The Word for the Third is Catharsis
Photo Credit | Robyn Kessler
BY KAITLIN SOLIMINE
The eve before I turn 38 weeks pregnant, I start hearing voices saying, “Mama!”
The first time, I’m in bed with my second born and hear someone calling “Mama! Mama!” in a desperate cry from down the hall but the voice isn’t a child’s, it’s a man’s: My husband’s? I spring from bed imagining Joe, my husband who suffers from high blood pressure, having a heart attack or something terrible has happened to our daughter, C., who he’s putting to bed – but when I open the door to her bedroom Joe and C. are cuddling. They both look up at me, wide-eyed and wondering why I ran like a banshee and flung open the door.
“Were you just calling for me repeatedly?” I ask.
They reply, “What are you talking about? We didn’t say a thing!” And laugh at me like this is all a funny, ridiculous game I’m playing but when I don’t laugh back, they have this slant of concern like maybe I did hear something and if so, what did I hear and why? C. says she once heard what she called a “radio voice” in our home’s back office say to her, “Get out of here or I’ll bite you!” and so she ran away but that’s the only time she’s heard a ghost, she says matter-of-factly. (A few months later, she tells me if you stare at walls intensely enough, you can see spirits hiding in them.)
I close the door, go downstairs to brew red raspberry leaf tea, and when Joe is done getting C. to sleep, as he descends the stairs to join me, I hear a smaller voice this time: “Mama?” it asks, like a creaking door slowly opening, and maybe that’s in fact what the sound was but it really sounded like our second born, who we call Bubs, waking, calling for me.
“Is Bubs awake?” I ask Joe. Again, he cocks his head.
“Do I need to be concerned about you?” he asks.
The next morning, we ask our son who says, “No, it wasn’t me,” but then nonchalantly tells us he once saw a ghost in the bedroom closet.
***
The third child is the pregnancy of hot water feet. A constant need to be in water. Not buoyant, but submerged. I think of baptisms, my own, of the upcoming mikva for my Jewish conversion… . . . some day . . . a far away day with three children and an ocean to swallow me whole. Beside me, C. is asleep, legs tucked under her like a bug in heat, hugging her “rainbow sherbet giraffe,” her chosen birthday gift from the zoo; I think there will come a day she doesn’t love stuffed animals, abandons them to boxes. This thought is a sad thought and also a blessing, that she would relinquish the need for story and softness, could fall asleep alone. Ghosts and bedtime stories tucked into walls, in boxes. Eventually all relinquished to the trash heap when our bodies fail us, generation after generation, our material objects, these wooden homes, spirit-laden closets, outliving us all. I banish that thought to the walls too; too scared to realize how little of this little family of ours truly matters.
***
I am writing for myself, mostly. Always. All of this in the iNotes section of my phone. Written in basements while the nanny rocks the baby to sleep. The idea of anyone reading any of this is stifling, suffocating. But everyone wants something of you. Emily Dickinson’s fame is a bee buzzing about my head and the Instagram bees are loudest, or is it Facebook, or TikTok, or Twitter? What of Snapchat? What is that anyway? And the kids tire of our phones and I tire of our phones and I’m one phone call away from heading somewhere warmer for winter but where? But where? We keep asking that in the middle of the second pandemic winter. The second full one, almost the third, how we haven’t all tired and soured of the tiny hairs getting caught in mouths behind masks. The dreams that I’m somewhere where no one is masked, the years of photos with hidden faces. I cannot think to a maskless future. Too exposed. And yet I am thinking of a storefront in Lisbon I visited over a decade ago, a very old store, that sold shoes or hats or an apothecary or that’s what it had been, the old sign said, but now it sells fancy, handmade gloves. Oh, that’s right. The leather gloves. I never did buy them – or did I? The red ones? The old man’s hands measuring my wrist, telling me to return in three days, the decadence of leather smell heady as hay, and the sun beating down on me as I walked into a Portuguese afternoon, my new red vintage dress tugging on my menstruating body (still not pregnant, still desperate to be a mother), and the old semi-famous author who asked me to sit on his face. I didn’t. I didn’t laugh. But I forgave him which I shouldn’t have. Should I have? Fame is a bee. A ghost. A lullaby.
***
The other semi-famous author who is a friend – a disappearing friend these days of mothering-at-large – told me never to have more than one child because my books will always be my other child. I did. I did. I buried the lede. I will climb my way out of this, I tell myself. Why is it a struggle: writer AND mother? Why privilege one above the other? The mother is the domicile, the forgotten. Sit on someone’s face. A man’s, of course. Pick up the pen. Forget the children. No, I cannot. Silvia Federici, I tell them, which is ridiculous to act like I just learned something everyone else has been shouldering for centuries. Don’t listen to this white woman anymore. Or do. We’ll all be ghosts someday anyway. Fame is a bee! Listen to that white woman. The one with the domicile name. The one you memorized as a kid: “There’s a pair of us, shhhh, don’t tell, they’ll banish us you know.” I always found her poetry saccharine. As if the world was weightless. Did she have kids?
