by Katie Arnold
Fear pools in my stomach and rises up through my throat. How have I not realized this until now? The ache between my shoulder blades is cancer, a rogue tumor on my spine, compressing my nerves, spreading by the minute. It’s so obvious. I must be dying, too.
Even when I tell Steve this, sobbing at the terrible irony, and he says, “It’s probably just our saggy old bed,” and even when we go out and buy a new mattress and my neck pain subsides literally overnight, my anxiety doesn’t. Resourceful and nimble, it just switches targets. My healthy body is riddled with aches and unfamiliar sensations and strange blemishes I’ve never noticed before, proof that I’ve been stricken by disease. I listen with fascination and horror to stories of others people’s illnesses. It doesn’t matter if they’re people I know or complete strangers. It doesn’t matter that cancer isn’t contagious. If they have it, so do I.
Every few weeks, I’m dying of something new, sometimes several things at once. My tingly scalp must be a brain tumor; my chronically chapped lips, melanoma. My symptoms defy logic and reason. I can conjure heart palpitations, numb fingers, and aching kidneys with a single thought and then lock them into my body until I’m sure my days on this planet are numbered. Is this what an anorexic feels like when she looks in the mirror and sees fat when in fact she is all taut skin and angular bones? I see Dad’s concave temples transposed onto my own head and think, That’s it. I’ve got it, too. Some days, many days all in a row, the illusion of illness is all I can think about, a twisted distortion that no one but me can see.
I’ve come back from death only to find it has followed me home.
* * *
—
To be a new mother is to live in a bubble. You can see out into the real world, but you’re buffered from its sharp edges by a gauzy brain haze. It’s like running above the clouds high on the mountain. It’s clear where you are, but the quilted sky sequesters you from life far below.
The bubble is created partly by fatigue, partly by awe and adoration, and partly by hormones. Inside the bubble, all that matters is the bare necessities: eating, sleeping, changing diapers, surviving, loving. As in childbirth, your body knows instinctively what to do.
The baby bubble is evolutionarily essential. It’s what keeps you focused on your baby so that you don’t accidentally leave her on the side of the trail, where she will get eaten by coyotes. It’s what tamps down your ambition, temporarily disables your ego, frazzles your short-term memory so that you aren’t tempted by work or deadlines or other nonessential distractions. This doesn’t mean you’re not working harder than you ever have in your whole life. You are. But the bubble dulls the perceived effort. You’re so exhausted that you’re unable to fully grasp how exhausted you are. Thank God for that.
Inside the bubble, time is elastic and the days are outrageously full, as though you’re moving at half speed. For a while, you are. The membrane that separates you from the rest of humanity thins as time goes by. Occasionally you’ll think you’ve popped out the other side, but you’re really still in the bubble, peering wishfully into a blurry world. Then your baby starts teething and stops sleeping and under you go, swallowed again. Resistance is futile. And in spite of everything, you’ll miss this when it’s gone.
I know because everyone tells me so. Strangers feel compelled to stop me in the grocery store, their eyes growing misty when they see my darling precious lovelies, one or both of whom may be fussing in the cart. “I have two babies of my own,” they shout over the din. “They’re eighteen and twenty now! It goes by in a flash!” The thought of this makes me want to weep, both in despair that they’re right and dread that they’re wrong. What if I am forever being spit up upon and tormented by fatigue? What if I blink and my babies are gone?
After Pippa was born, I stayed in the bubble for fourteen months. Coming out was like stumbling out of a movie theater in broad daylight, squinting at the sun. Who am I? Where am I? Life and all its busyness had carried on without me.
Now I live in two bubbles. A bubble within a bubble: mourning and motherhood. Like the baby bubble, the grief bubble is a protective shield, strange and disorienting, only darker. Living in my double bubble is not an entirely bad thing. It means I cannot get worked up over distant threats like an earthquake or tsunami, a nuclear leak in Japan or air strikes in Libya, unless of course I am thinking about the Future, capital F, as it pertains to Pippa and Maisy. And then I lie awake in bed at night, feeling the panic inch into my throat, and wonder, How will our daughters live in this world?
