had inherited from a relative, a fur coat still encased in plastic at the time to protect the fur from fading or tearing. She cut off the arm of the coat, a rich chocolate-colored rabbit fur--and emerged as our hero. My siblings and I placed the fur skin in a cardboard box, then the baby bunnies, who we later named Peter, James, John, and Luke–my mom’s idea, which we enthusiastically supported. We nursed them for days with milk bottles, but all, except one, Luke, eventually died.
Luke’s left eye was red with blood like a bulging overripe tomato, so it surprised us that of all the bunnies, this was the one who survived. My mom told us we had to let him back into the wild. I appointed myself to do this, and carried him out to a grass corner near the pond, near our neighbor’s fence. Who knows where Luke went after that or how long he lived. Most likely he did not live long.
Yes, I reasoned that day in the field, the dogs had probably gotten to this dying ground squirrel too, then abandoned her to die in clumps of dirt and spindly grass. I held the squirrel in both hands, held her trembling body until she died. I had sensed she was dying as her breathing and shaking slowed, and so I stayed with her, sung to her the way my youngest daughter Liv currently does–songs of improvised melodies and lyrics to fit meandering thoughts and sudden observations. (Just this morning I overheard Liv singing an unpredictable pattern of notes in her room while she dressed, “And when I wear this sweater to school, I will be thankfulllll!” )
I buried the dead squirrel in the dirt I found her in. I’m sure now I did not bury her deep enough and that the coyotes or the dogs could have gotten to her again. But I did not know these things then, and marked her grave with a stick drawn image I can no longer recall. I did not return home until dusk, when my mom noticed the stain, then tried to wash it out, but in the end, never could.
3
I had met Ryan after a childhood of unrequited love. I had never loved a boy, other than a best friend who did not love me that way, and an eighth grade crush I wasn’t allowed to date because I wasn’t yet sixteen and because he was Catholic. My dad had told me often not to date anyone I couldn’t marry in a Mormon temple or I’d feel a lot of sorrow, too much of it, and then he told me stories of non-Mormon women he loved but in the end, chose not to marry, and how it broke both of their hearts. I carried with me a fear of the inevitable sorrow that would follow any love or crush I felt for a non-Mormon boy.
Ryan was Mormon, though, and when we began sitting by each other on the floor at the back of the biology lecture room, he drew a tiny bug, barely the size of a peppercorn, on the open page of my textbook. The bug was so miniscule, just like his handwriting, and I laughed out of surprise and delight. A true talent, this smallness! I texted him. He returned my texts, then calls, then invited me to sled at his grandparents’ cabin up in the Utah mountains during the fall when the aspens, oaks, and maples light up in yellows, oranges, and reds. Later, he held my hand in a dollar theater while we watched one of the many awful superman movies, a casual wave-like move, the way his arm and hand rolled over into mine. Easy was the way I described us then, the way I loved him, the way I felt.
One evening he kissed me outside the back dorm entrance under a single lightbulb and a night sky, and I felt my body melt like a grilled cheese sandwich. Though I would later date and kiss other boys while Ryan was gone on his mission, I remembered the way Ryan’s kisses melted me. He was my kissing point of reference, and no one compared.
We loved each other at a time when I thought Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” was romantic. I played the song for him in his Toyota pickup truck, the truck we used to make out in until four in the morning. I thought the lyrics–“I’d rather live with him in his world, than live without him in mine”--were nailing this thing called love on the head. Giving up your desires, sacrificing for your lover, this love was more real than any convenient, easy love. This love was also the only love I had known or seen, a love I believed required a woman, particularly, to decenter herself, to resign from her position as sun, to instead become a rotating planet around a new sun, a man.
When I decided to leave my husband years later, it was because I had found our shared universe desolate, a place where I saw him as a flickering, burned out sun that could not warm me. Loving him on patriarchal terms, or rather, on the terms I imagined he wanted, which was less of me and what I wanted, and more of what I guessed he wanted because he never said, left me embittered and resentful. I had handed him and patriarchy the authorship of my life and love, asked him permission for an identity, and resented his silence, which I interpreted as no’s. I resented the way he so casually witnessed my deprivation.
Later, after children were born, our marriage waned as more demands were made of us by children who needed. To offer to others that which you so deeply desire but do not receive is to pick at the wound. To see yet not be seen. To care yet not be cared for. To put to sleep and yet not sleep. All I wanted was to experience reprieve with Ryan and our kids. Peace. Fulfillment. Joy. Rest. Yet these two desires–peace and their company–were often at odds. I too rarely experienced both at the same time. I chose them, time and again, though often reluctantly, often begrudgingly, and then I shamed myself for my reluctance.
I didn’t know how to discern my needs because I hadn’t seen anyone acknowledge them who wasn’t also a little coo coo–aka the kind of people who ask for too much. I didn’t know how to ask for things I could technically go without. “Are you okay?” is a question that means little to anyone who has no idea what okay is supposed to feel like. Sure, I was okay. I would always be okay whenever anyone asked me, even later in the jaws of postpartum depression, even after my brother died, not because I was lying, but because I was unable to recognize when my own pain was “too much.” What was too much besides collapse? I was still walking, wasn’t I?
A week after Eleanor was born, I had to be hospitalized for a uterine infection for two days and two nights. Only then, with confirmation from a doctor that in days past I would have died from this, did I allow myself to sit in a hospital bed with nurses bringing food and water to me, feeling as if I were sneaking off from my mother duties to vacation away from my newborn after an exhausting labor and delivery. I felt guilty about all of this, as if I could walk out of the hospital room if need be, but was selfishly indulging in healing.
More often than I care to admit, I felt I could shout out, “GODDAMMIT!” and hurl some kind of dish at a wall. “Look!” I imagined saying to Ryan and our girls while pointing to the dent in the wall and the shattered glass at the foot. “You see? That is your mother’s inner life!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
In 1960, “almost every major news journal was using the word ‘trapped’ to describe the feelings of the American housewife,” writes Coontz in The Way We Never Were. “Redbook’s editors put out a call for responses from young mothers about why they felt trapped. They received 24,000 replies.”
It was not a plate I wanted to shatter, but this invisible cage.
