Tuesday morning found me driving down to the medical complex next to the children’s hospital for Jude’s scheduled endoscopy. He is mostly fine now, and I don’t write much about it anymore because it seems like that’s his business as he’s old enough to choose what he wants to share and what he doesn’t. But suffice it to say that the extreme bout of post-viral gastroparesis back in 2020 left enough of a disruption in its path that we have to see a GI specialist now. He’d experienced another flare (though nothing as extreme as the original one) earlier this year and was referred for an endoscopy. By midday, I was able to exhale because all went well with no signs of concern. Then I got a call from pathology yesterday that echoed what his doctor said after the procedure, and everything looks healthy.
But of course, I didn’t know all of that to be true as I talked to the nurse the day before to get pre-op instructions or as I drank coffee alone in the quiet kitchen before the day began or as I signed all of the consent forms for anesthesia. I’m glad it’s over. I felt bone-tired from it, and all I really did was drive him there, wait next to him as they prepared him with an IV, nervously try to distract myself for the short procedure, and then wait next to him as he woke from anesthesia.
He is a few months away from high school. He is six feet tall with a chiseled jaw and twice as strong as I am. He asks me questions I’ve never thought about before and knows more about many things than I do. But there was some feeling stirring in me as I sat next to him when he woke up from his anesthesia haze that I haven’t felt in a long time, and it reminded me of the days when his little frame fit in the crook of my arm and molded to my shape, that sixth sense buried deep in your bones that rises from some mysterious place when you’re looking for confirmation your kid is physically safe. It is different from all of the other worries I have lately, different from the emotional complexities of raising tweens and teenagers. It’s less fuzzy and more concrete and primal. Something more elemental, something familiar, something like what it felt like to wipe sweat from his tiny, feverish body at 2am in a rocking chair in that corner of his nursery with the tree-lined view I came to know in any hour, even by moonlight. It’s been a long time since I felt that particular chord vibrate inside, but on Tuesday morning as I nervously wagged my foot with my right leg crossed over my left and then sat up a little straighter when the doctor walked in to review the results, I felt it again. When they wheeled his man-sized frame back to where I waited alone, there was a brief spark of a moment that felt like I had a baby again.
It was a timely reminder because last week I finished Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, and it took me back to that time as well. I loved that novel so much, though I know it's not for everyone. It features blood and violence beyond what I can usually tolerate, and it’s weird and thought-provoking and just all around incredible. The general premise is that the main character is an artist who abandons her career to stay home with her son because daycare is both expensive and emotionally taxing, and she soon finds herself turning into a dog as some unexpected shapeshifting miracle. Her husband travels for work each week, and eventually she stops fighting the transformation when he’s away and instead just lets it happen and enjoys what it feels like to be an animal. Beneath this bizarre storyline, Yoder inserts all kinds of commentary on motherhood (both society’s expectations of us and our own primal urges) that were so spot-on for me that I couldn’t put my pen down. My copy is full of underlining and marginalia that I couldn’t stop scribbling.
The world we live in leads us to believe that women mellow when they have children, that in caring for another being so tiny and helpless, our wildness fades somehow. And maybe that is true about certain kinds of wildness; risky behavior was never a craving of mine, but now with kids of my own, my tolerance for physical risk is nearly zero. But there is some other kind of wildness, some feral longing and reaching that motherhood birthed in me nearly fifteen years ago, and before I read Nightbitch, it was something I couldn’t even put words to myself. It felt so good to read a book that allowed me to feel seen and gave words to a feeling I harbored but didn’t define. I think maybe the reason that magical realism works well in that book is because that feeling is so unnamable and complex that only a bizarre metaphor can fully communicate it.
But Yoder doesn’t oversimplify with some mama-bear trope, and she doesn’t stop with the animalistic, bodily feeling of early motherhood; she pushes it further to illuminate the urge to create and to show that motherhood and art do not have to be at war with each other, and both of those things can have a ferocious quality that borders on violence. As she says,
“This thing comes from us … It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If a child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. [We forget] the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces.”
