Boom goes the cannon
the pocket of time in which the hole in your belly matches the one in the universe
I.
After giving birth without pain medication (not by choice; I was hollering "drugs!" right before my son shot out), I experienced a true high. When the doctor asked me how I felt, I remember telling him "I feel GREAT. Like I could ride a horse."
"Please don't, though," he said as a resident pulled a stitch nice and taut.
And he was right, that wore off, and there was healing needed to be done, for things wind up a mess no matter how you get the pirate ship out of the glass bottle.
When I saw the OB again at the six-week checkup, he filled out my return-to-work form with a request for extra time off due to "tearing" — something I thought we could try, why not. So-called human resources — who might have simply given me some new body parts from the vault! — told me that wasn't how it worked; if you had a vaginal birth you got six weeks paid short-term disability and not a day more. Six weeks is the period of time the red egg timer that is your uterus takes to empty, but the idea of six weeks’ paid time off is obviously arbitrary; in parts of Europe you’re considered out of your head to show up to work after your 35th week of pregnancy, and in Australia I hardly know a soul who returned before their baby’s first birthday, so busy are they making cakes and attending free baby-and-me classes outside in their matching UPF hats. Here in the U.S., people often have to haul themselves back to the office days after birth with a gaping hole inside them.
Even if you don’t have to go immediately back to work, you have to eventually go somewhere. On that day, you gather up all your pieces in one of those enormous knotted baby wraps — certain loops swathe the baby’s bum and certain others are there to keep your kidneys from tumbling out or your waist from flaying open — and head out. In my case, I took up the local moms’ group on an open-invitation “happy hour” down the street. Japhy was a few weeks old and I had decided I needed to “get out” more, see other people, so I left him at home with my husband and took my one-and-a-half-year-old to the party, where I knew no one. I walked in, sweaty and knobby and awkward, and spent most of my time there acting as though I was very entranced by the host’s pet parrot, but really thinking about how ludicrous the idea of circulating in society is when you have just cleaved a new soul off the back side of your abdominal wall. I did try to have some polite conversations, standing there as if an arm wasn’t falling out of its socket (“So how long have you kept birds in your closet?”) and worrying that someone would notice I ate more cheese than I brought. Even now, I find the whole thing so funny. Like walking down the street with a chainsaw in your neck and turning stifly to wave hello to your neighbors. What a strange time it is, when you can’t put on leggings without tripping over thanks to the lack of abs, but feel compelled to spend the afternoon in someone else’s home hunched over your thirsty baby and trying not to flash anyone because you want your newborn to have friends.
“We have the same apartment layout,” I told a mom whose home I visited when Japhy and her son were tiny bleating lambs, “but there’s no wall over there.”
“Ah,” she replied looking at her wall, wishing me gone from her apartment.
“Illness is a place where a person comes up against the limits of their being — the physical limits of the living body, yes, but also mortality,” writes Anna Altman in a good, recent review of how the “sick-lit” genre has evolved that also helps get at what exactly changes when you are witness to the growing and dispatching of babies… though I realize of course that pregnancy is not a pathology, exactly.
Further back in time, Dave Eggers explained the purpose of writing about these corporeal things more simply as “THE PUTTING ALL THIS DOWN AS TOOL FOR STOPPING TIME GIVEN THE OVERLAP WITH FEAR OF DEATH ASPECT.”
Just the fact of growing and dispatching a new person is mind-bending. You can never look at bodies or life the same way, or unsee the pointy shadows lurking just around the corner.
Another image: My husband ran with the bulls once in Seville.
“How did you know when the bulls arrived?” I asked him, “like, how did you know they had been released from the thing?”
“How did I know there were bulls?” As someone who has known what it is to run from bulls, he was incredulous at this question.
It begins with a cannon blast: “Boom goes the KEH-nen,” as Japhy would say in his absurd half-Brooklyn accent. You hear the cannons and know to run. The bulls are charging in the distance, barreling with horns down the alleys, down — hopefully — someone else’s alley, toward — hopefully! — someone else’s perineum. That’s partly what is so strange about the maternity ward, it’s a portal where the underworld bubbles up to the surface, snatching souls and delivering babies onto weigh stations, yet so quiet! No cannons.
II.
A call went out on the parent’s group listserv early on: a mother on the other side of the park had died shortly after birth, and the father was soliciting donated breastmilk. I was conveyed to the the kitchen over a sheet of ice and opened the freezer, looking over my deranged filing system of manila pouches, greedily tabulating the frosty numbers. Could I give away 15 ounces? Twelve ounces? Ten ounces? That would set me back several evening dad-feeds, which I used to sit on the armchair doing nothing at all while our baby shotgunned a bottle in my husband’s arms. I stood at the freezer door, measuring out these frozen pouches of milk as bricks in a walkway that would get the motherless baby further along its journey. No matter how I arranged them, it seemed an impossibly short road looking at the length of life its mother would be gone.