It seemed as if all other mothers were more fulfilled than me, didn’t have as many other needs, not like mine. Sure, they needed time to sleep, eat, etc. But I needed that and seemingly so much more. Like regular escapes, not just from kids, but from motherhood itself, from wifery, from life with all its obligations and irritations. I needed time to ask questions, explore myself and the world. I needed what I still believe should be a universal right: the ability to finish a goddamn thought.
The need for emotional or psychological healing (let alone physical healing) still is so often seen as a character weakness, a personal flaw or ineptness, or something more sinister, like sin. To ask for alleviation is to admit your own discontentment or depravity. I hated so much of the monotony and the boredom of caretaking, and then felt unholy because of it. Feeling, then judging those feelings became my trap. If I didn’t enjoy my divine purpose, what did that say about me? The problem wasn’t the dogma or the belief. The problem was me.
Each day of motherhood is addressed one moment at a time–one sock, one button, one spoonful, one swipe of Desitin down the butt crack. One moment is manageable, survivable, which is why depression and grief can slowly seep into your cracks and sockets without your awareness or alarm, until you’re soaked through and through, unable to move your legs from the bed to the floor. When my first therapist suggested I had postpartum depression six months after Lydia was born, I didn’t believe him because I could genuinely enjoy parts of mothering enough to still move my legs at the time. I ended up applying for a teaching job soon after, and “surprisingly,” after reading and talking with adults and stimulating my mind uninterrupted, the depression subsided, became manageable. I wouldn’t truly understand my own postpartum depression and distorted thinking until I could no longer get out of bed ten years later after my third and last baby was born during the beginning of Covid lockdowns. Only from the familiar cycle and repetition of an experienced mother did I recognize it. Ah, here it is again, that depression.
Many philosophers believe the pleasure of our existence outweighs our pain and suffering. But the South African philosopher David Benatar, born in the 1960s and who I imagine personally witnessed pain and upheaval, argues that the absence of pain is preferable to the presence of pleasure. The more I mothered amidst fluctuating hormones, chronic pain and grief, the more I sided with Benatar. I craved merely equanimity.
This is what I do with threatening things: I tear them down. I left my marriage and searched for my own universe, a place I could burn and glow and protect myself from more pain with flaming comets. All those late night Catan games with Ryan had prepared me for settling on uninhabited land. I was the Catan Queen, wasn’t I? I could also be the queen of my life, shout-singing, “This is the longest road!!!!” as I walked out the door, winning by two unexpected points.
4
The mythical creature called the selkie, half-seal, half-woman, lives in both water and land. When she approaches land, she sheds her seal skin, and appears as human. In the myth told by Leslie Marchiano, a group of young selkies who have arrived on land, shed their seal skins and dance late into the night around a fire. A man from the forest sees them and desires to have them. So he takes the seal skin of the youngest selkie and waits for all the others to return to the ocean. The young selkie looks all over for her seal skin but cannot find it. And so the man, having carefully crafted this moment, approaches her and offers to take her home with him. She is both saddened by the loss of her seal skin, and grateful to have this kind man and a place to live. The man hides the seal skin, and plans to never reveal the true nature of their union.
The young selkie marries the man and they have children. Because she no longer possesses her seal skin to return to the sea, she enjoys this time with her family. She keeps house and feeds and nurtures her children. But one day, her child–and I will suggest that this child is a daughter–discovers a seal skin in the attic. She brings the skin to her mother. “What’s this?” the daughter asks. The mother sees the seal skin, registers that this skin had not been lost, but stolen, that she’d been tricked into this home and life by something that looked like comfort. Her being here was not an honest choice as a result of an honest offering, but a lie and a cage.
Furious, and with an expression like stone, the mother grabs the skin from her daughter, walks out of the house without saying a word, out through the forest to the edge of the sea. She puts on the seal skin, and without looking back, she dives into the sea never to return ashore again.
“Ere long,” Ember Grant writes of the selkie who returned to the water, “sounds of joy, and laughter were heard far out amongst the billows, and they grew fainter and fainter until they were heard no more. The moon rose high and fair, and shone over the wide solitary ocean, and whither the [selkies] had gone no one could tell.”
5
I recently stumbled upon a photo of me holding my firstborn Lydia when she was less than a month old. In the photo, we sit on a second-hand tan leather couch Ryan’s grandparents gave us. The couch sits against a pastel yellow wall, a soft, gentle color like the three-day-old chicks we bought last summer, though my memories and experiences of motherhood do not feel soft or gentle. I had picked that hopeful color for the walls when we first moved into that townhome, but if I were to choose a paint color now to describe the reality of my pregnancy and later pregnancies, and postpartum depression, I would hover my hand over the gray and black paint chips, settling on bluish-black, dark and sore at the center like a basketball bruise.
I look like a child in this picture, this mother, and this is what sticks out most to me now, more than Lydia’s salamander arms and legs stringing out, or her alien eyes that look up at me from my lap. I look down at her tenderly, and I look like her older sister, like I’m babysitting, or playing make believe.
I was twenty-four when I became pregnant with Lydia, only two years younger than the average age of first-time U.S. mothers today, and a decade older than some of my ancestors and some first-time mothers in rural areas of the U.S. now. But years matter less than maturity or self-realization. Though I had thought myself ready to hitch myself to Ryan at twenty-two, I had never considered what Leslie James summarized so simply in her essay on the beginning of motherhood and the end of her marriage:
“Don’t get married if you don’t mean it. Don’t get married if you are only capable of meaning something for a week, a month, a year, five years.”
Though I was deliberate about when and what kind of guy I would marry for eternity–and I did believe him to be Ryan–I never considered if marriage was something I could mean, something I was capable of meaning at my age and development. Yes, I was smart and thoughtful and scrappy, studying love and marriage and how to do it well for eternity–witnessing my parents’ marriage made me hyper-committed to creating a better one. But because a Mormon marriage was so central to my believed purpose and destiny, to everyone’s –Mormons believed– I believed I had within me all that was necessary to do it and enjoy it.
I married while I was still in college, the summer before my last semester. I had only recently entered the world of college life, including a world of budding critical thinking, evaluating research and bias and information that challenged my ways of thinking and interpreting the world. Later, after entering grad school, I became pregnant only a year after I began shyly teaching my first writing classes, presenting my own research, discussing topics with professors who still intimidated me, and speaking while grown adults listened to me. I wasn't used to being listened to for long periods of time or taken that seriously by anyone, really, especially without blushing.
