The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [79]
My belly grew too big for my clothes. Too big for my bath. My bed. Too big for my house. My former me and all her puny dramas. Bigger and bigger. My belly grew.
And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made.
At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I’d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don’t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a sexuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali - had anyone crossed me I’d have a head necklace. I’d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I’d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don’t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I’d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I’d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man balls and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives.
My belly grew.
My belly carried me.
My belly carried our love, bulging between our shit faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer.
When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers.
My thirst to go numb began to leave my body.
At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It’s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.
That night after the knot tying business? We went home and staged a photo shoot. Me with a black satin ribbon tied around my neck and black satin panties in front of a deep red velvet curtain licking milk from a bowl. I don’t know why. We just did.
God the sex we had from that photo. Big bellied sex.
Now that, ladies, is a keeper.
Because when love comes to someone like me? After all my black holes? You can bet your ass I’m going to grab it. I may be damaged goods, but I’m not an idiot.
And baby, lemme tell you. I’m no Hester Prynne.
Sun
LIGHT.
Life.
Beautiful alive boy.
The night my son Miles chose to come there was a thunderstorm. In San Diego in April a thunderstorm is a gift - as if your soul might be wetted for a moment between days of endless sun.
When my water broke I walked barefoot in a nightgown down the street a block to the ocean. Andy was asleep in bed. My sister Brigid was asleep in the house. I cried and the ocean within me made way for this boy and the ocean before me opened up. When I got to the water I said “Lily. He’s here.” Then I walked back to the house. In bed next to my sleeping love I counted minutes. It was 5:00 a.m. The contractions felt like sentences before they are born. It is the only time in my life I have experienced