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Overview
Molly Caro May grapples with questions of grief and rage as she undergoes several unexpected health issues after the birth of her first child. Body Full of Stars both reveals deeper truths about how disconnected many modern women are from their bodies and celebrates the greatest story of all time: mothers and daughters, partners and co–parents, and the feminine power surging beneath it all.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781619025134 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Catapult |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 905,709 |
| File size: | 857 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The juncture appears. You fall to your knees and wonder: is it situational, historical, chemical, ancestral, physiological? It may be all of these. It may be none. Maybe it’s just me? Is it just who I am? It isn’t you and it is you. It is an energy you are meeting—maybe for the first time, maybe for the thousandth time but now in new way. It has a message. It wants to tell you something important. But the last thing you want to do is listen. You want out. Get me the hell out. And if you can’t get out, you want it gone, exiled, extracted from your essence. However, that’s the basic Physics 101 truth about energy. It cannot be destroyed. You are responsible for how you manage it. But you aren’t necessarily it. You are in relationship with it. It can only be heard and, then, with great love (and energy of your own), rerouted.
~ Labor____________________________________
We walk a long slow walk in late April.
“I wonder what the wind is bringing,” I say.
“Who knows?” Chris answers and grabs my hand.
Snow edges around tamped down grass. Small green buds have begun to surface. The wind almost blows my straw hat away. I have told my midwife the moon affects my cycles. It was just full. But she says first babies often come two weeks late.
We’ll see.
Because it is five days before my due date and I can feel the new mother-me nearby. She speaks to me already. She will walk through the forest for hours with her newborn tucked against her breast. As years unfold, she will pass on some necessary truths: cross many borders, language matters, don’t forget to talk to your own body. Maybe motherhood will give her a reason to become a great human. We duck down under some trees and I lurch back down the hill, one hand on my belly, one hand on Chris’ shoulder. A few weeks ago, at my yearly haircut, the same two-inch trim because I’ve never adventured much with my brown locks or my dress or my physical presentation, I told my sleeve-tattooed hairdresser that my husband had started to go gray, a remarkable even blend with his dark and she said, “Well, what you’ve got on your hands now is a salt-and-pepper fox.”
And she’s right, only he is, of course, more than that.
We’ve been together for thirteen years and, despite our recent murky distance, he still does it for me on all levels. When we reach flat ground, a great blue whale urge to rest comes over me. I curl up on the bed. Chris stays outdoors in the wintery mix of spring and rearranges rocks from our garden into a pile for a different garden. I’ve canceled all my plans for the next few days. My friends near and far know I’ve entered what I call the cave. My mother walks in from her house next door to her guesthouse, where we are living, and smiles at me like the Mother Mary. We are all waiting.
“How are you, sweetheart?” she asks.
“Good, slow, ready. But this babe might wait until May.”
“We’ll see,” she says, “I’m making a smoothie, would you like some?”
“Sure,” I say, “Thanks,” and watch my graceful mother walk out the door. She lived halfway across the world, away from her community, when she gave birth to me. As afternoon sun streaks through the window, I scroll through boy names on the phone. Hard to find one we like. We never had an ultrasound but my intuition knows this babe is a boy. Maybe we’ll never get to use the girl name we chose. When I glance out the window and whisper it aloud anyway, my bladder calls out.
Pee now. I barrel roll off the bed and stand up. It’s hard to remember what it felt like to once inhabit a non-pregnant body. Pop. Water starts to spill from between my legs. It is clear but pale green somehow. I freeze, as if any more movement will cause a baby to drop from between my legs. Drums pound in my chest. What do I do now? My mother walks back in with my tiger dog Bru.
“I think my water just broke,” I stutter.
“Looks like it,” she says and winks and for a long moment we look down, a long pause, even Bru investigates. She has told me what her mother told her. My body will know what to do. It is a natural process. I’ve spent most my life in an intense conversation with my body—this will be one more part of that.
Water broke.
Water broke.
Water broken.
What does that even mean—
We stare as it pools on the concrete floor.
~I come from brothers—so do my mother, my father, my husband, his mother, and his father. We only have brothers. There are no sisters and no girls, other than the ones who brought the boys into the world. I didn’t care about the sex of my baby. Even so I dreamt of my son riding in a lime green backpack, and of losing him, leaving him somewhere and the panic. Did he know what a crazy lady his mother had become while he was in utero? At six weeks pregnant, I had perched on a chair in the office of my doctor and friend Holcomb.
“How do you feel—any nausea?” she asked.