At the time I entered the college world at eighteen, I had only recently entered the heterosexual dating world, a world where I learned to entice and appease young Mormon boys. Figuring out how to comfortably exist within my own body was something I was still learning how to do as one of many girls who grew up in the 90s hating their bodies into smallness, girls of mothers who dieted and encouraged their daughters to diet and dwell in hunger with them. Self-denial was normal because chosen hunger was normal.
Then I entered the world of heterosexual marriage and power dynamics and unequal labor, which writers like Jane Ward have called “the tragedy of heterosexual relationships.” I had only just taken my first women’s literature class where I encountered feminist writers like Octavia Butler and Judith Butler. I was discovering new topics I liked to talk about, like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and the nameless women in The Book of Mormon, or how an entire Sunday at church could go on without a single woman attending, but how no service could begin without a man and his priesthood authority. I had never thought of myself as a sexual being until just a couple of years before I conceived, when I first married and began a life with sex for the first time on my wedding night at a Hilton in downtown Salt Lake City. I had never suffered serious repercussions for my choices either because I was young and young people have doors to open and close. Locks weren’t conceivable yet.
And yet I was also cognizant, unlike my mom when she first married, or when she conceived with her sixth and unintentional child. I was deliberate, unlike teenage girls who accidentally got impregnated. No, Ryan and I wanted each other, and then we tried for this baby, and won it first go around. This, I believed, meant I, we were ready. It turns out being cognizant of your choice to marry and mother isn’t the same thing as having a developed brain or identity, or enough of the environmental, physical, and psychological conditions to withstand the jolt of biochemical, physiological, and relational changes that marriage, pregnancy and childbirth can inflict on even the healthiest bodies and relationships.
I read recently that the average age for motherhood now in America is thirty-four. I was thirty-four and a mother of three alive babies and one dead baby when I began writing this essay. The thought of beginning interrupted nights now sounds excruciating, mostly because I am older now, but also because I've been a mother of four pregnancies and three children and I’m more tired at my age because of it.
The thought of what I may have done or who I may have become for the past decade prior to becoming a mother still sometimes hurts. There, the bruise again, right atop the sternum.
A best friend who I met at church when we were both seven came and visited me all the way from North Carolina. We skied. We ate. We watched silly TV shows and laughed late into the night. We said to each other, “It’s like we’re teenagers again, but real ones with real rebellions. Only we’re also sixty because of how old our bodies feel.”
We are teen mothers, though, and must be careful about our choices because our children are peeking in and spying on us.
6
When I cannot get the stain out of my daughter’s shirt, she asks me why I can’t get it out. What even is a stain, she asks, because these are the questions children ask, questions you never consider asking because the concepts are communal knowledge we all assume. My child reveals to me what it is I do not know.
Wikipedia tells me that “[s]tains primarily form when a substance is spilled onto a surface and the molecules are trapped inside the fibers and pores of the material. The spilled substance coats the underlying material and the newly formed stain reflects back light of its own color, which is how the stain becomes visible to the naked eye.”
An excerpt from a laundry magazine reads: “If the blood stains have been washed in hot water or put through the dryer, this could have set the stain and made them permanent. But, it's still worth giving the above steps a try. If this doesn't remove the stain entirely, it can still help to lighten the stain and make it less noticeable.”
7
No one saw me bumbling my way down the English countryside, almost, truly, breaking my ankles in Dr. Marten platform sandals. If they could, they would have been able to see me lost on google maps, tripping down hillside hedges I suspect were on private land. A “mile walk” to Stonehenge, my ass.
I’d walk one direction, trying to follow my spotty phone compass, only to have to turn around again and realign. No one would have been able to tolerate the clumsiness of this trip, no one, especially Ryan, especially my kids. But I could. With this much time to myself and my winging it ways, I found myself to be tolerable, enjoyable, hell, even preferable. The slowness, the confusion, the accumulating wrong turns and stops and reroutings, these were okay because I was okay just being around. I was okay not yet being there and arriving when I arrived, if I arrived.
I noticed a repeated sensation while I trekked, a habit, almost like a neural pathway that began in my mind then shivered down my body. Each time I took a wrong turn or arrived at a place unanticipated, I felt a cringe of foreboding. It was as if, upon realizing a mistake, I was expecting some kind of resistance that might prevent me from arriving at Stonehenge: “Why didn’t you plan this all out before?” I imagined Ryan saying. “This is taking too long,” I imagined my daughters saying. “I’m hot! I hate this. I hate you!!!!!!!!!”
I’d anticipate the disappointment and deflation that comes from accommodating another’s desire or need–to go potty, to get a snack, take a nap, take a work call. But when I let the cringe pass, let the imagined words slide off of me like shower water by reminding myself I was alone and pretty damn free, what remained was an uninterrupted desire like a blaring ruby in a dark museum room, my determination shining on it like a spotlight. I could let myself be pulled by this desire and will and no one, not Ryan, not any Mormon leader, not my parents, not my kids, not even a petty god could slice the line that pulled me to what it was that I and only I wanted. Despite how lengthy and very stupid this all was becoming (I saw myself like my dead brother would have seen it, imagined him jokingly saying “You’re an idiot!”), I was okay with it because I only had to deal with my own attitude about it. I knew I’d get there because no one else could stop me, complain to me, tell me this wasn’t something I could or should want. I knew I wanted it, and I’d walk till morning if I had to.
I was so often surrendering to my family’s interruptions and intolerances, their preferences and impatiences, which had resulted in my own frustration and rage. I preferred to push on through, to figure it out as I went. I was used to my own imperfection, my own moods, my own exhaustion. If I just had to manage myself, I knew how to. The tricky part was accommodating everyone else’s messy selves who didn’t seem to want anything I wanted.
For so long I had felt I was under a wooden table trying to cut through the table top when I yearned for a sky. For too long I had felt stuck at the entering point, stuck at the resistance of the wood, stuck at the first shavings of the table. I didn’t slice tables just to slice tables. I didn’t enjoy resistance for resistance’s sake. This seemed to be what my marriage and motherhood required, though. Drudgery. I kept sharpening my saw, strengthening my push and pull, hoping to break out into something worthwhile on the other side. A sky, crisp as the bite of an apple. The crunch of satisfaction like an anticipated orgasm. I was never bursting through to any sky, only into thicker wood.