* * *
—
Nothing drives home mortality like motherhood. When you care for a wrinkled, helpless creature who depends on you for everything, from whom you are inseparable, you realize that you absolutely cannot, must not, die. And then you watch your father die and you realize that you absolutely will. And someday so will they. Just not now, please. Not for a very, very, very long time.
Nights are the worst. Steve falls asleep instantly, while I lie there, stewing in gruesome scenarios until eventually I get up and swallow a baby aspirin. (Mom, who rarely takes medicine, swears they are a cure-all.) Sometimes even this backfires. “Steve!” I whisper one night. “I think the aspirin is stuck in my throat. Do you think it’s like…burning a hole in my esophagus?”
He turns to me, eyes brimming with fake alarm. “Yes, right this very minute!” He checks to make sure I know he’s kidding, then scoffs, impatiently, “No.”
Another time I wake to the faint shrill cry far off in the tunnel of my ear. A baby, but which one? Dazed, I stumble down the hall. All is quiet. Then, faintly at a great distance, the piercing wail. Not in our house; not human. Outside in the arroyo, coyotes. Pulse racing, I creep back down the hall.
Sometimes I startle awake, fearful that in my delirium I’ve brought Maisy into our bed to nurse her and I forgot to put her back, and now she lies tangled in the sheets near our feet, suffocating. I slide my hands around, feeling for her in the dark, and jab Steve with my elbow. “Where is she?” I ask frantically.
His voice rises from the bottom of a deep cave. “Who?” he mumbles sleepily.
“MAISY!” I cry.
“In her crib.”
I’ve sweated through the sheets, and I curl my feet around Steve’s, breathing in time with him, until I fall asleep.
In the light of day, when I ask Steve if he ever feels afraid, he looks at me blankly, as though the thought of coming home to find an ambulance flashing in the driveway has never once crossed his mind, as though he doesn’t live in abject terror of our daughters choking on grapes or becoming entangled in blind cords. I do the worrying for both of us. Early puberty, terrorism, the pimple in Steve’s belly button, leukemia, breast cancer, Pippa skiing into a tree, divorce, car accidents, avalanches—they come fast and furious at all hours of the day.
In my bubble, I vacillate between despair for tiny perfect bodies going wrong and awe that everything is exactly right: Maisy rearing up on chubby cellulite knees, about to crawl, toothless pink gums, hair coming in like peach fuzz; Pippa’s round toddler belly pressed into mine. I crave my girls; I long to be on my own. I love them fiercely; I miss my freedom. I want to write, I want to sleep. I am desperate for Pippa to stop pinching me, for Maisy to start sleeping through the night, but I don’t want them to change. Ever. Motherhood is madness, the craziest kind of love I’ve ever known.
* * *
—
Santa Fe is swarming with natural healers of every stripe, and as the months go by, I consult them all. Am I experiencing sympathetic grief-induced hypochondria, post-traumatic stress from the shock of losing Dad so quickly, an almost midlife crisis? It’s all of them. A perfect, terrible storm.
I become my own lab rat, a one-woman experiment. I quit sugar, cold turkey. I see an acupuncturist. Once a week for a month, I drive to a subdivision on the edge of Santa Fe. A yellow-haired woman I’ve never met be
fore, Janice, leads me into a room with mystical accents where she teaches me how to tap on my temples, my forehead, under my eyes, my clavicle, while chanting. It’s a method called Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT, she explains, and it’s designed to purge trauma from my psyche by replacing the negative memories in my head with positive ones.
We sit facing each other on chintz chairs and I try to copy Janice as she taps. Forehead, eyes, temples. Forehead, eyes, clavicle. It reminds me of the old clapping games Meg and I used to play—Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack. All dressed in black, black, black—except that the words are woes: I am afraid of dying I am afraid of dying I am afraid of dying because…I am afraid of living I am afraid of dying because…
I’m tapping and chanting, and at the same time I’m thinking of what this is costing me and how embarrassing it is to divulge my most private fears to a total stranger in a broomstick skirt, and what a racket she’s running because surely this whole thing is a scam, a kind of creepy brainwashing. And even as I’m thinking this, I know I’ll come back next week and maybe even the week after. That’s how desperate I am.
