I am standing in my underwear, very pregnant, at the top of the stairs. I don’t remember my husband ever taking this photo. Like an image from another era, my expression is neither joyful nor intoned—flat, really. I am dissimilar parts pieced together. My neck seems too small for my puffed face. My middle is smooth and firm like the head of a seal and large enough to be its own low-slung planet. And like some kind of vertical orbit, or animal stripe, that strange, brown line has appeared, running from navel to pelvis. Linea negri it’s called, and I read it is always there, just made visible in pregnancy by the cascade of biological events I am mostly oblivious to. Pads of soft flesh conceal the curve of my back, my jawline, my bear-wide shoulders. I am completely unrecognizable to myself.
• •
In Italy, 1553, a small statue of a Chimera was unburied outside Arezzo’s city walls. The statue was a clear representation of the female beast from Greek mythology, what Homer described as “a thing of immortal make, not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle, and snorting out the breath of the terrible flame of bright fire.”
The statue’s posture sends the message of a cocked rifle. Forelegs drawn back and low, hind legs slightly bent, ready to spring. The flexed claws strain against the ground. A collar of tiered barbs frames the troubled face of the lion, its mouth held open, expectant. Scales stud her spine leading to the serpent tail, which loops forward over the body. From the center of the back emerges the head of a goat under a mantle of dagger-like horns.
• •
After my son is born, I marvel at the high/low unpredictability of my own behavior. It is not clear where an old self ends and where a new self begins. It is not clear where his body ends and mine begins. For months we shared the same “earth suit,” doubling and dividing—he in his watery chamber, I an echo thudding through light. Living now inside the confusion of in and out, day and night. My skin is the dry field where he claims roots. Without boundary he curls into an egg on the hull of my chest and grows his thoughts.
• •
He is as soft and pliable as a bag of soup mid-thaw. I count thirty-nine white dots (milia) constellating his cheeks and nose—the ski-jump nose he clearly inherited from June, his great-grandmother, who survived the deaths of four husbands. I weigh one eye against the other and claim they mirror the shape and hue of mine. His wide forehead I claim also, and the outline of his face, more box than egg. His black hair is assigned to his father (wild, thick.). Too soon to know if he will inherit his father’s grace and extra-long arms, though we are certain the genes between us will make him tall.
• •
A few weeks postpartum I begin to recognize members of my tribe. With one exchanged look, I see they, too, went down to the center of the earth and grazed the mouth of violence and were bitten and perhaps thrown back over a fire and held there, stuck, panning for a trace of relief. Solemn women, hair matted, collars lined with white crust. They wheel the razory cries of newborns through blue streets, dragging water bottles and blankets, unsteady and slow. Women whose bodies are wet, imperfect machines in various stages of repair. Women in coffee shops and airports, on park benches, in cars covering themselves, heads bowed to feed their children, the skin around the eyes stamped by the darkest paces of the night. Women keeping time, checking watches and phones and checking again as if answers to questions were hidden among the numbers, we are learning to live by the hour, its waves of unsettled cries, the counting and preparing, fueling and refueling, the pressure to get to sleep and the hurry to wake.
• •
My friend tells me her child learned to say mom much later than dad. She thinks this was because her son for so long believed she and he were the same person.
• •
I take my son to Cheesman Park, my favorite place to walk in Denver, and discover it is a new place, one with dogs charging in all directions off leash between the city’s angular profile and the Rockies’ jagged sprawl. Pinecones drop from evergreens and Frisbees sail off course, threatening the soft dip above his forehead, the delayed ossification of the fontanelle. On the narrow pathways there are more men sauntering, off kilter, than before, boozy as they pass. For the driver who blows the stop sign I feel venomous rage. A jogger spits at my feet as she trots by; I almost grab her by the ponytail and yank her down.
• •
A 2011 case study: While the participants—all women—receive directions, an actor posing as a fellow participant rudely interrupts, repeatedly checks her phone, and delays the start of activities. Participants later are placed in separate rooms and each instructed to play a video game against the offensive woman. Whoever won could blast an unpleasant sound—an emblem for aggression—at her opponent at the volume and duration of her choice. Lactating mothers chose twice the length of time and volume as nonlactating mothers, and four times the strength and duration compared to nonmothers. Surprisingly, the lactating mothers showed significantly lower blood pressures during the confrontations, suggesting the flow of hormones dampens one’s inhibition to strike.
• •
“You were not yet born,” my mother tells me.
“We lived in that drafty carriage house in Franklin. I was cooking something. Your sister was on the floor, batting at toys. She wasn’t crawling yet. I heard this scratching sound, and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I turned the radio down. I put my ear to the fridge. I followed the sound to the trash can in the pantry. Something was moving around in there. Under wet newspaper and coffee grounds. I lifted the paper and there were rats.”
“Rats?”
“Yes. Rats. Squirming around. Many rats.”
“What did you do?”
“They were so close to your sister.”
“What did you do?”
“I killed them.”
“What? Come on.”
“I killed them.”
“How?”
“I marched outside with the can. Found the pitchfork in the garage. Dumped the can over. “And. Well.”
“You are kidding.”
“I am not.”
• •
We Bought a Zoo may be the worst movie I’ve ever seen. It has the face of a romantic comedy and the oversized body of a family drama—I can’t believe Matt Damon agreed to be in it. Scarlett Johansson, a devoted zookeeper in her unsavory beige costume, is so ill-cast it’s laughable. I cringe at the number of times the phrase “we bought a zoo” awkwardly creeps into dialog. And yet. The grizzly’s proximity to the family home is not unlike the feel of a loose brake pedal in heavy traffic. I can’t watch when a shipment of snakes gets loose and everyone—a determined Johansson, the staff, Damon, his cherubic-faced children—begin to gather up meaty snakes to rush back to the container. It’s too much. In another scene, pictures of Damon’s deceased wife appear on his laptop screensaver, and he wilts at the site of her, slowly sliding down a cabinet to the floor. I weep uncontrollably.
• •
After my son is born, I am once again singular and yet never again alone. At first he lives in my arms. My silhouette includes the bundle that is he. Every two hours he drinks from me. I sleep propped against pillows, holding him in the center of my chest, tipping in and out of consciousness. We attach a co-sleeper to the side of the bed to give him more room to splash around and chortle. We raise the dropped side and scoot him a few feet to the wall. I fill bottles with breast milk. When it seems he won’t be lost in the vast open field of the crib, we put him in the adjoining room. We hang a curtain. We turn up the noise machine. We switch to formula. I picture myself holding a balloon gently by a string. I don’t realize I’m letting go until I’m far enough away to watch its mild drift, farther and farther from view.
• •
Toward the end of pregnancy one in every thousand cells in the mother’s body belongs to the fetus. The genetically distinct cells are not contained to the collection of limbs, the newly formed network of veins or laboring heart. Stray cells wander from the source, crossing the placenta to swim the bloodstream like pollen stirred out of a tree. These cells are the same that compose the material of the child’s eyes and the folded channels of his brain, which will translate and store all that he sees.
By the time the child is born, six percent of the mother’s DNA is not her own. The mother is someone other than she was before, literally. The refugee cells remain in orbit, searching for permanent residence in the lungs or muscles, looking for a way to knit into the fabric of the skin, the brain even, as studies suggest it’s possible for fetal cells to penetrate the blood-brain barrier and generate new neurons. Scientists call this fetal microchimerism. For every fetus a woman conceives she will carry something of him or her inside her. “The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before.” Osho, the spiritual teacher, said that.