The baby shrieks. I don’t put down the phone. What is wrong with me?
***
The baby is born on Christmas. The postpartum scenes are what we see from bed. Sun drawing shadows across the wall, wicked as spiders hiding behind wooden playground nooks. (Later: We find a white widow on the backyard climbing structure. We think it’s a black widow. We call pest control. A man named Carl kills the mother’s eggs, not the mother.) The toddler arrives, finally okay with being in his new sister’s presence, and climbs love bugs up the baby’s arm. The kindergartener has a story to tell of her day (a walk in the rain to the dog park) then retreats again to the world behind the door. All alone. You and baby. You and breast. You and tending to the perineum. Questions like “How’s your perineum?” become commonplace. Friends ask about the birth. The word is catharsis.
Kegel, we attempt: hold like you’re holding in a fart for ten seconds. Release. Tighten and release until exhaustion.
Kegel: hold tight while coughing away postnasal drip. The baby has a cold. Third born sick at three days old. Cough. Pee a little. Good thing you’re still wearing a diaper.
The toddler points and laughs, “Mama is wearing a diaper.” The next night, in the tub again, he says, “Mama’s belly is little!” which is funny because little is relative. I’m eight days postpartum and my stomach is as round as it was when I was six months pregnant.
I write somewhere: “THE BABY’S HARMONICA SOUNDS,” because I want to remember. Because writing is recording is remembering.
I haven’t left the house in nine days. A friend in Pittsburgh is also under house arrest but hers is due to Omicron. How do you say house arrest in French, I wonder? I feel it would sound trés chic.
***
I’m tempted to save the thirdborn’s first nail clippings. My grandfather kept a lock of my grandmother’s hair in his military beret when he shipped off to the South Pacific during World War II. I was eight years old when I discovered that hair in the same beret, tucked behind photo albums in my childhood home. I never questioned how the hair survived both their deaths. We can’t manufacture magic. Abandoned objects are ghost stories in their own right.
***
I want to read. I do. I do. But what? I’m taking photos of the newborn’s fuzzy ears. I’m watching frivolous French sitcoms about male prostitutes. Instead. Instead. I do. I do. I want to be a person living in the world. No, I want to be frozen here in this vestibule. Okay: a bedroom. I am privileged beyond measure and yet the mind. What is the mind? Silly, female philosopher to no one awake at three in the morning. Nothing you say will be valued, Mother. Threaten Divorce. Threaten The Patriarchy. They laugh laugh laugh. At least you’re raising one more daughter than a son, you tell yourself. At least you made double the females to males.
The six-year-old is restless. Won’t sleep. Her itchiness annoys me. I don’t like feet near my feet in bed. The grown one knows that. She won’t stop working her body into the sheets. She’s taken to this need to pick her nose at night. Self-soothing. Must be from me. “I need something cold for my head to lie on. That’s why I keep moving. I need to get in a good position,” she says.
We read Horton Hears a Who. Was that what I was hearing? A who in the walls? On the windowsill? A who who was tall, not just merely a ball, but a who through and through, a who who was meeting my call?
Fame is a bee.
It has a song—
It has a sting—
Ah, too, it has a wing.
You know the eye health test where you focus on the central red dot and count the number of smudges you see at the periphery? That’s happening to me in bed. The eye test must be a metaphor for something in my life, but I don’t know what. Wait. Let’s come up with something good. Like it’s a metaphor for postpartum. Like it’s how the world is going on smudging the periphery but your focus has narrowed, has to narrow, to the little balled up, knock-kneed infant with the feet still curled as if in utero who is always on your chest, whose skin is the olivest of all the children. There, we made up a word/a world. And finally: born in the tub. You forgot to Google if water birth had risks. Too late. The risk passed. She came out swimming and you looked down only to see a curled fist raised so you grabbed for her, pulled her upward into the sky, the air, her slow acceptance of life above the surface apparent in that she didn’t feel much like breathing yet. She was the slowest of all three to sputter a cry, seal-like with her creamy vernix folds against your chest.
***
I watch your eyes dart from sun to moon, to the quilts above our bed, then your gaze falls like sunset to my smiling face, your mouth pursing into an ‘o’ and the eyes that observe now, are learning slowly, the same eyes that will take you through the rest of your life. This is a big gesture. A feeling too much for me. These eyes, God willing, will outlast me, see things I’ve never seen, take in the absurdities of life for the first time. Begin again and again – remember? Remember how have we forgotten everything? Like the ghost calls: where did they go?
KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope, Rafael, and Lyra, 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. Kaitlin’s latest project is Postpartum Production — a podcast about postpartum and creative practice — and how we can redefine what is seen as productive in caregiving and art.