Four Before I Begin Again, by Susanna Childress

Four Before I Begin Again

Susanna Childress

Four Before I Begin Again

Susanna Childress

Editor-in-Chief

Leslie Jill Patterson Nonfiction Editor

Elena Passarello Poetry Editor

Geffrey Davis Fiction Editor

Katie Cortese Managing Editors

Nonfiction Trifecta

2019

Jasmine V. Epstein Nancy Dinan Meghan E. Giles Jennifer Popa Jess Smith

Associate Editors: Timilehin Alake, Jasmine Bailey, Caleb Braun, Emma Brousseau, Nathaniel Brown, William Brown, Jennifer Buentello, Andrew Gillis, Jacob Hall, Katherine Jackson, Maeve Kirk, Jesse Lawhead, Brook McClurg, William Littlejohn-Oram, Zachary Ostraff, D Patterson, Matthew Porto, Catherine Ragsdale, Sara Ryan, Kate Simonian, Peter Vertacnik, and Valerie Wayson.

Copyright © 2019 Iron Horse Literary Review. All rights reserved.

Iron Horse Literary Review is a national journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

IHLR publishes four print issues and two electronic issues per year, at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, through the support of the TTU President’s Office, Provost’s Office, Graduate College, College of Arts & Sciences, and English Department.

Four Before I Begin Again

M

aybe he says it when he unhooks my bra or when he runs his hands up the back of my thighs to cup my butt. Maybe he asks when he kisses my shoulder. Maybe it’s when I help him out of his shirt or tug at his earlobe with my teeth.

Are you ovulating?

It’s a simple question for him. If I’m ovulating, he’ll wear a condom.

If I’m not, he won’t. J’s eyes, a sandy green, peer at me, clear and waiting, as if he’s asked whether we have more peanut butter in the pantry.

But I’m plunked down naked on the edge of the bed, doing the math in my head and counting on my fingertips and trying to recall the signs from earlier in the week, and even though I’m using an app to track my cycle, I’m no longer someone for whom the prefigured calendar works very well, which is to say, I don’t know if I’m ovulating or not. So I say so. I say it’s unlikely given that my body seems headed for early menopause. That I may never ovulate again. My ovulating days may be over.

J moves my hair back from my face with both hands, but he isn’t looking into my eyes any more. He says, Are you sure?

My teeth clench, not with anger but from trying not to cry. He doesn’t want to wear a condom. He doesn’t know how to want to make a baby after losing another one this summer. He doesn’t want my ovulating days to be over, but he doesn’t want to get me pregnant right now. He doesn’t know what he wants—except, in this moment, not to wear a condom.

No, I say, I’m not sure.

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Four Before I Begin Again

I take his hands into mine to keep them from my hair, my face, and press into the meat of his palms with my thumbs. All the sexy electricity, as though through a hose, has been siphoned from the room.

We’re having the ghost of a conversation we’ve had dozens of times, where intercourse afterward is, for me at least, a tangle of elbows and hips and self-dismay. I know I want another baby, more than anything I’ve ever wanted. I’m waiting for him to want that, too. I’m not waiting with much patience or cheer; yet I refuse to misrepresent the odds here because if I’m on my way to early menopause—the OB has confirmed my suspicions with her own, and after this cycle, I’ll go in to get tested—even J’s green light won’t be worth much. At this point in general, it’s difficult to tell what’s worth much: willingness, a positive test, an ultrasound, a second ultrasound, a trimester, two.

Huh, he grunts, then twists his features into a jokey-face of deliberation, everything puckered then widening, puckered, widening. What to do?

I’d be super surprised, I say, my throat tight with the truth of it. Truth hurts, they say, and what happens next exhibits that reckoning: blood from my extremities sweeps inward so fast my fingers and toes go limp, prickle. Slowly I tilt into the pillows. I wish I could be funny, that I, too, could bloat my face or guffaw or fart or whatever it takes to lighten the room, but I’m tired of waiting, of the flat hilt of hope. I’m tired of wanting.

It’s up to you, I say. And again I know the truth: it both is and it isn’t.

Susanna Childress

3

E

ach month, the body of a woman starts over, so to speak.

During follicular mellowing, the ovary produces an oocyte through oogenesis—a delightfully recognizable term: the development of an ovum—as well as a cataract of hormones.

On pregnancy sites, the weekly calendar makes it sound like this is part of the end result, the We have begun to understand how first chapter of a book to overwhelming experiences affect which we already know the our innermost sensations and our re- ending.

