5 a.m.
By Kaitlin Solimine
Photo Courtesy | Kaitlin Solimine
“Pregnancy brain” is a state of mind, is a 5 a.m. wake up call to pee, nose sick toddler in my bed, his feet against my back and the baby breaststroking my cervix.
Of what am I in service to this time?
Of what will I be called to survive?
I tell his father birth is like dying. The closest you’ll get to it. Not you/him. Me/her. His eyes are wide and tired. Don’t try to talk to a bird.
In the dream before 5 a.m., the Sea of Japan is mentioned. “There’s long maternity leave there, good healthcare,” a tall, white man says. “The Sea of Japan is a good place to ride out the pandemic.” I wake, take note — Find the Sea of Japan on a map, pin for future pandemics.
I book depth hypnosis. Massage. Home organizer. I’m clearing something in order to give birth to something else: but what?
My third eye pulses as soon as this miracle baby is conceived — at 5 a.m., I press my palm to my forehead, ask for divination but the sound machine set to wake in an hour doesn’t answer. I’m hungry for protein pancakes.
“The body doesn’t lie,” the midwives said before they left us in the basement, their bodies pulled to another birth. They were distracted when they came. They were holding space for someone else’s birth/death, the walking of the coals.
I want to cup Silvia Plath’s words in my hands — “The swans are gone. Still the river remembers how white they are. It strives after them with its lights, finds its shapes in a cloud.”
A Townsend’s warbler returns again to the budding lilac above where the 18-year-old cat is buried. There’s a story about Townsend, 19th century grave robber, white man lurking in Chinook cemeteries, plundering skulls for scientific racism: “I don’t rejoice in the prospect of the death of the poor creatures certainly, but then you know it will be very convenient for my purposes.”
There’s our daughter, almost six now, asking if the cat is bones. Just bones. “I miss him,” she says, and I’m tempted to dig six feet of soil and rocks we compressed over his body to touch what’s left of him, to finger what fur survived a season.
Inside me, the third child’s magnificent spine is fully formed, skull 99th percentile, and the body performs perfunctory calisthenics — readying, readying, for what?
This three-inch journey between bodies. Birth is three inches. I’ll never find my way again through this, metaphorically, but that’s not what this is, a way of speaking. This is the knowledge of a body in a body. The knowledge of a bird returning to the same nesting ground. Magnetic, some scientists say, arguing with pens and formulas but somewhere a bird is born from egg from bird mother. Somewhere else a beating heart ceases to flutter.
5 a.m. wake up call: “Unremarkable uterus and cervix,” said the ultrasound report. Unremarkable. I take issue with that. Write forward a new narrative of remarkable uteruses and cervixes.
The dream voice again: “There’s nothing sweeter than the smell of a pregnant puss.” Pregnant with what? Possibility, I’d say, but no one is parting the Sea of Japan for this one, nor that one, nor the one before or the one before that. Good-bye federally mandated maternity leave. Good-bye childcare as infrastructure. Yours/mine. No one in the dream is rebuilding a monument to the remarkable uterus. Remarkable cervix. Mother. Forget forget. Pregnancy brain, shut up.
On the drive home from the zoo, the kids are asleep while three little kittens who lost their mittens and they began to cry plays on repeat at a stop light. Along the sidewalk, a woman pushes an older woman in a wheelchair, blanket swaddling infirm body, only bright skull visible, tilted back mouth open to full California sun. She wants to eat the sun, I think. She wants to swallow it whole and take it with her to the other side, wherever that is, and the child inside me is eager to escape, eager to swallow this sun too, as if life is only a face in the sun and death its opposite and I am overwhelmed by the fear that one day the sun will be gone from my face too.
Townsend valiantly displays Chinook skull to sky, effervescent California sunshine, but what can that forever-gaping mouth proclaim now?
KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope and Rafael, author of award-winning novel Empire of Glass, cofounder of Hippo Reads and Hippo Thinks, and a childbirth and lactation activist. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, and more. She lives in San Francisco where she is at work on a second novel, The Blue Lobster, which explores themes of midwifery, climate change, and New England Native American history, as well as a book of essays on home and motherhood.