In the middle of our third session, Janice abruptly stops tapping and tugs at my arm. She makes a dramatic shushing gesture with her cracked coral lips and points out the window. A few feet away in her backyard, a cat squats along the fence line. It’s tawny and plump, with inquisitive ears and speckled fur, nearly camouflaged against the winter-faded bushes. It watches us as we watch it, but when it stretches to its feet, I can tell by the way it moves, with both sureness and secrecy, that it’s not a house cat. It’s a bobcat, wild and alert, the way I long to be.
When the session is over, I can’t get out of there fast enough. The bobcat has broken the spell. I won’t go back again.
* * *
—
In one corner of his office, Dad kept a small display of cameras. There was his small, blocky Kodak Brownie; an early-model manual Nikon with a cracked leather strap; several scratched light boxes and dusty lenses. Eventually, Dad joined the modern world with the purchase of single-lens reflex Canons and, reluctantly, digital SLRs. He never had an iPhone. His preference was always for simple manual equipment that required you to do the thinking.
The simplest device of all is the camera obscura, in which a small hole or several holes let light into a dark chamber. Images of objects outside the camera appear upside down and backwards, scrolling across the top and sides of the blackened chamber like a movie reel running in reverse. Looking into a camera obscura is like being inside a grainy, slow-motion home video on rewind. The smaller the aperture is, the sharper the image; the larger it is, the blurrier and more abstract, as though the events you’re seeing are happening to you and not happening to you at the same time.
This is what it feels like to be inside my brain.
I try yoga, hoping the dim lights and quiet postures will calm me, but when I bend backwards into bridge pose, my neck feels so exposed, I think I might die, as if I’d been guillotined in my last life. The instructor speaks in an exotic French accent that’s almost impossible to understand. I think she’s saying, “Open through the kidneys. Feel your kidneys. Soften your kidneys.” I don’t know exactly where my kidneys are, nor can I feel them, but the mere mention of them makes me think of Dad and his cancer, and I turn my face away from the teacher so she won’t see me sobbing silently through the rest of the class.
I get a massage to release my tense muscles, but the masseuse lectures me about developing a spiritual practice, which only makes me tenser. I go see a German Pilates trainer for a private lesson to strengthen my core so my back won’t hurt so much. The instructor, who specializes in a method called Contrology, has oily brown hair and sits cross-legged on a wood-and-metal apparatus. “The Reformer is modeled on a hospital bed,” he says loftily. “With traction. See the springs?” He doesn’t offer me a seat, so I sit on the floor, aware that I’m hunching my shoulders, that I’m soft and weak around my middle. He demonstrates the exercises and I perform them with the trepidation of the scrutinized. They are harder than they appear on the little black-and-white diagram taped to the wall.
“Lift, lift!” he says. I raise my arms, but he barks, “Not your arms, your core! Separate!”
I don’t know what this means or how to do it, but I do not want to separate; I want to be whole.
“Drop your shoulders, drop your shoulders!” he yells.
“I’m trying!” I say.
“Try harder!”
I am paying this man to berate me, blowing my modest inheritance from Dad on this. I want to cry, but instead I retort, “Hey, cut me some slack.” My insubordination surprises both of us. When our time is up, another client comes in and the German trainer is sunny and cheerful, as if the abuse of the past hour didn’t happen. He says to the man, “What’s the news?” and calls him Jefe, and there’s no trace of his German accent.
When I tell the trainer I won’t be back, he smirks in triumph, as if to say he knew all along I wasn’t tough enough. I don’t tell him the truth: that trying harder to be in control, to keep my grief at bay, is the last thing I need.
