Lessons in the Maternal Body

When she is pregnant her breasts get big. Her babies die (her body kills them), and her breasts disappear. You're the exception: the one who lived.

Because she has no breasts she wears a bra made with foam rubber padding. In clothes she's supposed to look like a woman who's pregnant, but without the belly, a woman with breasts.

In public you are not to comment on breasts, not even when you see them naked on the backs of playing cards in a trinket store in Chinatown when you are so little you have to ask how the women can have breasts so big when they're not even pregnant.

The first thing you notice when your own breasts begin to grow is a rising lump of hardness under the left nipple. You will think a bone is out of place. You will go to your father to ask what it is. He will tell you to talk to your mother.

One night when your breasts have grown bigger your mother will come in to use the toilet while you're taking a bath. She will comment on your breasts, say they're nice and round, call them "fellas."

When you become a mother yourself and nurse your own baby daughter, your mother will recall for you that before you were born the pediatrician instructed her to nurse you for at least six weeks. Then she will tell you how long she nursed you.

You know the exact shape and size of the wedge of air, the triangle of light between the pale flesh of her legs. You know the long reddish strands of fur that hang down into it, the thick, hanging lip of skin.

You know her teeth, the space between the two front ones, which she's always said meant she was destined to travel (but look what she got), the pearly crown and the gold inlays back in her molars.

You know her wide mouth, her chapped lips. You know the vaccination scar inside her thigh.

You have seen her sit on the edge of the bathtub and shave those white legs. You have seen the toilet water full of blood when she stood up from it.

On your underpants one morning you will find a choclatey-looking smear. She will be sitting up in bed, smoking her morning cigarette and drinking her morning coffee, and when you show her the underpants she'll say, "Congratulations," and "Welcome to the club."

She won't remember saying these things, or saying that your breasts were nice, round fellas, won't be able to imagine a time when you could have seen her toilet bowl full of blood.

When your daughter is an infant you will observe how your mother holds her: as if she is fragile, made of glass, as if she would break. When your daughter is an infant you will observe how, while changing her diaper, your mother powders her skin: gingerly patting her thighs, bottom, tummy, avoiding that broad chubby wedge of pleasure-sensitive baby-girl flesh altogether.

For a moment, while giving birth, you believed in God and always had. It was biological. The pain resolved itself in pleasure. The baby left your body and you knew. Of course there is a God, the voice in your head went. The way it might go, Of course the sky is blue. This was the only language the voice in your head knew to use.

When your mother is eighty and your daughter finishing graduate school you and your lover will take them to Paris. Your daughter will have been to Paris before, as well as to various other European capitals, but your mother will not, until now, have left the USA. She will sit, half-dressed, bare-legged, on the floor of the cheap hotel room she shares with your daughter, eating bread and cheese with a red-handled Swiss army knife. Like a college girl, you'll think. And suddenly it will hit you with astonishment that here you are in Paris in a cheap hotel with your mother and daughter, as if this is the greatest miracle possible in the world.

When your daughter is a teenager your mother will comment to you about her nice figure. This comment will be true, your daughter will have a nice figure, but your mother's making it will fill you with unease.

When your daughter is a teenager your mother will worry what she will have learned from you about men. You were married only two years and after that had too many boyfriends. But when your daughter grows up even your mother will let her share a bed with her boyfriend when they visit her house.

Your mother started smoking when she was fourteen. At eighty-one she's still going strong. You were older when you started, and after nineteen years you quit. One of the things she liked about Paris was the freedom to smoke.

She sets her hair in pin curls and pastel plastic rollers. You have seen her hair get brittle, frizzed, from dye and permanents she gave herself for years at home. You remember that penetrating chemical smell. Now she lets her hair go gray. At the front it blossoms like snow.

You know how her underwear hangs on her skinny body. You know the dark veins that branch and tendril up her legs. You know the sound of her throat clearing, her cough, her terrible wheezing breath.

When she was young she was a dancer, before she married your father. Now she does yoga. You can see her perfect posture inside her loose-hanging sweats.

In high school, or junior high, when you studied reproduction, you learned about the effect of the Rh-factor in pregnancy. You understood that it was not your mother's body that killed those other babies, but your own survival. You told yourself that you must have known this all along.

When your daughter is five, nearly six, you find yourself pregnant a second time. You are no longer married, have not been married since your daughter was two.

You and your daughter will be visiting your parents when you first become aware of what is happening in your body. You will be up late brooding when your mother gets out of bed to join you. She will sit with you on the couch, craving your love. She will demand that you tell her you love her. You will be unable to speak the words.

Two weeks will pass before you can be tested for pregnancy, although you know quite well that you are pregnant, and another two weeks will pass before the hospital can schedule you for an abortion. You will have waited a month in the knowledge of your pregnancy with a child you cannot have, the residual haunting of your last abandoned boyfriend, a man you could not love.