“What is American motherhood but a series of provocations?” says Amanda Doyle while explaining a mother’s rage. That’s it. What is motherhood but a series of thwartations and incomplete ends? I had literally forgotten this way about me because it had been so long since I had the space and time to experience it–my drive and will that carried me to fruitful ends over the long savannahs of my childhood. Three hour gymnastics practices at 6am. Free throws right after the buzzer, the final clutch win. Up to serve in a volleyball game down by fourteen. I finished the essay, read the entire book, ran the tenth mile, painted the walls and the ceiling periwinkle as a fourteen-year-old (how my parents trusted me to do this on my own blows my mind). The GPA. The diplomas. The raise. The publication. This was not so much a vanity or a desperate need for accomplishment or external validation, but a lust and a drive to see things through to completion, to wholeness, which I felt incapable of suppressing. This drive still existed in me as a mother, but the ability to act on it, see it through, became often impossible while accommodating others and their differing staminas. This drive, this fire turned into a smoldering rage and an ashy depression.
I had forgotten what it was like to merely take steps. This step, then this step will lead to this foreseen, predictable thing. All you need to do is will yourself to step. All you need to do is work toward satisfaction. Motherhood, marriage, relationships required something more than this, and without any guaranteed end. I was wandering, retracing, redirecting without any promise that Stonehenge existed. After not seeing it for so long, I wondered if it even existed. What was all the sawing and sawdust for again? I was only dirtier. So I threw out the saw, and quit sawing.
8
I was seven months pregnant with Lydia, painting a white dandelion on what was to be her robin egg wall when I slipped and fell off a three step ladder onto my butt, sending shocks up my cervix. Had I killed my baby? For the first time since conception, I cried out of fear and concern, then immediately felt a swelling of shame. What was I doing painting on a ladder? Why couldn’t I be more careful for the baby?
I had suspected I was an incompetent person for much of my life, perhaps due to a misunderstood neurodivergent brain. Pregnancy added a layer of required foresight and restraint that felt additionally burdensome and inhibiting to the most basic of tasks, like deciding when to paint a room. Falling off ladders was more proof of my secret ineptitude, which was getting harder to hide. The problem, I was beginning to realize, was that my incompetence was now also reckless and irresponsible because it could harm the baby. I feared I could not keep myself in check for my own daughter, a fear that has lingered since.
Since conception, the fetus could not grow, could not evolve, let alone survive without taking up more space in my body and brain and life. And yet, I also couldn’t disappear without annihilating the fetus. I was a girl raised in a country and religion that had much to say about how to clothe my body, hide my body, configure my body, reign with my body. Marriage and the childrearing that followed became a balancing act–how to exist enough to let the baby and family thrive, but only so much, not too much, so as not to harm them? E.g. Caffeine?
What had once been simple preferences were now moral predicaments. How to honor my value of independence without overstepping my other values of responsibility, and not harming others, like a parasitical baby? Finding balance between my values and needs, and the baby’s often paralyzed or overwhelmed me. I became a pendulum swinging back and forth between reluctant abstinence and negligent indulgence. Don’t eat any sushi. Whatever, eat the sushi and the deli meat. Don’t drink caffeine. Whatever, drink more of it, and every morning. To care also seemed to evoke a hyper vigilance and worry I often witnessed and judged unfairly in other mothers. Chilllllllllll, ladies. I didn’t want to be a bother like them, even to myself.
In colonial times, men were solely credited with providing all the necessary material to create life. Women were only containers of men’s pure offerings (hint: sperm). “Even though a woman was considered useless in making a baby, she was ascribed considerable power to damage the one a man generated in her," writes historian Agnes R. Howard. Like early Christian interpretations of biblical Eve, a woman could only offer her children a downfall. If, like Eve, one bite could create the downfall of an entire human race, might as well eat the whole fucking fruit now and satiate my hunger. Though I did not think of myself in explicitly Eden terms, here was my offering to my 21st century baby: A fall off a ladder.
Accompanying each pregnancy was a centuries-old voice that told me I was too selfish or self-interested to be a good enough mother, let alone a good mother. I see now how I felt shame about suffocating in the plastic bag I had been handed about womanhood and motherhood, which was too often the suffocation of too many dreams, desires, and choices. I found myself tying a plastic bag within a plastic bag and blaming myself for struggling to breathe, if only I craved less air.
When I arrived at the hospital to make sure I hadn’t harmed the baby from my fall, I sat in the hospital bed hooked to a machine monitoring the baby’s heart. The heart beat was there and steady. Relief poured over me as I vowed to be more careful and cautious for the baby. My relief for the baby surprised me, as if my feelings alone were proof I was a good or bad mother. When push came to shove, I did want her safe and alive, her little heart beating. This was a low, but necessary bar if I wanted to be a mother, I knew this, but for the time being, I had finally met it. I cared.
9
As each fetus grew, I would begin to feel claustrophobic in my shared body and shared life, though it began to feel less like a shared body and life, and more like the fetus’ body and life. Suddenly, so many people concerned themselves with protecting the baby, apparently from me. “Watch yourself for the baby,” they’d say to me when watching me walk on ice. “Take it easy for the baby,” they’d say to me after workouts. ***cue Elaine Benes, please.*** “Ya don’t wanna deliver early now, for the baby!” Ha! Ha! Ha! Gifts I received were for the baby. Conversations were about the baby. A relative once placed both his hands on my budding belly and shook it like a magic eight ball. ‘Hiya, baby!’”
These were often intended as kind gestures, gestures to recognize and connect, ones–minus the belly shaking–I would appreciate during my later pregnancies when few seem to care about your pregnancies or children anymore. But I was young, afraid of disappearing in a world I was just beginning to forge myself into, and everyone seemed more eager than I to witness my excitement and enthusiasm about the baby, as if my attitude alone were a crucial piece of evidence that what is required of mothers and childbearers isn’t often excruciating, but fun! A little toy in an already happy meal!
