A Translator: Chapter Two

Chapter Two: Wombs

This is a memoir of my body and because I am a woman, I guess you could say that it is the story of a life framed by two wombs, the one I came from and my own.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was chubby. It would be almost impossible to imagine her this way if not for one photo is our family album. In the photo, she is hardly pregnant. It is late October 1975 and her skin is a brown somewhere between carmine and cinnamon. Her cheeks are rounding already. She is wearing high waisted white pants and a red and white striped top. The white is a shock against her skin tone and her long black hair. Posing in a doorway, one hand on her hip, she is a knock out.

It was my mother’s third pregnancy. Her body knew what to do. She was impatient. She managed a long winter and the taunt of spring. Now it was early June and the weather was hot. When her doctor said it would be another two weeks before the baby arrived, she likely waited until he turned to his notes, before flipping him a low slung bird. When she left the doctor’s office, she marched past the bus stop. The bench was hot from the hard sun, she couldn’t imagine sitting on it, and she began the long walk to the house on Lake Street.
I call it the house on Lake Street, not our house. It had a definite article, like the train station or the mall, but was never truly in our possession. My parents met there for a few hours each day, long enough to eat a meal, start a fight, and storm out to the garage.

No one in her small town walked anywhere. The bus system was pretty much for decoration, some civic vanity project to make the town appear more cosmopolitan than Bruce Mines or Wawa. Not many rode it, but it was there, as proof that the small town might someday be a city. Along with the Steel Plant, and the two paper mills, they made this town significant.

But she had lived in Toronto. She’d taken streetcars to work and subways to parties. She knew more about the world than most of the people around her. She’d even been to Detroit once.

Some bus stops had weather shelters. They were made of wood, had a roof and two sides. In the rage of a blizzard, depending on the direction of the wind, you might feel protected while waiting for the glow of the bus’ two wide set headlights to break through the curtain of white. But the shelter did not keep out the cold, and it was just as likely that the wind might come from the same direction as the bus, and in those times, you were brushing the flakes off your eyelashes, worried that in blinking them away, the bus might pass you by.

It was funny to be thinking of blizzards during this hot spell. It was early June, and it had been hot for enough days that the last of the snow banks, those ancient sooty ones that rimmed shopping mall parking lots and school grounds, had finally succumbed. Now it was hot and muggy, the humidity coming off the lake making the green in the world become bolder.

She tied her hair into a pony tail, feeling the weight of her belly as she lifted her arms. She shook her head at the foolish doctor who said two more weeks.

She counted the bus stops along Queen Street, one every couple blocks, and counted twenty before she was certain that she was in labour. She finished the walk home, pausing when she had her first good contraction. When she arrived, her son and her mother were in the backyard pulling rhubarb from the garden. Her mother looked up and saw the pause, the grimace, and knew it was time to get the suitcase.

The birth itself was easy, relatively short, but I am lucky to be alive. My parents had only wanted two children. My mother’s first pregnancy was almost twins, but something happened, and instead of two babies, there was only my brother. Then, in another year, she was pregnant again, and she and my father agreed, this would be it, two kids and they were done, she’d get her tubes tied. But then she miscarried.

By that point she was sure she wanted to be a mother. She had already been transformed by the love she felt for her son. The miscarriage was a loss for her and my father.

It’s odd to think of how fertile my mother was. By my age, she had a child in kindergarten. By my age, she was one more separation away from a divorce and single motherhood.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I can’t imagine being a mother, because I certainly can. I think I’d make a good mother, though the downsides of parenting seem pretty clear to me. What a risk, to make a promise with your body to be tied to another human for a lifetime, and that this promise should manifest as a third person that you will carefully bring into the world together. To break that promise, seems the most profound failure anyone can make. And yet I am proof that it is survivable.

My body might not want to make that promise. A doctor once told me I have a heart shaped uterus, like a Valentine heart was drawn between my ovaries. It seems an even better place to find this cartoon symbol than in my chest. My heart might be ready to do its proper function, though my uterus may be inhospitable for procreation, it is a perfect host for love.

In some ways I think it’s fair to say I’ve already been a parent. Helping a frail parent has a lot of similarities to parenting. There are triumphs, the times you coach or advocate for your parent, and they learn or are protected, or maybe even flourish. There are brutal epiphanies when the limit of your influence becomes clear, when you fail to protect them. Caring for a dying parent is very similar to parenting, minus the hope.

When my mother was dying, the stages of withdrawl from this life were incremental and seemed infinite. A few hours after she told us it was time, she slipped from consciousness. At least that is what I thought, though it was hard to tell, because her eyes never closed. Her poor muscle control combined with the lid lift, meant she’d slept with at least one eye open for years. As she entered into the labour of death, her eyes remained open. Her mouth also moved, in soft round shapes, it was like watching someone croon “Moonriver” on mute. The thought crossed my mind that she was trying to say something, but also I was quite certain that she wasn’t.

Very young infants make these same mouth shapes, as they learn the muscle control necessary to communicate emotion. Eventually, it results in a smile, maybe just by fluke, but then the delight in their mother’s face rewards it, and then mirroring begins. I noticed this when looking into the face of my friend Linda’s two month old daughter. The baby’s eyes widened, her eyebrows lifted, her mouth stretching to oh shapes. I couldn’t be sure that she saw me, that her actions were anything more than muscle twitches.

But it seems to me, that each small development that baby makes, each element of humanness she acquires, has to be practiced, borrowed, and then at the end, it will be given back.

I hear that demystifying death, talking about it, facing it as a fact of life, is supposed to make us more courageous. I think it might be my only regret of my mother’s passing that I did not come through it less afraid of death or more certain of why we are here.

I can guess that is what makes parenthood so much better than what I have experienced; the truth that each day, things get better, children become more independent, giving hints they may be better than us. A small bundle of the future you can hold in your arms.