Storing and cataloging bodily fluids in the freezer is a sign that you are still physically “in it,” I think, it being the awareness of the limitations of your physical form re: FEAR OF DEATH ASPECT. Producing milk is an insane magic trick, a power I never felt I could really control even when I was capable of performing it, but a miracle anyway, when the other parts all seem to have failed. What an underrated organ, I thought at some point, before asking myself: wait, are breasts an organ?
“The Breast Is Not an Organ,” answers a 2008 journal letter by AB Ackerman. Apparently, 2008 had seen vigorous debate over this designation. Here is an excerpt from the prior letter, “The Breast Is A Distinct Organ,” by David Cassinaro: “The breast is easily recognized (by even first year medical students) both grossly and histologically as distinct from any other tissue, and the function of lactation is obviously unique to the breast alone. Therefore, there is no compelling reason to jettison our concept of the breast as an organ.”
Obviously.
Ackerman does want to jettison that concept, though, arguing that breasts are really just skin and sub-skin capable of secreting a substance: “If his claim that the breast is an organ because apocrine glands in it are capable of lactation, then he is obligated to explain why the axilla and the external auditory canal are not organs; apocrine glands in them also produce secretion different from one another and from colostrum. I welcome compelling arguments by him.” (Bolding is mine.)
Have you ever blinded your baby with a shot of milk to the eyeball while trying to get a latch? I have. It makes a compelling argument.
There is so much literature on the existential nature of Having A Body, but very little of it seems to address the added powers that female characteristics sometimes give you (beyond the occasional glimmer of terrified male awe in art history). The paradox applies nonetheless; take Ernest Becker:
Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.
Picture Ackerman and Cassinaro moving pieces about the chessboard in the melting desert, Cassinaro yelling, “man is exceptional, a revelation of thought and creativity and self-awareness that transcends his animal form!” Then Ackerman, shouting back across the hot winds, “Man is a squirrel!”
Japhy constantly asks me to tell him about “yesterday, when I was a baby,” or “yesterday, when I was in your belly,” venturing guesses like a barrister examining my testimony: “Yesterday, when I was a baby, I crawled into the road?” (Me: no.) He and Scout both love to hear about their births.
“You were in my belly, jumping all about, and then when the day came, you blasted out like a rocket shooting to the moon,” I have told him. Another time, I explained that he rolled out in a ball like a dragon egg and then stood up and immediately started running. Both stories more or less true.
I did respond to the call for breastmilk, offering enough that it was a personal sacrifice, but not so much it would leave us high and dry. “The family was inundated with offers,” the reply came, informing me that while my donation was greatly appreciated, it was no longer necessary.
How it happened
I forget that it is “100 day” in pre-K, and that I am supposed to send Japhy to school dressed as an “old person.”
“Don’t worry, we found a costume for him,” says his teacher:
More more more
If you’d like more in the vein of TMI, might I recommend this old ELLE essay of mine.
“Like a squirrel, I have eyes and ears, scurry about on the ground and occasionally climb a tree.” — Crispin Sartwell, NYT
“The first necessity is to claim the morning, which is mine. If I look at a phone first thing the phone becomes my brain for the day. If I don’t look out a window right away the day will be windowless, it will be like one of those dreams where you crawl into a series of smaller and smaller boxes, or like an escape room that contains everyone and that you’ll pay twelve hours of your life for. If I open up Twitter and the first thing I see is the president’s weird bunched ass above a sand dune as he swings a golf club I am doomed. The ass will take up residence in my mind. It will install a gold toilet there. It will turn on shark week as foreplay and then cheat on its wife.” — Patricia Lockwood’s advice from a 2018 Tin House essay.
“An American friend recently told me that he knew someone who was helping a celebrity write his memoirs and that this celebrity, abetted by his ghostwriter, had undertaken to concoct an episode in his life, in which he pretends to have been present thirty or forty years back at a baseball or basketball game (I forget which) that is now considered historic in the United States (for reasons that also escape me). The ghostwriter and his client have watched video archives of the game on YouTube so as to describe the scene as minutely as possible. They have been able to find out whether the sky was cloudy or sunny; they have been able to drink in the atmosphere of the ballpark and the mood of the spectators; they have been able to revisit the historic moments, the ones that a man who was really there would be unable not to remember.” — Maël Renouard in Brooklyn Rail back in 2016
Have you read Vittles?
And here is my recent VICE piece on how public defenders use Twitter — beyond the legal ethics, it looks at the big questions of who are we listening to and why?
… on which note thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY <3 <3 <3
“Just the fact of growing and dispatching a new person is mind-bending. You can never look at bodies or life the same way, or unsee the pointy shadows lurking just around the corner.” 😭