Out of defiance and a desire to control something of my life, like my own body, I continued to run as exercise until the last few weeks of my first two pregnancies, the baby bouncing excruciatingly on my nerves, sending electric shocks up my vagina. A family member once praised me for staying so active well into my third trimester. Little did she know I was doing this because I didn’t want to accommodate the baby more than I already was, and I didn’t want to be fat, something then I only saw as a fault, uncontrolled, undisciplined. Fatness was a quality my mother and my husband’s grandmother warned me about–the baby weight that is so hard to lose, which, they told me, they were still trying to lose decades later. I still gained weight, though, no matter how much I tried not to, always twice as much than the recommended weight gain– “Don’t eat for two or gain more than twenty-six pounds”--the books and pamphlets seemed to highlight incessantly as if this, this were the important takeaway. I’d ruminate about this while eating goldfish crackers to temporarily subdue the nausea.
The misery of each pregnancy broke me in, and I eventually morphed into a cliché myself, like a weathered shoe. When people asked how I was feeling and I told them the truth, which was that I felt despair from the vomiting and nausea and heartburn and weight gain and depression and lack of sleep and a sinking terror that none of it could be managed, I could see their discomfort about the idea that growing a baby could ruin a mother’s body or mind. Sure governments, healthcare or lack of it, religions, jobs, cultural and family systems could make a mother’s life hard, but not Mother Nature herself? That seemed too cruel, a betrayal. So I began mothering them by lying: “I’m doing better now, though. It’ll all be worth it for the baby,” what a pitiful thing to say, I thought, as I watched the silhouette of the non cliché person I once was drift away as if on a kite string.
Some people, however, refused to acknowledge or accommodate my perinatal or postpartum needs, like the BYU admin who wouldn’t withdraw me from an extra elective class without penalty because I was violently ill from pregnancy. I was told pregnancy was not a valid health exemption. So I took a W on my transcript instead. After I was employed as a visiting faculty member, I discovered, after accidentally getting pregnant with Eleanor while on a birth control pill, that BYU did not offer maternity leave, let alone paid maternity leave, for people with my job title. As (apparently?) one of the first female employees to officially inquire about this policy in the English department—at least, according to the dean at the time—the surprised man offered to lessen my teaching load, but informed me that I would still need to pay out of pocket for a sub if I chose to do so, as if work leave to push a baby out of your vagina were an option rather than a necessity.
Pregnancy and mothering were and still are so commonplace in Utah and Mormonism, that both are often seen as an expectation and a redundancy not worthy of accommodation. When a relative stopped by unexpectedly and saw me lying in my bed near a vomit bowl, the drapes drawn, the lights off because light and movement made me more nauseous, he *joked* that my hibernation was the real thing that was making me miserable, that I should get outside, move around, that it’d be good for me. Perhaps he threw open the drapes, or perhaps I imagined it. He wasn’t saying, “Get the fuck up, pussy,” and yet he was. I felt the tension of two clashing views of feminism collide inside me: (1) Was I a bad ass girl boss bitch who could get just as much done as anyone else not pregnant or without children? Or (2) Was I a pregnant woman with specific needs who needed accommodation instead of blame for disrupting the way non-pregnant people do things?
The person who seemed to acknowledge me and the baby the least, though, was Ryan. At times I felt I needed to remind him of my expanding presence because he did not offer adequate acknowledgement on his own. “You know I’m pregnant with our baby, right? The baby we tried [so hard for one month] for?” It was as if because everyone else noticed the baby in me, he didn’t have to.
There was no putting his ear to my belly, no whispering of songs. He was still tone deaf after all, pregnancy didn’t change that. There was no, “Can I get you something?” from him. Instead, I’d beat him to it, “Uh, could you get me a bean and cheese burrito?” to which he’d offer what seemed to be a perturbed yes rather than an enthusiastic one. He wasn’t thinking up names on his own, except for when I pushed him. “Lauren,” he said once and then again, and I liked that he liked the simplicity and plainness of the name, even if I did not want the name. But it was as if because he offered a name, it meant I should acquiesce. I didn’t. Never mind his last name he seemed entitled to, or the baby showers he did not feel required to attend. Baby things seemed to be categorically assigned to me without discussion. He and the other men in our families poked fun at my request that he attend the baby shower. Was this baby not his too? He came, even if reluctantly, though I was annoyed again at his reluctance.
I was too often sick to go out to dinner, sit in a theater, work out, hike, camp, play, have hot thrusting sex, and so we needed to find other ways to connect outside of the only ways we had so far. We didn’t know how to say “I feel so far away from you” or “I’m beginning to suspect you’re an asshole” without hurting each other’s feelings.
Ryan seemed adverse to my daydreaming–my imagined future life and lifestyle with me and the baby, and instead poked holes in my fantasies as if they were personal threats: “So how are we going to afford a cottage home on a cliff by the sea?” What I interpreted then as opposition to my yearnings was, I suspect now, the burden he felt of financially making those dreams come true, and he worried he would fail. As a Mormon boy raised to not only be a provider, but the sole provider, our family’s economic survival and flourishment rested on his shoulders, and he was still a student athlete without a job or source of income. This baby in me was real not just because it kicked my nerves and made me vomit up my entrails, but because it cost $4,000 after insurance.
And so, in our confusion and what we believed to be our segregated burdens, we pivoted away, rather than toward each other. This was the beginning of loneliness in our marriage. I grew larger and more visible while simultaneously feeling less seen by the one I thought was supposed to want to see me the most. Take up less space, he seemed to be telling me while all I could do was grow larger, a looming threat to both our childhoods.
The truth is there wasn’t anything my husband or anyone could or could not say about the baby or our future that could satisfy me because I was unsatisfied with it. Each pregnancy and the subsequent postpartum depressions amidst my new life of mothering, which catered to every whim and mood and need of a helpless infant and child at all times of the day, which required little of my preferred intellectualism, and every bit of physical, emotional, psychological prowess I could muster, tossed me into an accumulating tornado of chaos. I could not control or escape the boredom and suffering in my new life, but instead had to endure it because it impacted me on a cellular level at all times of the day. I had hated pregnancy and a whole lot of mothering, and now, it seemed, I also hated my husband.
10
When I arrived at Stonehenge, I jokingly commented on how underwhelming it was. “My own kids could make that with their blocks!” I said to neighboring tourists. “What a joke!” I pretended to be an unimpressed American. We laughed. I was actually here, and how I got here was embarrassing and foolish and hard. And so I was also triumphant.
