You Never Had A Brother
On figments and a figurative four walls, imaginings, intrusive thoughts, and fear of fear itself.
Knives
I cut up the head of cauliflower as quickly as I can, not because the baby is restless—using her pinkened legs to propel herself off her kick-and-play piano, her arms thrown wildly toward the plastic monkey hanging down with its plastic tambourines, but because I wield a knife. And, I want the task that involves the knife to be done, the knife put away quickly—as quickly as it can be. I want to be done with knives.
Four months postpartum, I now only see danger. Clothes with too-tight collars at the neck, a tub full of water, dangling wires and loose wires and soon-to-be-loose wires, a bedroom and its pillows. I fear not what I would do with such things, but I fear the fear of knowing what one could do with such things, and am awed that we have mutually agreed on this reality, that everyday things are never seen in more unspeakable light. That is: blades don’t shimmer too darkly and electrical sockets don’t glow so menacingly and we are never called—really called—to the water.
I am also awed at how keenly I now see the world. The dark and the menacing and the siren-like. And, how much I worry in my seeing. About our agreement. About this “reality.” About the various angles of light.
Throughline
As a new mom, my life is freshly parceled. My baby and I two bodies sectioned only by hours. We change, feed, sleep, change—wash, sterilize, wash, use again. There is a steadiness in sequencing, a safety in the closed loop, and also a quiet. This quiet—the quiet of our days—is not one I'm used to: the kind of quiet under a Caribbean sun that encourages the listless fingering of a novel's pages, the whirling of the tops of berries against a tongue, the sipping of warm cola, the cultivating a kind of ease. No. These days are tired and tiring and strangely—in the largesse of exhaustion—unproductive. My body propped up by the cry of my child, then dragged from moment to moment by sheer will. These days, it would seem, nothing—not even ease-is being cultivated.
Fearful of the lack of cultivation and acutely aware of the litany of days behind me—the great dragnet of time, I volunteer myself for a serial workshop in which we write and read serial poems over six weeks time.
In the workshop, we read poems that appear to mimic life with their unceasing refrain and repeating patterns, but also poems that break those patterns, and poems that never had a pattern to start. We read poems of containment—their tiny organs strung into a vital system, functioning miraculously together, and poems written together under specific conditions—each the result in the same or a very similar Petri dish, and poems with a throughline—the line threading the poem together, pulling the reader through.
One evening, after putting Aoife to bed, I find myself listening to fake ocean waves on a sound machine a half a mile from the real ocean, teased into the night by one such throughline.
Over the course of an hour, I trace the speaker in Larry Levis’ poem “Linnets” as he profiles his brother—his brother and his brother's shooting of linnets, his brother and his brother's two-tone shoes. His brother who walks through an intersection, who pulls him—the speaker—in a cart through the town. The brother whom he meets in Los Angeles, who offers him “bitten words”—the brother who remembers nothing of the past.
The poem is in twelve parts and as I begin to read the eleventh, a piece of information, a shard of context enters my chest and turns itself deeply in me. A punctum: it suddens, stabs, stuns.
Until one day, in a diner in Oakland
you begin dying.
It is peacetime.
You have no brother.
You never had a brother.
The throughline I had imagined existed, the reality to which I was attuned, the things that held the poem all together: in one moment falling away.
Perinatal Anxiety
In Lucy Jones' Matrescence, she lists the "symptoms" of pregnancy that surprised her—restless leg syndrome, acne, eczema, pins and needles, brain fog, color changes, increased vascularity, feeling high.
Women who I knew were once pregnant or pregnant alongside me also warned of a number of strange and debilitating effects from fainting spells to carpal tunnel to in-the-night nose bleeds to mouths full of blood, and my own pregnancy felt like a bombshell: nausea only quelled by eating pretzels, migraines that triggered mid-night vomiting, blurred vision in one eye, loss of hearing in one ear, two weeks of pelvic pain, severe TMJ, heart palpitations and dizzy spells, floaters, low blood pressure, and constant dysgeusia—a sour taste that turned eating into a minefield and begged me to eat the cake, the cookie, the bagel and then after eating said cake, cookie, bagel made me immediately repent.
And, then, there was the panic. Panic walking to get an egg-and-cheese sandwich on Key West’s Duval St. Panic walking to the beach. Panic walking from the beach. Panic in poorly lit grocery stores. Panic in overly lit grocery stores. Panic in crowds, panic when left alone. Panic in cars. Panic in bodegas. Panic in restaurants. Panic if I left Old Town then panic if I left a two-street radius then panic if I left the house then panic if I left the safety of my bed. And, during all that panic, I began to fear something else, something even worse: that in postpartum, this panic might turn, curdle.
I imagined strange thoughts slipping into my mind as if logic, and those faulty imaginings, twisted figments beginning to grow, fluttering in and out of my reality, and then my reality: in and out of illusion. I worried about the kinds of stories you watch on Dateline. That like the realities for those new mothers who fell into psychosis, reality for me might loosen and I, too, would find a way to use a rope or a wire, to mix tub with water and water with child, to wield a knife. I worried deeply that I might become divorced from the world I knew, and while I might continue on with a life, my real life would fall away, shed like a second skin—that I might think I was doing one thing while doing something altogether different. In brief, I imagined I might imagine—like Levi’s’ speaker—I had a brother, only to find I had no brother.
Horrifying yet: I never had a brother.
Darkening
Alone with Aoife, I coax her into a lime-green Halo swaddle, wrap her diaphragm tight to prevent her arms’ inevitable escape, then lay her down in hopes I can finish reading about a woman also laying down her child. If it sounds recursive, it’s because it is. My reading a bubble of my bubble, a silver-lined mirror I hold up to see myself reflecting back into myself.