“Not a bit. I feel great, excited,” I beamed as my hand fluttered over a flat belly. My mother only had one whiff of nausea during her three pregnancies, so the forecast looked good for me. The next week, my stomach turned. I began to vomit into toilets, mason jars while driving, bushes behind the hardware store, kitchen bowls, snow and my own lap. Multiple times a day. None of this is unusual. But it didn’t go away after the first trimester. It tapered but stayed my whole pregnancy. My baby was grown on chicken, whole milk yogurt and oatmeal. I ate nothing green. I took no prenatal vitamins. I pressed my face into grass to get away from offending smells: toast, coffee, forest fires. Holcomb was also pregnant, a month behind me. Her nausea never shifted into vomiting. She explained she had to hold it down, just could not let that lid off.
But my lid had blown off.
Part of me knew it was an initiation—to what though, I wasn’t sure yet.
Even daily body maintenance became impossible. I stopped brushing my hair or wearing sunscreen. Someone told me metal near my body was bad so I cut one underwire out of my bra, forgot about the other one and walked around with uneven breasts for months without realizing it. My exuberance about life would kick in from time to time. I’d always been able to get up and try again. But then something would backfire, like moving too fast too wide and long on cross-country skis and ending up at a chiropractor’s office with seized muscles and ligaments around my pelvis.
It was a mild case of hyperemesis.
That would have been the rational explanation. But I sat on my perpetual life question: had I created this situation? Acid in my throat must be an act of releasing the old. It was necessary for my growth. I could also no longer censor what words came out of my mouth, except when teaching writing workshops in town. Somehow my sickness never showed up in front of my adult students or clients. Maybe I could control it then because I had control there. We had entered a co-habitation of sorts with my parents two months into my pregnancy when they moved permanently to their small cabin on this wild stretch of land in Montana. Chris and I had made a home here for two years in our own yurt until the cold and throwing up off the porch in the middle of the night got difficult. I needed the bathroom of the cabin. Their guesthouse was a garage, not yet a guesthouse. I wanted to welcome them to their land and then leave to rent a place nearby. But we couldn’t both rent and save for the future home Chris would start to build soon on a triangle of land a thousand feet down the driveway. No bank would give a loan to a self-employed artist couple. My parents had been generous in letting us stay.
But the close quarters grated on everyone, especially me.
We slept on their couches, folding up and stashing blankets every morning. We shared the one small bathroom with them. Intergenerational. People used to live this way. Many people still do. It could be a healthy support system. It could also be thunderstorms after thunderstorms. It was probably both.
A viper awoke in me.
Call it rage. Call it fury. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the emotion. It’s a part of every human, but never before had it come on in and taken over. Everyone safe enough to be close annoyed me. I lashed out with mean comments. I apologized as much as much I vomited. They watched me scream at the moon. They backed away slowly. Chris and I happened to be in the middle of an uncomfortable changing of the tides. We avoided each other or stewed. No one saw me whack the ground repeatedly with a long metal spoon. Friends told me to feel the feelings. Really? But my rage turned inward as well. How could I be so cruel to the people supporting me? I’d never been a placid human, always slightly impatient, but these maneuvers were new. I was losing opportunities all over the place. My disappointment at not being a radiant pregnant woman was a small part of it. My mother would later say, “You were radiant at times. You just couldn’t see it.” She would remind me there has always been a good and kind Molly and point out I had lost control of some basics all at once—my shelter, my adulthood, my marriage, my mode of transportation, and my body. There are photos of me with my arms around Chris, with a wide smile and gleam in my eyes, with my hands wrapped around the gorgeous largess of my body. Toward the end, a softening occurred. It has too when you can only waddle. I would stand on a snowy bridge, tap my belly and feel a small kick respond back.
“Hey there, sweets.”
My babe was already my purifier.
My body, despite the throwing up, had stayed strong through the pregnancy—no swollen ankles, no blood pressure spike, no low iron, no infections, no complications at all. I held onto this luck of mine. It was my ticket back to decency. I had clawed my way through a strange passage toward motherhood. Part of me destroyed by it; part of me fortified. On the other end, we would meet our dear child, eventually move into our house and my body would no longer be stuck in a state of shock. With that, I would let go of all rage and settle back into the woman I knew myself to actually be.
But it was my, our, backstory.
It’s hard to erase the backstory.
Table of Contents
LaborThe Girl Who Climbed Trees
Amass
Became Aware of Her Blood
Release
And Took Note of Her Shape
Float
As She Grew into a Woman
Shed
Who Chose a Cause and a Person
Ground
And the Moment to Expand
Mother