A caravan of campers parked along a public road that ran along Stonehenge, land owned by the state and available to all. Some guy in his twenties with long unwashed hair began shout-singing Blink 182’s “I Miss You,” a song I used to have stuck in my head in high school for an entire year. “Don’t waste your time on me, I’m already a voice inside your head,” he screamed. It was all so unholy, all so un-magnificent, a moment and place so unraveled, disheveled, dirty, silly, stupid. I adored it.
I stared at the weirdly arranged stones in the afternoon sun amidst the caroling caravan. I can’t remember how I got back to my hotel room because there was no public or Uber transportation nearby. It was as if I was so caught up in each glorious, ankle-breaking step I wasn’t thinking about the whole picture. A life is both all the steps and each step, after all, and because of it, all I remember is walking down a quiet road in trickling rain, passing a field of yellow rapeseed. I think I caught a bus in a small neighborhood? The rest blurs.
Later that evening, at the recommendation of an Uber driver, I went to a karaoke bar down the street. I drank a few cokes and I protected my cup the way I would have protected myself from all the stories about womanhood and wifehood and motherhood if I had only known I was in danger. I danced with locals in my embroidered jean jacket I bought at a second hand store in Canterbury. I took it off, revealing a red top and a shoulder tattoo. A bunch of army men stationed there cheered and twirled me, sang in my ear while we all danced until closing.
Later, in Dover, after walking along the coast for hours, I stopped by a loud pub and met a group of young girls who fawned over me. “You’re getting a divorce?” they said. “Good! Marriage is a hoax!” And I agreed with them. “You’re so pretty!” they said. We hugged. We danced. We drank. I told the smallest one to not let a man talk to her like her boyfriend talked to her. She said okay. We tagged each other on Instagram. I think about them still, and laugh.
So this is what could have been. A life of less fear, less avoidance, less hunching. A life of connecting with more screwed up people, beautiful, vaping, and laughing people. A life with more of me, dancing in dirty sandals and blistered heels, right here, like this.
11
Before my last baby was born, my doctor wondered out loud if the fetus that was supposed to be showing up on the screen was a fetus at all. He hoped it wasn’t an ectopic pregnancy or a blighted ovum, a type of miscarriage where an egg gets fertilized but does not grow into a fetus. In utter confusion, I responded, “How could I be barfing all this time if I weren’t pregnant?” Not until he sent me elsewhere with better equipment that confirmed on a screen that there was no fetus in my uterus could I even comprehend that I was not going to have another baby anytime soon. What do you mean I went through two months of this suffering and not only did I not get a reward for it, but I also got something worse? Disappointment.
I cried in the bathroom before that second ultrasound with better equipment, before I found out it was a blighted ovum and not an ectopic pregnancy, because if it were an ectopic pregnancy, I might not be able to have more children. Though I already had two children at home waiting for me, I cried at the idea that I may not be able to have more of them, more of the things I regularly complained about and still complain about. I cried because I had been complaining about the pregnancy all this time, but when it was taken from me, I felt deprived, then bereaved. The alternative to frustration, rage, exhaustion was just that: emptiness. A white chasm on a black screen, no beating heart. No heart at all.
You could call it entitlement or naiveté, the way I so ardently believed in the concept “You reap what you sow,” as if suffering and hard work–like surviving weeks of nausea and barfing–guarantees you reward. If not a certain reward, at least some thing rather than its absence.
The thing is to have something to love, something to complain about, something to escape and then return to and embrace, something to hold onto on your knees in the grass. We grieve what we lose; we lose what we once gained.
The thing I’m talking about, of course, is a life.
12
After I returned home from my ten-day, Eat-Pray-Love trip to England, after Ryan and I had bickered over text, confirming my decision to divorce his ass, Ryan showed up at the house for an arranged visit. That’s when he discovered our dog had gotten to the chickens.
“The chickens are dead,” he texted me after walking into our backyard through the gate, his first text to me after days of mutual silence. I ran to the balcony overlooking the yard and found him walking among four half-dead chickens scattered about the lawn and disfigured, their wings and crowed feet sticking out in sharp, juniper branch ways.
The largest pullet who we called Reba because of her red feathers, bled on her side in the grass mouthing and gurgling while wounds from the dog’s teeth exuded blood. Eleanor ran out to the yard, gasping, panicking, while I sprinkled hose water onto the chicken’s wounds. She was dying, and I wanted her to suffer as little as possible. Eleanor screamed for me to call an ambulance. I told her it was too late, we had to help her die more comfortable.
I dripped water into her beak. I stroked her head until her neck went limp and her beak quit moving.
To rear a child, like a chicken, is to confront death. Mothers, historically, were ever pregnant, though only two-three children on average would live past infancy. Only in our modern history have advances in medicine allowed humans to carry more babies to term, allow surrogates or adoptive parents to carry more babies to term, and raise kids through to adulthood, though pregnancy still remains an immense evolutionary risk for all women.
If carrying or birthing a child doesn’t result in their death or yours, to raise a child is to practice confronting death’s inevitability. A parent must surrender to the constantness of time and accident and sickness and an entirely new stage of human development, like a whole new wardrobe now in size 4T. Perhaps this is why parenting consists not only of awe and beauty, but also terror and mourning. To love little bodies and brains who grow and morph and contort and change so quickly and continuously stretches and rips wide a heart. Like a war veteran, witnessing my own memories sometimes evokes a grief I am unable or unwilling to fully face. I haven’t enjoyed enough of my life as a mother or the lives of my children, of Lydia’s entire life so far–she turned ten this past summer–, which happened simultaneously too fast and too slow, like an hourglass trickling sand until you notice the top half is now empty and the bottom half full. When did it stop? Always when you weren’t looking.
Perhaps this is why so many parents and invested caregivers have a hard time articulating the pain and guilt which accompanies child rearing because it is only after you look that you realize the sand is gone, never to trickle again, for there really is a last ninth birthday, a last size two shoe, a last pronunciation of swimsuit as “swim soup,” or watermelon as “water lemon.” You do not notice your child’s last pronunciation of l’s as w’s until she pronounces “Wydia” as “Lydia”, so it is only after the end that you are able to recognize the end you did not appreciate at all or enough. This is the kind of grief parents must accustom themselves to, of these regular recognitions of loss, of missed moments forced upon them regularly and with penetrating clarity. Underneath the crusty scab of joyful parenting is a nerve end raw and tattered, a tenderness and a fear of our own fragility and inadequacy–how can anyone take this all in? It makes sense that caring for children cannot always engage or soften us. Sometimes we yell, scream, close our eyes, check out, plug our ears. Sometimes we flee.
