Nineteen
A year after her birth, and my body has shifted into shapes previously unimagined. In labor my hips had unhinged, and they have not swung back to where they were before. I remember in nursing school learning the signs by which a female cadaver could be identified as having borne children or not, that irrevocable spreading apart of the hipbones. My child has crossed my threshold and in so doing has marked me forever.
The outer signs also: my abdomen now slack, stretch marks puckering the lower skin. On the street, people’s eyes slip by me. They might bend to coo and talk to the baby, but I am no longer seen, am only the adult attached to the adorable baby. When they do look, I flinch from their gaze. I know what they are thinking. I want to say, “No, I haven’t lost the weight yet. Don’t you know what my body has undergone? Months of reshaping from the inside, a complete structural transformation, bones sliding around, skin stretched to tautness. I’m not going to spring back to my pre-baby ‘bikini body’ any time soon.” But this is exactly what every look on the street is projecting, what every celebrity magazine and TV show is shouting.
More than that, there has been another, more intimate kind of stretching. “It will go back to normal,” the doctor assures me. But the truth is that no one knows if this will actually happen. I think of taking a mirror and looking at myself down there. But it’s too frightening. It feels like the site of a battle. I want to ask other women, “Is it the same for you? Has this happened to you too?” But I can’t make myself approach the other young mothers with their designer baby bags and expensive strollers.
Between baby bottles and diapers and my baby’s screaming, the last thing I can think about is sex, and when he tries, I push him away. My ungainly, unlovely body doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. It belongs to her now. These breasts are hers; my belly and skin and lips are hers. When he touches my breasts, I can’t stop myself from swatting his hand away. He rolls away, but not before I see something flash in his eyes.
He tries again months later, putting a tentative hand on my breast, kissing the corner of my face, and again I can’t stand being touched. I don’t want more hands on me, another piece of me taken away. Her need is already deep enough to engulf me whole. I can’t withstand his.
I wriggle away. The space on the sheets opens like an abyss. I hear an edge of frustration in his voice when he says, “Baby, why not? It’s been long enough, hasn’t it?”
“Long enough? For what?”
“For you to be healed. For you to be ready. I love you.”
Some terrified tumble in my blood, my body stiffening from head to foot. I say, “I’m a mom now. That’s all I can do. I can’t take care of you too. Don’t ask me to do that too.”
“I’m not asking you to take care of me. I love you. I just want us to be together.”
“No, not like that.”
He shifts closer; he says, “You’re a mom, but you’re still my lover.” Instant tears spring to my eyes. I can’t imagine myself this way anymore. I’m not his lover. This body belongs to her more than to him or even to me.
He pulls me close. I let him kiss me on the mark on my face he has claimed as his own. He sighs. “It’s fine. I love you. We’ll be fine. We’ll be like an old married couple. We’ll just love each other and it’ll be fine.”
I know he’s trying to convince himself. Deep in my body I know that sex is too powerful a force to be ignored. I know there is nothing as flimsy as a shared life without sex.
*
She goes from crawling to walking on her wobbly legs. She watches everything we do with those startling eyes. She can speak only a few words, but she points with her tiny finger at every new thing that catches her eye—the flowers, the birds above, a tiny spot on the linoleum. She is like a spy in our world, watching and seeing everything. I feel as if she understands everything. But she gives no information about where she comes from, the secret place she has left. We teach her about our world, thinking it important, thinking ourselves important. But the mystery is, where did she come from? She can’t tell us. The cosmic joke abides; the mystery protects itself.
When she cries, she wrings her little hands, twisting them in the most heartbreakingly helpless way, as if around invisible objects. There is something graceful in this motion of grief. It makes me adore this child who has come unexpectedly among us.