The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch [80]
I’ve met many mothers whose children didn’t come right or never came at all. We are like a secret tribe of women carrying something not quite of this world.
A Japanese woman friend whose infant son died seven days into his life - no detectable reason - just the small breathing becoming nothing until it disappeared, told me that in Japan, there is a two-term word - “mizugo” - which translates loosely to “water children.” Children who did not live long enough to enter the world as we live in it.
In Japan, there are rituals for mothers and families, practices and prayers for the water children. There are shrines where a person can visit and deliver words and love and offerings to the water children.
There are no Western rituals for the water children. I am an American woman who does not believe in god. But I do believe in waters.
The day Miles was born, Andy cradled my body through its crucible. My sister Brigid stitched love in beautiful thread around the room of us - nothing wrong could have entered her fiercely sewn world. When he came I wailed as women do for the child they have carried and brought into the world. But my wail carried another soul in its song. My Miles’ long body was brought up to my chest, the umbilical cord curling its milky grey spiral still connecting us.
He moved.
I felt the heat of his body.
His little mouth made for the mound of my breast and nipple.
So this is life.
The first thing Miles saw when he opened his eyes was a father who let out a sound I’ve never heard before. A male sob as big as space. A father with open arms ready for his child, ready to protect him his entire life, ready to love him above anything, ready to be the path of a man before him and hold his hand until the boy goes to man. A father who had no father himself rewriting the story.
My sister came to us and embraced the three-bodied organism. I do not know what she felt but her face is the word for it.
In my belly, before he was born, Miles swam. Back and forth and around and flip turns and kicks and such movement - so alive - watching the taught skin of my belly was a little alarming. The force of him took my breath away. And yet we felt inseparable. His body was my body was his was mine. When I went swimming with Miles in my belly, which I did often, people in the lap lanes would marvel at how I could be so fast. So big, so round, so breasted - but fast. But I knew a secret that they did not. We are all swimmers before the dawn of oxygen and earth. We all carry the memory of that breathable blue past.
It is possible to carry life and death in the same sentence. In the same body. It is possible to carry love and pain. In the water, this body I have come to slides through the wet with a history. What if there is hope in that.
In the Company of Men
THEY SAY EVERY WOMAN WHO MARRIES, MARRIES A version of her father. My father fractured the hearts of all the women in our home with his rage. And so when I go back through and think about the men I have loved, or thought I loved, it is with a split apart heart. If I have any idea what the love of family means, if I have any sense at all where the heart of it is, then I learned it first from the man I did not marry.
Do you remember where you were the day Kennedy was shot? I don’t. I was born the year Kennedy was shot. So I can’t remember anything about it. But I remember Michael. In every part of my life.
The first time I saw Michael, he was standing next to Phillip in the painting studio at Texas Tech. It was late at night. I walked up to the floor to ceiling windows and looked in at them from the outside. Two tall, thin, beautiful young men, standing next to each other, painting on canvas. I held my breath. Staring at the image of them … something happened in my heart. It throbbed when I looked at these two men painting. My eyes stung and my throat got tight. But I just took a swig of vodka from a