Somebody's Daughter, the Forgotten Entry

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Tear Down This Wall, Mr. Gorbachev

 

September 29, 2011

I sit on my mat and pull out my hair, make a little nest I can gather together and throw away. My husband is at the bathroom sink doing his male toilette. Josie lies like a slug on the chaise and sighs. I read, but am inspired by nothing. I am disheartened by the long day of nausea ahead, the gray skies, the predictable hours.

“Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev.” These are the words in my mind. 

  What wall?

Unhinged, then Hinged.

September 28, 2011

“The urge toward form is the urge toward God” Charles Wright says in his poem, “Scar Tissue”. I'm not sure I see that as true. God lies behind form, is formless. God is more like Mecca, a direction. We can angle ourselves toward or away. Away, and life can well as high as the morning sky and pummel you to the sand where you bob up, dazed, frantically searching for all of your lost items. I am learning, ever so slowly, to orient myself toward God. Only then, do I feel the ground beneath my feet.

So this morning I got out of bed and rolled out the mat and looked up at the light coming in through the window. I tilted slightly to the north; it was a symbolic gesture. I thought about hearts, opened hearts, awakened hearts, beating hearts. I said, “God”. I read some poetry. I tried to stare into the intergalactic space of my mind. Stars rushed at me. I became frustrated. I said, this is enough, and rose to go eat a muffin. As I rolled my mat, I thought of my father's faith in science. My father had a very logical mind, was an engineer for most of his life. I used to find scraps of his papers with his firmly pressed letters and numbers; his attempts, failures, successes to look for answers to his math problems. When he got sick with cancer, he treated the doctors like gods. Sure he went to church like a good Catholic (I still remember him singing the Holy Holy in a soft baritone voice to himself) but his true faith lie in science, and later, specifically, medicine. He spoke of those doctors with such...reverence. And I used to wonder why. So they're intelligent, so they have saved people, but they're men, just as you are a man, and men only go so far. My father did everything they told him to; he was the perfect patient. They told him to have radiation, he had radiation. They told him to have brain surgery, he had brain surgery. They told him to do chemo, he did chemo, and he did it with a smile on his face, believing in the doctors' command of life. He wanted so desperately to live. I'm not sure where my father's spirituality was back then. I'm sure he had his personal prayers and a private relationship with God, but I didn't get a glimpse of it. I saw a man desperate and at the hand of doctors and then ultimately furious his body wouldn't go the way they commanded it.

Now I go headfirst into my own dilemma and I am wary of doctors, their onslaught of statistics, their professional, stoic dispositions. I have yet to meet one doctor I consider to be whole, to be of scientific mind, yes, but spiritually inclined, or maybe not spiritually inclined, that's too dangerous for this society, maybe just truly compassionate. When I leave their offices, I am unhinged. Jelly. Fearful. I'll do anything they tell me to, just like my father. I start to convince myself I can handle watching the needle puncture that beating heart and silence it. Hell, I never wanted three babies and sure as hell not all at once. I'm no mother-woman (credit Kate Chopin, The Awakening). And then a little voice says, how do you know what you are? The tide of opposite thinking always washes back in. I hinge myself back together. What if they're wrong, I start to think. What if I can do this?

What disgusts me most about these fertility doctors is their complete disrespect for life. They pump us up with zygotes according to some chart and feel no qualms about going in and “reducing”. There are some doctors who spend day in and day out “reducing”. And I want to say, Well do you have to be so fucking cavalier about it? Shouldn't there at least be a moment of silence?

There must be a middle road, one where you walk with an open mind and an open heart. Only then will I find the answer.

Baby A, Baby B, and Baby C

September 27, 2011

Three Blind Moles Attach

Three blind moles attach

to my uterus, their luminescent

heads subtly bob, their bodies

curl and tuck. My silent world

closes on their soft round skulls.

Help. This is the word

choked out, then swallowed. Help.

The sedum, ubiquitous in September,

is pink with nausea, the crab apple tree

has forgotten its fruit, the sky,

wrapped in Lazarus's shrouds, holds

out both arms to Mother Earth

who thrusts open her legs. I retract

from their lovemaking. Slumber is

as thick as weeds.

The small pat, the unleavened bread,

beats in each blind mole,

a tap tap tap telegraph to souls

whose wings darken rooftops

and valleys. I lay this body down

toss out statistics and pitch the head

of Science on a stick.

I must be still. The oracular,

the subtle clink and hush

of reflection, the ruddy-colored bird

with a sideways eye, the stinted bud

with a slice of stitched lip, is among us.

Where is that place of truth and trust, where perception isn't amped up with worry and worst case scenarios? Once again, I feel as if life is happening to me and not with me. I carry the weight of this decision like a ten pound watermelon. It starts to spoil and I smell eggs. Rotten eggs. And then I am depressed. Hopeless. My mind deems no solution. I collapse like a supernova into a black hole. How can I not do that? Where is the door to new thinking? Writing poetry helps because I can express the depths of me and not have them fester. That's step one. But the higher power thing has me conflicted. Catholic guilt and old Catholic mores say I am being tested, or worse, punished. I didn't put my faith in God in this situation, I put it in science and now I must deal with the ramifications. But the Buddha in me says otherwise. There are no mistakes, just life. Make this decision first out of compassion and make it with the awakened heart.

But it's the heart that bothers me the most. Their tiny beating hearts. If they were a conglomeration of cells and only this, I would have no problem having the doctors remove one. But they are no longer just cells; they have that heart and that heart, I believe harkens the soul. I am one for hearts; I can't help it.

The risks of having triplets are numerous. Babies born at two pounds, NICU for weeks, gestational diabetes, not too mention how I will progress to the size of a cement truck. I never wanted three babies, ever. The doctors are anxiously waiting for me to say the word, reduce, and my worries will be instantly lessened. But there is that already beating heart and its holy momentum. Who am I to stand in its way?