My belly grew every single class I taught, the undergraduates smirking and nudging each other’s elbows, then turning strangely loyal like beautiful little revolutionaries against the man. My belly grew each week I taught the graduate fiction writing seminar, me staring them all down one at a time until they smiled, me helping them sew the colors of their words into magnificent tapestries no matter what the judgment, them not able to sustain their disdain in the face of my unapologetic radiance.
My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.
And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me — the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.
At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I’d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don’t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a sexuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali — had anyone crossed me I’d have a head necklace. I’d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I’d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don’t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I’d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I’d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man balls and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives.
My belly grew.
My belly carried me.
My belly carried our love, bulging between our shit faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.
When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers.
My thirst to go numb began to leave my body.
At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It’s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.
That night after the knot tying business? We went home and staged a photo shoot. Me with a black satin ribbon tied around my neck and black satin panties in front of a deep red velvet curtain licking milk from a bowl. I don’t know why. We just did.
God the sex we had from that photo. Big bellied sex.
Now that, ladies, is a keeper.
Because when love comes to someone like me? After all my black holes? You can bet your ass I’m going to grab it. I may be damaged goods, but I’m not an idiot.
And baby, lemme tell you. I’m no Hester Prynne.
Sun
LIGHT.
Life.
Beautiful alive boy.
The night my son Miles chose to come there was a thunderstorm. In San Diego in April a thunderstorm is a gift — as if your soul might be wetted for a moment between days of endless sun.
When my water broke I walked barefoot in a nightgown down the street a block to the ocean. Andy was asleep in bed. My sister Brigid was asleep in the house. I cried and the ocean within me made way for this boy and the ocean before me opened up. When I got to the water I said “Lily. He’s here.” Then I walked back to the house. In bed next to my sleeping love I counted minutes. It was 5:00 a.m. The contractions felt like sentences before they are born. It is the only time in my life I have experienced a purity of happiness. Because my head was empty of anything about me. Nothing else about my life in the room. Lightning lighting up the darkness. Water everywhere.
I’ve met many mothers whose children didn’t come right or never came at all. We are like a secret tribe of women carrying something not quite of this world.
A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life — no detectable reason — just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word — “mizugo” — which translates loosely to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it.
In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.
There are no Western rituals for the water children. I am an American woman who does not believe in god. But I do believe in waters.
The day Miles was born, Andy cradled my body through its crucible. My sister Brigid stitched love in beautiful thread around the room of us — nothing wrong could have entered her fiercely sewn world. When he came I wailed as women do for the child they have carried and brought into the world. But my wail carried another soul in its song. My Miles’ long body was brought up to my chest, the umbilical cord curling its milky grey spiral still connecting us.
He moved.
I felt the heat of his body.
His little mouth made for the mound of my breast and nipple.
So this is life.
The first thing Miles saw when he opened his eyes was a father who let out a sound I’ve never heard before. A male sob as big as space. A father with open arms ready for his child, ready to protect him his entire life, ready to love him above anything, ready to be the path of a man before him and hold his hand until the boy goes to man. A father who had no father himself rewriting the story.
My sister came to us and embraced the three-bodied organism. I do not know what she felt but her face is the word for it.
In my belly, before he was born, Miles swam. Back and forth and around and flip turns and kicks and such movement — so alive — watching the taught skin of my belly was a little alarming. The force of him took my breath away. And yet we felt inseparable. His body was my body was his was mine. When I went swimming with Miles in my belly, which I did often, people in the lap lanes would marvel at how I could be so fast. So big, so round, so breasted — but fast. But I knew a secret that they did not. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.
In the Company of Men
THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father. My father fractured the hearts of all the women in our home with his rage. And so when I go back through and think about the men I have loved, or thought I loved, it is with a split apart heart. If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry.