Torpor

on "micro-violations" / on motherhood / on womanhood / on having a daughter / on dreams for her

Francine Van Hove - She risks her eye (The smell of coffee) 2012

Do you want time? My husband asks and some days I don’t even know what that means.

Standing on the edge of a scene.
A boy’s bedroom.
A stolen joint.

It feels almost primordial. My husband says. Driving around the island we have found ourselves living. All the green making one woozy. But not the sea. And it is as if we are living on a boat. Everything needing to be returned to its place after use.

School is out and I spend the morning reading Kevin Henkes to my daughter. Chester’s Way, Sheila Rae The Brave, Chrysanthemum, A Weekend With Wendell.

Do you want time? My husband asks. The blackberries growing over the path down to the beach. Everything that bloomed in spring needs pruning. A fat cat coming by in the afternoon, making me think how the island is rumored with rats.

I make toast and chicken tenders, making sure to remember to refer to them as “dino nuggets” T-Rexes, and Triceratops as I put them on my daughter’s plate, I roast broccoli. I buy a sweet potato that is sure to grow eyes and limbs.

On the drive to the airport the older man driving us mentions my husband’s relationship with our daughter, the two of them sitting in the back together, and says This is good. This is very good. This means she will make a great housewife. And at first I thought it might be a loss in translation. But he repeats himself. Girls who don’t have good relationships with their fathers, they don’t make good wives, they are crazy.

I roll my eyes back to my husband. I am normally not speechless in these situations, normally I am jumping the gun, I reign down on any slight mention of making my child into something she is not. She is not a teenager I spit when someone refers to her normal range of toddler emotions as being like a 14 year old. She’s only 2 years old! I almost yell, let her be a child! Something happened when my daughter was born, something very old unleashed itself in me. The things that I thought I had resolved all came tumbling up and I became so aware of my daughter’s birth sex and I vowed to protect it, protect her. And I am speechless because my brain can’t compute how you would look at a 3 year old and turn her into a wife. That I thought about the first time I had been turned into one, at 12 years old, a target, pulling on my mother’s sleeve, a drunken, slobbering man coming on to me in a crowded room. My childhood punctured, and of course there are other moments, but often this is the one I return to. The violation so subtle, and even more the ones after that, I tell my therapist, even now, I am often uncomfortable when I can sense that someone thinks I am beautiful. That I was not beautiful then, at 12 years old, or even the following years that I was made into a woman. That what I should find flattering is really terrifying and it makes me feel like I owe whoever is looking at me something. That I have to do something about their enjoyment. That I have to grant them access to me. Sitting in the front seat of the car, directing this man onto the 134, and thinking I could kill him because my daughter is beautiful, the type of beautiful that attracts attention, the type of beautiful, that one night while I am watching the Brooke Shields documentary, I am struck by their similarities, and a shot of terror crawls up my spine.

And days later, I am still thinking about this man’s comment, how often the body is first to register threat, how often I’ve been led to think I am overreacting. That after my daughter’s birth, the assistant surgeon, who also happened to be a friend of my mother’s, and who had now just seen my literal insides, my blood pooling around his feet, my normally sober body shaking from all the drugs and the operation I didn’t want, my daughter suddenly turned sunny side up, and I knew when she had turned, in an acupuncture session where all the needles made her squirm, and I thought I should ring the little bell at my right hand, I should tell the practitioner to take the needles out, but I didn’t, hoping to avoid the the exhaustion of induction turned to c-section, an operation that seemed to take hours, that after 24 hours of labor and 5 in active pushing, my daughter descending and then ascending, her heart rate steady, and then to the operating table, afterwards, the doctor laid his hand on my shoulder and said the good news about X is that she does an incredible cut, just like a plastic surgeon so you will be in that tiny bikini that your husband likes in no time. And I lost it.

I heard you gave Dr. Y a hard time. My obgyn said the next day when she came to look at my scar, which isn’t perfect, which still aches, my daughter now loving to lean her whole body across my middle. I often weep when I think of my daughter growing up with her father. The rare gift of having a man protect her personhood. That often what brings me to tears is their relationship, the care in which he tends to her, that he has never made me aware of my sex, and that he will never make her aware of it. That when he speaks of leaving the country, he speaks of her rights.

On the last day of our online birth class the teacher asked each couple what they wanted for their child, and I could not help but laugh when one couple said I just want her to be happy. Forgetting that I was not on mute, and the teacher turning to my square and saying Well what do you want Jane? And I said I wanted my daughter to know her power, I wanted my daughter to trust her body, I wanted my daughter to never find herself on the prairie stunned into torpor by the sudden cold, like I had been, too often, until I had her.