In The Nursery—the book I’ve been reading—I’ve been following a woman and her relationship with her baby, whom she calls Button, as well as her relationship with her husband John, her relationship with an elderly neighbor named Peter, and her relationship with reality. Her world is held between four figurative walls—an apartment in what I presume to be New York City: "I am here with Button, and this is all I am. This is the doing, me being here." Still, within these four walls, violence looms—dark feelings pervading a seemingly safe space. She thinks at one moment: “[Buttons's] naked body…resembles store-bought poultry...So easy to slice." She thinks at another of her child: "Let's wring you like a wet cloth." She googles: "How common is wanting to kill your baby?"
As I near the end of the novel, which so very accurately depicts postpartum, I am convinced that her neighbor Peter—who visits her in the day when only her and Button are present—is a figment, and also that her thoughts will spiral—become increasingly riddled by dangerous wantings. This belief seemed to have been confirmed midway through the book, when a visit from Peter results in the narrator’s eery dissolution of self. During the visit, Peter reminisces about his dead wife Agata and the narrator reminisces about her own late mother. The two’s stories of their loved ones are at first spitballed then stacked then buckled and folded together, and then increasingly blurred, becoming almost indistinguishable: "She liked to run hot water under her wrists to get warm. He remembers her debilitating migraines. I remember she always wanted to be outside, wherever she was."
Coming to the book’s close as Aoife stirs, however, I learn I am wrong. As the corners of my eyes watch my baby kick about in her little green suit, I find the neighbor of the narrator who is also eying her baby to be of flesh and blood.
In the final scene, the narrator leaves the building that has been her private prison with her husband and child, only to see a photocopied announcement of Peter’s memorial service. Peter, I learn at one time, is both corporeal, and now dead.
As I read the final pages in which narrator and husband agree to attend Peter’s service, I find myself somehow disappointed by this fact. As if the narrator’s suffering wasn't quite enough.
Scarcely Thoughts
In the first psychiatry session I attend since October and my early postpartum, I am excited to unveil a happier, healthier me—a person no longer stricken by panic at every turn, no longer sick of being sick. I am also eager to discuss what I call “thoughts.” I tell my psychiatrist there had been these “thoughts,” but then I preempt what I am about to state, qualifying the statement. These are not “scary thoughts,” I find myself saying, but “just thoughts”—scarcely thoughts, or really things you could (if you really tried to) call thoughts, or at best a kind of thinking similar to thoughts.
These thoughts I’ve had, I explain, happen mostly when I’m alone with the baby, and the imagined result is my undoing. If I eat a dried mango, I will choke to death. If I eat fennel or fenugreek or fiddlehead or anything that starts with an ‘f,’ I will go immediately into anaphylactic shock. If I try a new spice, unusual seasoning, or a ‘natural flavor’ of unknown origin, I am likely to asphyxiate and die. That the rash on my chest is the result of a histamine reaction, that my body is irretrievably lost.
I also tell her there had been a kind of ritualization at night. I do not fear the night (a common anxiety in early postpartum), but I have a need to do "good,” "good" vaguely defined as repetitive. I must get into bed on the left side—not the right. I need to close the pocket door to the bathroom, then check if the pocket door is closed. I have to put my nursing bra on the chair carved from a log. Precisely. Just so.
As I tell her of these thoughts, I find myself making light of my thoughts’ consequence, trivializing their power over me, and my psychiatrist, at first letting me rationalize, eventually calls my bluff.
Intrusive thoughts, she says plainly. I am having what I most feared.
Seeing my visible deflation, my psychiatrist goes on to say these are not harmful but anticipated. Surprising and odd and uninvited and unexpected, but to be expected—with over seventy percent of new moms experiencing them. The mother mind like a film left in water, its dormant, gelatinous layer swelling darkly.
Something More Porous
In a monthly reading group I attend, we discuss the lives of Bernadette Mayer and Alice Notley. Of their work and their domestic life, and how the latter intruded, stepped over and into—finding space in the former. The moderator of the group brings up the notion that many of us have about poetry as unsullied, perfect. As writers, we say, “THIS IS THE POEM.” And, doesn't it look exceptional? A monumental black ink around which white pixelated grass springs in a kind of devotion, a concrete island surrounded—even glorified by the space around it. As writers, we also go as far as to point to the mess around our hollowed writing table (the dirty dishes, the cleaning products, the groceries and accounting and the babies and the babies' playthings, all the drudgery and cliche and ubiquity) and say: “THIS, THIS IS NOT POETRY.” This—low, mass, ugly, and also disruptive, unruly, annoying—is separate, outside, unworthy. And, yet, the moderator notes, the truth is poetry is much more porous, is interrupted and interruptible.
I think soon after our discussion: so, too, our minds.
Soft things—easily shaped and just as easily punctured.
That we are right to fear the knife.
Touching
As a new family unit living at the Southernmost Point, we will all-too-soon take to the island's green-blue waters and remember the ritualistic dances we do to appease the tidal flats.
In the Keys, when people climb down ladders, hop over their boats’ and jet skis’ and kayaks’ sides into the water and onto the water’s sandbars they do what is called the stingray shuffle. They kick up their heels and run the soles of their feet along the bottom like teeth along gums to loosen the sand, sending vibrations out from their centers of gravity.
This action stirs up clouds around ocean-goers—divorcing them from what lies below, and encourages unseen threats—like stingrays—to flee.
I think about this strange dance a lot. How in the gray, in the murk—between the blue of the water and the light of the sand—we stand for an instance, teetering on what terrifies us. The bottom of the ocean like the edge of a knife, the choke of a collar, the tendered underside of a pillow, a dangling chord.
How in touching darkness, in calling to it—if only briefly—we also somehow move through it. The white sand kicked up abruptly, generously, gaseously, before settling underfoot.