13
The Sunday morning we planned to explain to our three daughters who are not idiots that we were going to divorce, I sat on my parents’ porch overlooking Utah Valley where I first met Ryan. This was not sentimental for me, but merely a fact: seventeen years ago. I began writing out what I would say to my daughters, explaining why their dad and I were divorcing. I sent it to a close friend who is a daughter of a twice-divorced mother. She gave me some feedback. I edited my draft. I let my mom read it. Then sent it to Ryan. He said to edit out the part where we were choosing this, “Because I’m not choosing this,” he said. I edited the draft so it said that only I was choosing this.
I read that draft over and over. I went for a walk, which alleviated none of the angst and sickness I was experiencing. I sat down again. I can’t do this, I thought. No, I can. I just don’t want to. I refuse to.
I believe what I wrote even now, though I’ve since burned that letter. I didn’t want my girls to see it, true as it was. I knew they could be okay as children of divorced or non-divorced parents, just like I knew I’d arrive at Stonehenge if I just kept going. I just didn’t want to give this suffering to them. I knew suffering too well, and I also knew the life I had with them and their father was good enough. More than I wanted to jump in the sea and swim to an unknown place, I knew I didn’t want to give this to them even more. I could create something better away from their dad, but I could also create something better with their dad because he was ever willing, it’s one of the reasons I married him. It was up to me.
Our one shared house with our shared dogs and surviving chickens and what were then alive hamsters wasn’t so bad. It could be better, for sure. But it was good enough.
That’s the language of settling, isn’t it? And maybe that’s a little what love is. Settling into someone, settling into a life, settling into what is now instead of what could have been, into the thing bleeding and trembling in your arms. It is seeing the truth of you, the truth of me, the truth of us, and being like, This is good enough for me. What is here is found to be preferable to your imaginings, to your willingness to search beyond because what is here is enough.
I saw a glimpse of another life when I walked to the cliffside of my marriage and my life as I had so far known it. I looked out at the night sea. The glimmer of the moon reflected over the waves of what could have been and what could be, away from what was. I looked the sea dead in the eye, breathed in its salty air, felt the wind blow my hair every which way. I stood at the edge of land and water in a mauve silk negligee, determined to dive in and swim.
The wind that carried me to that spot at the edge of earth and water drowned out my husband’s voice, my mother’s, my father’s, the voices of my children. Instead, I heard only my own voice. Years ago I said yes to him, to babies, to baptism, to Utah, to a creative writing class in a small classroom in the JKB where I wrote an embarrassing essay about the way I fell in love with him. Now that I’m older and more doors are closing, I must pause, and I paused right there on my parents’ porch overlooking Utah Valley and my past and my future. What will I choose this time, knowing it means not choosing another thing?
At that pause I saw how returning to my children and the first boy I married was no longer a closed door, but one I opened long, long ago. The force of opening that door shook the whole ceiling and the hall, knocked a few frames and chandeliers down, and closed other doors down the hall, a few what ifs. I opened it naively, foolishly even, but also wholeheartedly. This didn’t mean I had to still choose it now, or that I could choose it like I chose it then. I knew our flaws, I knew what we were, how we tried and so often failed each other. I knew we needed to change things, how the things we had to change sometimes seemed more than the things we had to keep. I knew I loved him more than I had ever loved him, and I knew the way we weren’t a comprehendible fit if this choice were just about me and him. But together we offered our girls a smorgasbord of differing, complementary qualities. If we could team up, if I could suit up, we could win, this family of ours. We could be something unforgettable.
I was still curious what else I could find here in this life, a large room with those small ass Utah windows so close to the ceiling you can’t even see out of them. The vent-sized windows, which often made me feel claustrophobic. But who says we can’t carve out windows? Big, arching windows? Perhaps we could stainglass them, send ricocheting light all over the walls. What if we did that? Made the light dance?
What if the thing that changed was me and how I changed could change us, change what we could form at the edge of dirt and water, a new claylike, muddy thing? I was no longer the expansive, formless water of childhood, but also the dirt of marriage and motherhood. Could I not welcome in the tide, shape something new, craggy and dripping as it was? My grandmother was a potter. What if I could form a cup out of water and earth, and what if I could form a cup to hold all of me and a lot of him? What if this cup could hold our children too?
And so I paused at the shoreline where water crushes earth’s crust, where freedom and devotion collide, where possibility and surrender, assertion and compassion gnaw at the edges of each other. I wanted it all. I wanted the whole sea and the whole forest, and every which element all at once, but instead I took steps that formed a new pathway. I chose a path between two loves, a path to walk on back and forth, this time knowing where it is I’d like to go: a life together with less suffering for my girls.
It’s just what I chose. I’m not even saying I should have. I’m not saying this should be your story, or the way any story is supposed to be. I just chose it when I didn’t think I ever would, but I chose it because I desired it more than I desired anything else.
Before I called Ryan and told him that I had changed my mind, that I could love him better and settle into a life of all of us together, before he responded, Let’s build a chicken coop together, I used that almost forgotten will and determination of mine, that drive that is sometimes naive, that is sometimes stupid, that is sometimes intolerable to my whole family, which I stuffed deep down into my gut where it almost rotted. I wrenched out that grit to love all of them better, even my own damned self. I could work with good enough. I can make things better–I am an editor in addition to a writer, after all. I know how to devote myself to draft after draft, to this essay that turned into a book and then another book and then another book, and then this essay. I couldn’t tell you where Stonehenge is, but if you told me it was a mile in that direction, I could get there even if it meant taking twice as long as anyone else, a ridiculous, stupid, leaves-in-hair amount of time. I can laugh at it even.
And so I looked at my marriage and my kids and my self like a devoted mother could, and I said I will love you, you ugly old wrinkly thing. I choose to. I will it upon us. You will be good enough, I declare it so. Together, you and me, we are something to write about and weep over. We are something to keep.
14
“You have to claim responsibility for the harm you cause. You have to believe it’s necessary,” Leslie James writes, quoting a friend who advised her on her decision to divorce her husband. I didn’t believe this harm was necessary, and I didn’t believe the thing I was trying to flee from was possible to flee from anymore: my grief. This was the only life I had. There was no revisionist history, only a future. Was it possible anymore to separate my future from theirs?
