Henry Ford Hospital, 1932 by Frida Kahlo
For months, I haven’t birthed a single essay. My other act of creativity lives in my uterus for now, and the two compete for attention, as children must. I used to love reading metawriting as a genre; it suddenly seems horrifically masculine. What makes me write? It seems like a question only a man would care about.
For 320 days now, I have watched the unwatchable, as we all have. I don’t know if it’s radicalized me, or just reminded me of who I was before I caved to some notion of not wanting to appear either naive or angry. I used to care about things like appearing too angry, but that was long before I was a mother. Hell hath no fury like a mother scorned—I cannot speak for all women, except that I know you don’t need to be one to have mothered someone. And we are scorned, again, and again, and again, as we suppress the primal scream that’s been trapped inside us since we ever learned to love. Since we ever realized the world isn’t anything but a playground we have to try and love. Since we ever realized the world is a game we play for and with our children. Since we ever realized the world is everything we promise them, and the world is everything we love translated into the soft bodies of other people.
Once, in a literature class, we read a Nigerian author’s description of the wound between a woman’s legs, in place of the substantial gift and power bestowed on a man, and I remember a classmate gasped at that. To describe the vessel that brings forth life as a wound!! was her protest. I agreed with her then, but I was still a girl. To be a woman is to have a wound that never closes. To be a woman is to stuff a wound so you don’t bleed to death. To be a woman is to be many people at once-eggs are possibilities, and they can grow hearts that beat outside you and get thrown against the ugliest edges of the world. In Spanish, the verb parir, to birth, shares a root with the word for departure. To be a mother is to intimately understand departure, to be temporarily two people and then for one of them to leave. I wrote some years ago about the violence of childbirth, the cleaving of a single thing into two new things, a mother and a child. For something to be born, something must break: a woman’s waters, an eggshell, the earth, a heart. My journal from 2014 says, I want to be the same person as before I had my son, and I am ashamed I ever aimed so low. When my friend had a child last year, I asked her what it was like, and she said it was terrifying, to have a part of herself outside her body. Terror is the appropriate reaction to motherhood; my desire for blasé normalcy now seems like a dreadful injustice to myself.
A few months ago, I received relentless messages from the midwife about my mental health screening. She was concerned that I appeared to live in a fog of sadness. I was concerned that she didn’t. What exactly aren’t you depressed about, I asked her. She laughed. She is a kind woman, and I suspect she isn’t seeing what I am seeing. That’s my only explanation, although I’ve been wrong about many people, and lost too many friends to count after realizing just how wrong. She prescribed me two blue pills to take every night. They alleviate the physiological grief, but the cognitive grief follows me around like a pathetic alley cat, begging me to take it home.
Yesterday, I walked home from the pharmacy, and the air smelled like cardboard boxes of pizza. Had it not been for those blue pills, I probably would have wept. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to open my door to the sound of my grandmother’s voice, for her to ask if the pizza had arrived yet, to distractedly pick at crusts while listening to my aunts switch between a conversation about labor rights in Punjab and concern for my terrible diet like the two things were of equal importance. I wanted the sky to open up. I wanted it to rain, not sprinkle, as they say in New England; I didn’t want rain the flavor of a soft-serve ice cream cone, I wanted it to drench me, I wanted bloated bullfrogs and howling wind and a red sky and a true monsoon; I needed the drama and rage of the subcontinent, I needed something to break that wasn’t my heart. Later, my mood quickly turned from nostalgia to disgust. I have 18 mutual friends on social media with the latest upper-crust criminal making the rounds on the news, and I have just as many with her middle-class murder victims. I am never not disgusted by my proximity to wealth and power. I never know where to situate myself in the grander scheme of things, except to say I am from a place that no longer exists (or perhaps never did).
In 2010, there was a bomb blast near my old school that killed a teacher and child. I haven’t thought about it in years, but the crater it left in the earth appears in a dream. I wake and the clock says 2.11am, and I mumble to my unborn child to get her head off my bladder, and find myself wide awake. Recalling the dream-crater, I try and count the landmarks I remember that were blown up in those years and I can’t remember who to blame, or who we blamed when it happened. I remember learning the blood type on my school medical forms was incorrect-I am O, not A-when I donated blood to victims of a blast in 2013. They gave me mango juice afterward, and I crave it the way I had craved rain. I fall asleep and dream of Kamala Harris and a half-remembered tune from BabyTV.
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