And yet, at the same time, it feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom.
This comes as no real surprise — my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with skinniness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness. My mother’s skinny body, and her lifelong obsession with having zero fat, almost makes me disbelieve that she ever housed my sister or me inside of her. (I gained fifty-four pounds to grow an Iggy — a number that appalled my mother, and gave me the pleasure of a late-breaking disobedience.) One time my mother saw her shadow on a wall at a restaurant, and before she recognized it as hers, she said it looked like a skeleton. Look how fat everyone is, my mother says, her mouth agape, whenever we visit her ancestral Michigan. Her skinniness is proof that she moved up, got out.
A writer is someone who plays with the body of his mother. I am a writer; I must play with the body of my mother. Schuyler does it; Barthes does it; Conrad does it; Ginsberg does it. Why is it so hard for me to do it? For while I’ve come to know my own body as a mother, and while I can imagine the bodies of a multitude of strangers as my mother (basic Buddhist meditation), I still have a hard time imagining my mother’s body as my mother.
I can easily conjure my father’s body, though he has been dead thirty years. I can see him in the shower — tan, red, steaming, singing. I can conjure the slight oiliness of the curls on the back of his head, curls now present on Iggy. I can remember how certain clothes looked on him: a gray cable-knit sweater, his old Levi’s, his daily suit. He was a density of heat and energy and joy and sexuality and song. I recognized him.
I think my mother is beautiful. But her negative feelings about her body can generate a force field that repels any appreciation of it. I’ve long known the drilclass="underline" Boobs, too small. Butt, too big. Face, bird-like. Upper arms, old. But it’s not just age — she even disparages the way she looks in baby pictures.
I don’t know why she has never seen herself as beautiful. I think I’ve been waiting all these years for her to do so, as if that kind of self-love would somehow offer her body to me. But now I realize — she already gave it to me.
At times I imagine her in death, and I know that her body, in all its details, will flood me. I do not know how I will survive it.
I have always hated Hamlet — the character — for his misogynistic moping around after his mother’s remarriage. And yet I know I carry a kernel of Hamlet within me. In fact, I have proof: a childhood diary, in which I swore to one day exact revenge on my mother and stepfather for their affair, which broke up my parents’ marriage. (My father’s untimely death unfortunately occurred shortly thereafter.) I swore in my diary that my sister and I would stand forever with the ghost of our dead father, who now looked down upon us, betrayed and heartbroken, from heaven.
Also like Hamlet, I was angrier at my mother than at my stepfather, who was essentially a stranger. He had been the young housepainter in white pants who would sometimes stay late into the evening when my father was out of town on a business trip. On such nights, my sister and I would put on skits or dances for him and my mother: jesters for the queen and ersatz king. Not long after, he and my mother were walking down the aisle. When the reverend asked us to bend our heads in prayer, I kept my chin up, a sentinel.
For the duration of her marriage to my stepfather, my mother’s maternal body seemed to me supplanted by her desiring body. For I knew that my stepfather wasn’t just the object of her desire. I knew she believed him to be her desire, incarnate. Such thinking set her up for a bitter fall when he left her, twenty-odd years later, confessing all kinds of infidelities on his way out the door.
I hated him for crushing her. I hated her for being crushed.
When I was a teenager, my mother tried to explain her reasons for leaving my father in more adult terms. But even at thirteen I didn’t know what to do with the notion that she needed to leave him “to have a chance at joy.” My father seemed to me the vessel of all earthly joy; his death had but deepened this impression.
Why wasn’t he good enough? He told me that I could work outside the home if I wanted to, so long as his shirts still got ironed and were ready for work the next day, my mother told me. The feminist in me was unmoved. Couldn’t you have told him you didn’t want to iron his shirts, and taken it from there?
When my stepfather finally left, my sister and I felt as much relief as grief. The intruder had finally been expelled. The sodomitical mother would melt away, and the maternal body would be ours, at last.
No wonder, then, that our mother’s announcement that she was getting married again caught us off guard, just a few years later. As she and her husband-to-be told us the news at a dinner party orchestrated, to our surprise, for just that purpose, I watched my sister turn a furious red, then lunge around for a vine that could hold her. Well, if the wedding is in June, I’m not going, she sputtered. It’s way too hot in June for anyone to get married. If it’s in June I’m not going. She was ruining the moment, and I loved her for it.
But this time, so far as I can tell, my mother has not made her husband her desire incarnate, though she does love him very much. And for his part, so far as I can tell, he doesn’t try to talk her out of her self-deprecation, nor does he abet it. He simply loves her. I am learning from him.
About twenty-four hours after I gave birth to Iggy, the nice woman at the hospital who tested his hearing gave me a wide white elastic band for my postpartum belly, basically a giant Ace bandage with a Velcro waist. I was grateful for it, as my middle felt like it was about to slide off me and onto the floor.
Falling forever, falling to pieces. Maybe this belt would keep it, me, together. When she handed it to me, she winked and said, Thanks for doing your part to keep America beautiful.
I stumbled back to my hospital room, newly corseted, my gratitude now speckled with bewilderment. What’s my part? Having a baby? Taking measures to stop the spread? Not falling to pieces?
It is unnerving, though, this melting. This pizza-dough-like flesh hanging down in folds where there used to be a pregnant tautness.
Don’t think of it as, You’ve lost your body, one postpartum website counseled. Think of it as, You gave your body to your baby.
I gave my body to my baby. I gave my body to my baby. I’m not sure I want it back, or in what sense I could ever have it.
Throughout my postpartum delirium, I found myself lazily clicking on articles on my AOL home page (yes, AOL) about how certain celebrities got back into shape or into being sexual after babies. It’s humdrum but relentless: the obsession with who’s pregnant and who’s showing and who’s life is transforming due to the imminent arrival of the all-miraculous, all-coveted BABY — all of which flips, in the blink of an eye, into an obsession with how soon all signs of bearing the life-transforming BABY can evaporate, how soon the mother’s career, sex life, weight can be restored, as if nothing ever happened here at all.