She is right that there is some fierce transformation that takes place when you become a mother. I felt it in the early days when I learned to interpret baby cries so that my life could nourish another, and I felt it again on Tuesday morning as I waited to see that Jude was okay. But motherhood did something else to me, too. It birthed some generative urge that Yoder also illustrates in her central character. When my kids were babies, I can remember knitting sweaters and sewing things and making projects in one week’s time that would now take me months to complete. Probably in part because I was a stay-at-home mom for three short years, and in that time, the repetitive hamster wheel of our days made me want to see a finished project. But I think there was also something else there. A primal urge to make something, maybe birthed by the most incredible act of creation there is– to make a whole new person. Motherhood birthed something in me that felt like an insatiable inner hunger to build something, to create anything at all, with my own hands. Or as Yoder says, to make a world, and then, too, make a person to live in that world. Those earliest years are also when I began writing, which is no coincidence, just another way of building something with words as my medium.
There are moments (and the novel illuminates this so well) when mothering and art are in conflict with one another no doubt. I’ve written about that many times. I feel it when I have ideas in my head and I want to write but instead I’m tending to kids and when I look at publication lists from other writers who aren’t mothering right now, and I feel woefully slow and behind. I often tell myself that old story that says motherhood consumes so much of me that there’s not much left to give to anything else in my life. But the most dangerous stories we have are the ones we retell ourselves without question, and Nightbitch reminded me to question that worn out trope of the mom who is too tired to amount to anything outside of her motherhood duties. What does “amount to anything” even mean? What am I supposed to be doing if not living my life as it comes to me and creating things at my own pace?
Someone benefits from that overused tale, and it’s not us. When you tell women that motherhood takes every ounce of what we have and is so all-consuming that we cannot build new things, we stay in that quiet and isolated place of overwhelm instead of creating the lives and communities we want. We relinquish all of our power and lay it down at the altar of motherhood as society defines it instead of recognizing how mothering actually amplifies our power with its feral longings. A question I have never thought to ask myself until I read this book: without motherhood, would I even be writing at all? I don’t think I would. One act of creation birthed the other act of creation for me, and nurturing kids is a whole lot like nurturing words. Parenthood and writing feel more alike than different most of the time. They don’t have to be in competition with each other; instead there can be a symbiosis between them. There is something untamed and wild about motherhood, driven by instinct, all the time taking twists and turns that you never predicted, all the while creating something beautiful when you cannot possibly know how it will be in the end. That is exactly what it feels like to write. Let instinct take the wheel and let it go. Trust that you are building worlds you cannot see. As a words-girl, I’ve always loved the use of midwife as a verb, as in “to bring something into being.” I’m midwifing my children into whatever they will become, a job that didn’t end in a finite moment when they left my body to take their first breath, but instead that is where it began, and it continues still. But sometimes I forget that I’m midwifing my own work too, my own life. Shepherding what wants to take shape as it moves from one world to the next, from desire and idea to reality and experience.
After the nervous energy of his endoscopy passed, I settled into a slow rhythm for the last few days in an attempt to make spring break last, but as always, it has flown by despite my efforts. We spent some time at a pop-up art exhibit in Atlanta yesterday. (The Balloon Museum, an immersive art experience that has traveled from Rome to other cities around the globe and is here through June.) It was strange and wonderful and felt like stepping into another world for a while. I love a traditional museum experience with glossy floors and art behind glass, but it was refreshing to be in a completely different setting where our own physical experience could collide with the art itself in such unexpected ways.
I bounced in a ball pit for the first time in decades, and this time with glowing orbs above us and my own laughing children next to me. I left feeling buoyant and inspired and watched my kids lose themselves in a new experience that was only about fun and beauty, which is always my favorite view of them and a memory I’ll hold onto like a snow globe.
I’m beginning to see that though motherhood and art, both the making of it and the consuming of it, can feel like they are opposing forces at times, it all springs from the same well inside of me. It’s all that undeniable urge to tend, to nurture, to create, to usher in something new that wasn't there before. As Yoder’s central character says, I don’t have any answers other than art seems essential, as essential as mothering. In order to be a self, it is essential. I should perhaps cease being a person without it. Is that enough of a reason, that it matters to me?
What matters to me is these two kids, the life they’ve given me, the words I never would have written without them, and the inner world I’ve created with those words. This self, the one they birthed in me when I birthed them, is the only one I know. What a gift it is to midwife whatever comes next, to make the thing I cannot yet see, to relish in the act of making what I want to make just because it matters to me.
I have enjoyed your writing for some time. This essay in particular speaks to me so clearly. Thank you for sharing!
Omg- perfect timing. One of my favorite essays you’ve written! 🙌🏼 👏🏼. Good God is this relatable.