motherload

She keeps an office in her sternum, the flat

bone in the center of her chest with all its

urgent papers, vast appointments, lists of

minor things. In her vertebrae she holds more

carnal tasks: milk jugs, rotten plants, heavy-

bottomed toddlers in all their mortal rage.

She keeps frustration in her hallux, senseless

chatter, jealous fangs, the spikes of a dinosaur’s

tail. The belly is more complicated—all heartache

and ambition. Fires and tidal waves.

In her pelvis she holds her labors, long and

slippery. In her clavicle, silent things. (Money

and power. Safety and choice. Tiny banquets of shame.)

In her hands she carries their egos, small and

flimsy. In her mouth she holds their laughter,

gentle currents, a cosmos of everything.

Kate j baer  |  What kind of woman

I had deliberately not thought much about what caring for a baby would be like. (This was part of a larger life philosophy of mine: to better my chances of happiness by expecting nothing, or the worst.) The work demanded creativity and intuition: spending a day alone with my infant daughter reminded me of shepherding a friend through a first-time acid trip, continually gauging whether she needed to look at a flower, or listen to music, or sob for ten minutes, or be alone in the dark. Caregiving was humiliating and transcendent and unending, and I was unnerved by how quickly it could decimate me. Even with a partner who did eighty per cent of everything not related to breast-feeding, I could be scorched to a brittle skeleton by a mere half hour of my baby’s screaming. I needed not only my partner but our parents, our friends, and the mercy and labor of strangers, desperately. During nap time one day, I left a note for myself; ‘Maybe I eventually should write about caregiving, how I can only care for her because I am being cared for, how we have to make of ourselves and our situation a soft place for others to land.’

The point of having a child is to be rent asunder, torn in two. Years before I had my son I heard of an artist explaining why she had decided to become a mother: I didn’t want to reach the end of my life intact. Imperious, I judged this to be sentimental — permanently damaged by a chronic illness, I considered myself already ruined and misunderstood by the healthy and normal. And what is more normal than the ability to give birth? But motherhood is a different sort of damage. It is a shattering, a disintegration of the self, after which the original form is quite gone. Still, it is a breakage that we are, as a species if not as individuals, meant to survive.

There is no right or wrong way to be pregnant, to become a mother, to make a family. There is only one way—your way, which will inevitably be filled with tears, mistakes, doubt, but also joy, relief, triumph, and love.

birth stories

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