After your daughter's birth, and throughout her first year, you found yourself inexplicably wanting to live in the country and have six babies. You told yourself the desire was biological and wanted it just the same, until at thirteen months your daughter was done with nursing and the world came back into view.

The procedure takes fifteen minutes, including the insertion of the IUD. You feel nothing, only relief, and afterward, your ex-husband picks you up from the hospital. That night you go out drinking with friends to celebrate the removal.

Fifteen years later the IUD will have to come out. It will be embedded in your uterus and won't come easily. The doctor will do a D&C. You will bleed more than you did with the abortion. You will feel more, days later suddenly knocked breathless with a knowledge of your body's violation. You will cry. You will be fragile. Your lover will protect you, hold you, will have gone with you to the hospital, will have waited through the surgery, seen you home. You cried when he told you he would go with you. You will not have expected this, unused to being taken care of, after so many years alone.

Your mother studied French when she was a girl, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa at the age of nineteen. Her brother was to go to law school. She lived at home and got a job and supported her brother's education. She dreamed of going to France.

What is the body for? Passage through time. A woman comes into the world with all her eggs intact.

These are lessons, remember? The voice of instruction. The voice of your life is speaking to you.

When she has her passport picture taken for the trip to Paris, her image comes back so grim that she shows it to her doctor. The weather will be dark, the season winter. Sometimes in winter she gets snowed in. She tires more easily. She sleeps too many hours. Her doctor agrees that she doesn't look her usual self, and puts her on an antidepressant.

The antidepressant enrages you. You demand to know why the doctor hasn't recognized your mother's circumstances, the darkness of winter, the loneliness of old age, why he didn't test her, recommend therapy, deal with the cause.

In Paris she will be happier than you ever remember seeing her. As excited as a child. Mostly you will think it is Paris that makes her so happy, that lightens her step. At moments, though, you will wonder whether she really has been depressed all your life, all of hers, whether this strangely exuberant drug-induced woman is somehow your true mother, the mother you might have had all along.

Sometimes in Paris you will notice that she struggles for words, has more to say than time to say it in so ends up saying nothing, stammering to come forward with a single sound. You will think it is age at last, creeping up on her, until she tells you this new struggle with language is a side-effect of the drug.

Your rage returns. You demand to know whether the doctor studies her progress, watches her for adverse reactions, whether she's talked to him about this sporadic difficulty with speech. She resists you: she goes in for regular blood tests to monitor the dosage. And no, she hasn't told him.

Six months later she will say on the phone that she has good news, a thyroid condition. You will hesitate. Why is this good news? She can stop the antidepressant, she says. The problem was thyroid all along. The source of her happiness is economic. The medication for thyroid costs only $7 for a three-month supply.

On the telephone she still stammers, still gropes for words.

Les trois femmes: in Paris your lover took this picture again and again. Together, you have all your breasts. You have your ovaries, your fallopian tubes. Each of you has her uterus, and her clitoris. Your three hearts still beat, your six lungs still take in breath. You still speak, if haltingly. Every month, you and your daughter still bleed. These are lessons that haven't finished yet, lessons that refuse to end.

She has always been self-conscious about the size of her nose, which is long and Germanic and for many years has borne a pocklike scar from the removal of a small sun-induced cancer. Like her, you also have cancer-prone skin.

All her life she has been thin. She is a moderate person. She smokes in moderation, drinks in moderation, eats in moderation. When you were an infant she nursed you for six weeks. The only immoderate thing she's ever done, she likes to say, is love your father--choose your father to love.

After his first heart attack she will have gained weight. Only five pounds but it will look like more. Suddenly she will be puffy, almost plump. Almost won't look like your mother anymore. Five pounds.

All your life, you will gain weight. What you lose you will gain again. Every five pounds in either direction will make a difference in your appearance. But not the difference those five pounds make in your mother's.

It will become impossible to look at her, at her pale sagging skin, at her shriveling body, and imagine that you ever emerged from it. You. To imagine that you ever inhabited that space between her hips, that you rocked inside that womb, that her muscles ever expelled you, as yours expelled your own daughter, down the passage of her vagina and out into the world.

When you began to write these lessons you had in mind to explore this abhorrence, this abjection. As if the secret of it lay somehow in the matter of your mother's flesh.

When your father dies she loses the extra weight. She loses it slowly. As if she'd gained that weight, she says, to see her through the loss.

Seventeen years later she is still losing weight. Or is losing weight again, loses flesh, height, bone. Another five pounds maybe. Maybe another ten. She doesn't tell you. But you can see.

She tells you she doesn't regret those dead babies.

Catherine Gammon