This Is My Body, Filling My Body

Sometimes cellular regeneration hurts but not always

“Guess what sweetie? You’re almost there!” This is what the nurse says when she examines me on arrival. Her hands are warm and gentle.

“Just a skip and a jump, hon.” She pats my shoulder and grins. I think I’m not a very good feminist for liking how she calls me sweetie and hon, but I do like it, very much. Soon after the nurse completes her exam, she is at the door. “Hit the buzzer when things pick up,” she says as she leaves. John feeds me ice chips as I ride cascading waves of pain.

This homey country birthing room is a far cry from the high-tech city hospital where Sophie was born, where I was hooked up to a monitor and Pitocin, where a male doctor I’d never met sliced me open wide to make pushing go faster. I am happy here in this sleepy, low-lit place, laboring in my own way, with my raspberry leaf tea and some black cohosh to speed things along. 

Before dawn, my water breaks with a gush. I vomit. 

“Atta girl!” John says happily. He remembers this turning point from Sophie’s birth. He laughs, his real laugh. We whisper together between contractions until it comes, the fiercest wave yet. Here is the nurse again. Now the doctor. My body seizes and rolls through the shocks that follow, and I stare into the void behind my closed eyes, entranced by what I see.

Giant weeds coming up through the darkness, one after the next, rhythmic and ghostly, white roots intact, wet dirt clinging to fine-haired tendrils. “Visualize your cervix opening, the baby moving through you,” the nurse says. I try then to think of Jackson Street, those roses opening petal by petal. I try and I try, but in this long, dark tunnel where I float, weightless and dizzy, I see only weeds, weeds pulled up by the root, one after the other after the other, until something else finally pulses its way through the darkness too, something fiery, something that burns and slides back into myself.

This is my body, filling my body. Into this vision—weeds drawn from fertile soil over and over again, weeds and the rich, heady smell of dirt, weeds and the awkward act of pulling life from life, life into life, one thing to die and another to live—my son is born. 

This boy is neither flower nor weed. He doesn’t come from the earth. He comes from me. The part that burns is the part that glows. My body is bigger than my body. My body is a nebula, hydrogen and helium, dust and plasma. Bodies are made of cells, cells are made of atoms, and atoms are billions of years old. My son is slick against my naked chest. His skin is the exact same temperature as mine. His tiny bones are soft and alive. His mouth is a mouth, searching for home—and home is the stellar nursery of my skin, my breath, my milk. “Hello, baby,” I say. His gray eyes float through light-years to fix on mine.

This, I realize, is a covenant. 

“Waning moon,” John says, pointing out the hospital window. So, now I know. But it doesn’t matter because soon enough, the moon will wax again. But not everything that leaves comes back. I don’t know what will become of my mother, or the woman who moans, or me, or John, or Mafia, or any of us. I think of Sophie’s friends, Carl and Sugar, their blurry, anonymous squirrel bodies, always running. I still don’t know what it means. Here’s what I do know: I am a moon, and Sophie fits in my hollows, no matter the shape I take, and so too must my son. “Look at you,” I whisper. His name will be Maxwell, for deep water. 

“You need to push, hon,” the nurse says. The placenta is still inside of me, and I have to push it out now, this temporary organ formed from the same bundle of cells that also became this tiny creature, the one in my arms, studying my face like a familiar constellation. In some cultures, the placenta is called the twin. In this rural hospital, it is just a placenta. Still, I will be allowed to take it home in a plastic ice cream bucket, and I will bury it in my garden, where the placenta will decompose into simple matter to begin again. Scientists say our cells hold everything forever. But, also, cells are constantly dying and regenerating. Sometimes cellular regeneration hurts, but not always. Scientists say the body replaces itself with an almost entirely new set of cells every seven to ten years. Some important parts are renewed even faster. Other important parts are never renewed. All these facts are true.

“Push,” the nurse says again. “You have to push.” She presses hard on my stomach with one hand—a graphic kind of pain—and strokes my forehead with the other, which makes me cry. “You can do this,” she says. “Just push!”

And so I do. I push.

For More Embodied Writing, Please Join Us for Our Next Seasonal Intensive, The Visceral Self: Writing Through The Body

Writing in the Dark’s next seasonal intensive for paid subscribers, The Visceral Self, starts April 3, and will include weekly craft essays, readings, writing exercises, and participation in the comments, as usual in our intensives, plus paired yin yoga poses and meditations. Additional content (recorded meditations, candlelight Live Salons on Zoom, and more) for founding members.

This one is going to be special. Get more details (and more embodied writing examples) in the four linked posts below. I hope to write with you!

Love,
Jeannine

1. The Visceral Self Starts Soon

2. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final ... Nearby is the country they call life.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

3. I Was A Child in A Child’s Body

4. Some Might Have Called the Roses Garish

An earlier version of this essay appeared as part of a longer story called “The Part That Burns” published as Narrative Magazine’s Story of the Week in 2017. A revised version appears in my 2021 memoir, The Part That Burns.