I had tried to wash out Ryan and what we had with our girls, to get to the root of the dress, the white purity of the dress, thinking only the unstained dress was the best version of me. But they had already stained me, soaked into my fibers, browned the lap of my dress in the shape of a hand. There was no life that was real, no life that was not already mine in which we were not here already and intertwined.
Perhaps there is another life, perhaps a better, more beautiful one, and all I’d have to do is chin up and walk away, find a new sparring partner or none at all. But whatevs, who cares. I already met Ryan, loved him, loved them all.
Did you know breast milk is created together between mother and child? A collaboration of sorts, like a stain. The way the material of the mother interacts with the material of the infant to make a mixed material drink. Sort of like the way the human vagina and the human penis evolved over centuries together, not independently. As the vagina developed, so did the penis. A sort of discussion, a word and a response kind of thing. The quality of the conversation is the result of each utterance, each back and forth quip. What will you say? Pause. Listen. What can you hear?
15
It took me a year to settle into the weight and slowness of a life with Lydia, carrying my firstborn infant in a god awful car seat that nipped at my skin in an array of bruises along my left inner forearm and bicep. It took me a year to accept that errands with an infant best occur in between nap times, that I should buckle the infant into the car seat only after nursing her and burping her and changing her diaper, only after making sure the diaper bag is stocked and ready for a blowout at any moment in any place because the blow out will happen, but only if I forget to stock the diaper bag. It makes sense even if doesn’t make sense that it has taken me a decade to settle into the reality that my life–my days, hours, minutes–is tied directly to my childrens’ lives, and that I am also choosing this over and over even if I don’t actually have to. There are wives and moms who leave, walk away, walk out, kill their husbands, their kids, or themselves, and truth be told, many of us understand. We don’t have to live or love even though it feels like something is making us, perhaps biology, perhaps fear or shame, or perhaps hope that eventually this all will alchemize into something more obviously worthwhile.
Something in me believes–the way you believe you love your family even when you do not love them perfectly—that I would have always chosen to be a wife and mother, though I understand now I didn’t have to choose marriage at all or with Ryan, or experience motherhood so young and in this particular way. I might have still chosen this eventually despite where and how I grew up. I could not know what health or neurodivergent or mental illness mothering would create for or exacerbate in me, which is why marriage and motherhood has always been a risk, a luck of the draw, even if systems are in place to keep some women suffering more or less than others.
Perhaps my devotion to my fellow siblings, to the trembling creatures who share my world, who sweat and shiver, break and bleed, means that I, like the many caretakers and guardians of animals and creatures and humans and plants before and around me, would be inclined to choose this particular suffering, accidentally or deliberately, to the point of self-annihilation or extinction. But I, unlike the octopus, unlike many humans before me and beside me, have miraculously lived through—though never for—my suffering. Perhaps I have suffered more than the threshold that is healthy for my particular growth. Perhaps I questioned myself because I did not revere my pain.
No, I wouldn’t choose this exact life in this exact way again for me. I can imagine a much grander or gentler way of living that arrives at similar ends. Perhaps I became a first time mother at thirty-four after establishing a writing or evolutionary biology career. Perhaps I became an anthropologist, married a man when I was thirty-two instead of twenty-two, who sat next to me in an archaeology class. But I have created poems. I have written essays. I have, at moments, stopped at the side of the creek of our accidental town just to listen to the water because our daughters showed me how. I have splashed, laughed, mini-golfed with Ryan despite a well of feminist rage. I have seen the way the light peeks around and over the leaves, the way the light sprinkles like laughing tears all over our daughters’ blonde hair. Not all blondes are stupid. Some of them, like our girls who have both devoured my flesh and fragranced my bones for burial again and again, are paying attention. I have looked into our daughter’s eyes that are not my brown or Ryan’s green, but my little brother’s blue, and I have seen her future without us. The hope and terror of imagining her life without us, of imagining her life with us. Perhaps that is the timeless grief of motherhood, marriage, love, life: the gains and the simultaneous losses.
Someday I’d like to try and make a prettier way of living for my girls, a prettier way that does not require an alternate universe, pretty like white daisies, my mom’s favorite flower, growing in a field of green grass that reaches our knees. The grasses wave in the wind, sing “Good morning to you, to you, to you.” But until then, I see the ways I have been tallying again and again what was and is versus what could be, and what could be won for a very long time and it led me to a cliffside, a place between our pasts and our lost possibilities, a place for the lost, for the broken-hearted.
You get to choose where to go from here. You get to choose, and whatever you choose, don’t forget you are also a choice. What will you choose for yourself? I tell my children in an imagined conversation. Perhaps what surprised me was that when I finally chose, I chose an ugly soggy place. Not so wet, and not so dry. Perhaps the parts of me that are my mother and father and my grandmothers whispered to me that I could make something out of this mud, something deep and scoopable.
A scripture phrase comes to mind again, mixed with my own words:
“My heart is a cup, my heart is a cup, my heart is a cup, and my cup runneth over.”
16
There was a moment while rewriting this essay, when I was sitting in the living room near the kitchen table covered in leftover milk and half eaten cereal bowls scattered and spilling about, while I was folding laundry before school because my girls could not find any underwear, when my youngest daughter, my three-year-old Liv, pooched her lips for a kiss, and then Eleanor and then Lydia too as if on cue because any synchronization amongst them rarely happens. Perhaps they saw me staring off into another life or another way, the way my own mother used to stare off. Perhaps my daughters were looking for me. Perhaps they found me in the sky, floating up and away toward the moon that lures the waves, and they lassoed me back to the earth, to muddy ground, with all they could offer me: a kiss. I looked at them, then the piles of laundry they knocked over as they walked away. I didn’t roll my eyes at their clumsiness this time. Instead, I witnessed how evident they were. And I took all of it just as it was, the way we were okay, good enough, happy, even, to reunite.
I typed "so beautiful," but that felt incomplete and imprecise. I want to sit with these words, walk with them, chew them over. But for now, I'm amazed at how well you understand yourself here. I think it took a lot of work and pain to get there. But this feels honest and real, without sentimentality or apology, while also hopeful and giving room to grow.
This was excruciating and essential for me to read. Thank you for writing it, and for sharing it.