* * *
—
I call Bob, my Rolfer. Rolfing uses a form of deep tissue massage to manipulate the body’s connective tissue, or fasciae, that surround the muscles, bones, and organs. I found Bob thirteen years ago, after I hit a tree while learning to snowboard and broke five ribs in my back. My left leg was shorter than the right from the impact, and my whole body curled around itself like a misshapen S. After my fourth session with Bob, I dreamed I was running, and when I woke in the morning and went out for a jog, my first in months, my body was full of lightness, released from its crooked pain. Bob put me back together again after childbirth, dug a knot out of my Achilles tendon following my half marathon, and even did craniosacral therapy on Pippa when she tumbled off my foam roller and got a concussion. Does it get any more Santa Fe than that?
Now I climb onto his table in my clothes and tell him about my aching neck, my fears that I might be dying, too. Bob is in his sixties, bald, with the tranquil, Yoda-like manner of someone who exists in a near-constant meditative state. Rolfing gets a bad rap for being obscure and excruciatingly painful, massage’s evil doppelgänger, and while Bob does occasionally go after me with his elbow and puts his whole weight behind it, most of the time he uses a mysterious alchemy of light, precise pressure and energetic healing. Sometimes I can’t feel his touch but can sense it from the frisson of energy pulsing back at me.
Bob doesn’t talk much when he works, but he does talk to himself. “Oh, there we go,” he’ll murmur soothingly when he feels something essential but invisible shift into its rightful place. This time, though, Bob is silent, and I drift in and out of sleep, thinking about Dad, when he lay on a massage table, for the first time in his life, in the last month of his life, after he had given up but before we had. He was too sick to be massaged, so the therapist ran her hands above his body as Dad dozed beneath the thin sheet. After a while, I feel my mind drift above the table, hovering over my body in a strange and dizzying, but not unpleasant, way, in two places at once.
A magpie calls shrilly through the window, and I fly back into my body. Bob’s hands are cradling my neck so tenderly that I want to cry, but I wipe my eyes with my sleeve, because I don’t want to embarrass him, and because I’m afraid that once I start, I might not be able to stop.
My days are so full of appointments, I barely have time to run. It’s winter at seven thousand feet, and the trails have turned into luge tracks. I strap spikes onto my sneakers and labor up my mountain alone. Through my sneakers I can feel my toes trying to curl into the frozen ground for purchase. Even when it’s fifteen degrees, I dress lightly: tights and a wind jacket with a layer or two underneath, thin gloves, maybe a hat, maybe not. It’s surprising how warm you get when you run uphill.
My favorite time to go is during
or right after a snowstorm, when I’m the first one up the mountain. It’s harder and slower breaking trail, but the powder muffles my footsteps and makes the trail feel new and forgiving, cocooned in white, the snow still fluffy and not yet hardened into icy pitches. I run straight into the storm, doily flakes falling as fine as mist, the squall whitewashing the sky, my eyes streaming tears in the cold wind. I don’t notice that my feet are soaked and my socks are clumped with ice balls. I don’t register anything but the tips of the piñon branches gleaming with snowflakes, the ravens spinning overhead, black as coal against the sky, and the woolly cloud world enclosing me.
Some days it’s so cold that my muscles slug along like a car engine that’s been sitting out overnight in sub-zero temperatures, the gearshift gluey and slow. Skin-cracking, nostrils-sticking-together cold. The world is hard and splintery, and my legs and arms are out of sync. By the time I reach the top, I’ve finally warmed up, maybe too much, because my skin and clothes are damp with sweat and I freeze on the way down. Someone has chipped me out of a glacier from the last ice age. At the car, it takes me five tries to fumble the key into the ignition, and my hands are so frozen I can barely steer. When I get home, I stand in the hot shower for twenty minutes, letting the water drum down, get out and wrap a scarf around my neck, boil water for tea, and sit in front of the woodstove, coaxing flames from tiny, worthless embers. Still I’m shivering.
It’s only after the hypothermia and endorphin rush wear off that my worries come rushing back. I’ve developed a tightness in my chest that I’m sure is a congenital heart condition. Mom’s chain-smoking father died of a heart attack at fifty-eight, and her older brother suffered a fatal aneurism at sixty-one while jogging on his treadmill. In a scene straight out of the movies, Dad’s father keeled over from a coronary at Meg’s wedding and died two days later. He was eighty-six.