There’s the body, pulling lationship to our physical reality— the core of who we are. . . . Trauma up a pair of moistureis not just an event that took place wicking wool socks, lacing sometime in the past; it is also the her hiking boots, slinging imprint left by that experience on on and adjusting each of mind, brain, and body. the seventeen straps on one of those huge backBessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score packs that carry a tent and a sleeping bag and mat and a miniature water purifier and a second pair of socks and a tiny pot for cooking freeze-dried chicken alfredo. Geared Up. Ready to go!

But for all that, if the oocyte isn’t fertilized, or if the blastocyst doesn’t implant, the luteal phase concludes, and the endometrian cells accrued during the cycle separate themselves from the uterine lining. The thick nutrient-rich coating dismisses itself, sent out of

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Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby has yet to be conceived! Your pregnancy begins as your body gears up for ovulation and prepares for fertilization.

Weeks 1 & 2

the body with the ovum, smaller than salt, in a wash of menstrual fluid. The hormones released from the ovary return to a rivulet. The follicles reset, wavering under the body’s innermost breeze.

No hike this month. And so the counter goes back to Day 1. Or— does it go forward?

O

n the last day of October, I still see green all around me. It’s chilly but not cold, the sun pressing past clumps of white cloud.

Yesterday, I spoke at a literary festival in the same town as my friend A, and today, we’ve found some time to be alone. The copse of trees behind us has only just begun to turn. A rumpled brown leaf here or there, but no big, brushy rush of orange and yellow yet. My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, the sniff of green leaves and dry leaves. Tomorrow, I travel south, all the way downstate, for the funeral of my ninety-fiveyear-old grandmother, but right now, I’m in another cemetery, at the grave of A’s stillborn son. My grandmother was maybe the most humble person I’ve ever known, but her near-century seems exorbitant, embarrassing, Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” to a Basho-haiku, at the gravesite of a boy who didn’t get a single minute beyond the womb, who was fine all nine months until, mid-labor, he wasn’t. And as to you, Death, and you bitter hug of mortality. My tears make me nauseated, snot sliding down the back of my throat.

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Four Before I Begin Again

B is buried under a headstone engraved with the Peanuts character Snoopy. Snoopy’s eyes are closed, and he’s wrapped his stubby arms around Woodstock. The embrace and the lettering against the gray marble aren’t faded like many of the stone markers across the lot. B’s been gone six years, and each day, my friend A drives by this cemetery on his way to work. He’s not a crier, my friend. He squats next to me, speaking in a gentle rush of the plot that was gifted them, how they’d chosen the stone, how the mud stuck to his boots on the day, late in January, when they brought the casket to this spot and laid their son in the ground. After a moment, he moves silently down the row, as though to give me time alone.

I touch the grass. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. I free a leaf from where it has wedged itself at the edge of the headstone. I try not to weep aloud. I try to quiet the lines of Whitman that keep coming, bidden, unbidden. I hear you whispering there O stars of heaven, O suns—O grass of graves—O perpetual transfers and promotions. And when I turn to watch the wind rifle through the trees behind me, a gag ratchets its way up my throat. Balled up in my pocket, I find the wrapper from a peppermint candy and try with some discretion to blow my nose into it. The result makes me want to laugh. I apologize to B in my mind for being such a mess. Sweetheart—. I wipe my hands on my pants, and again I gag.

It’s possible my allergies are acting up. I look down the row of uneven stones, away from B’s dad, back at Snoopy. Maybe it’s my sinuses, my lack of sleep catching up with me. Or maybe, and here my smile

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7

drops away: Sweetheart—a jolt riding down my spine into the hands I’m sitting on.

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them, And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

I’m pregnant.

I

’m awash in acronyms. To check for early-onset menopause, my OB tests my FSH, LH, and E2 levels. I ask for my hCG, too. Why not.

When we get the results, J and I hide out in our bedroom, clutch at each other, cackle with shock, grin big and dumb as sock monkeys. I keep drawling, What? What? He says the same word back, our voices tilting and lifting in a chorus of disbelief, relief, fear, joy. And then J and I decide. This is it, the last time down this trailhead or this dead end.

T

hough my first baby had a twin that “disappeared” before the eleventh week, it had not grieved or worried me, a fact I can barely forgive myself for these days. When I birthed that twinless boy, hale, whole, and then another son two years later, I thought I’d done something right. Without realizing it, I congratulated myself: two beautiful babies! Followed by clichés, such as without a hitch. I’d done

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Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby is the size of an orange seed. The heart and circulatory system are developing while your body’s bCG hormone levels confirm you’re expecting.

Week 5

my part, barfing like it was an Olympic sport (she’s captured the bronze, folks!), and they’d done theirs.

So now that my streak has gone awry—a son I lost well into the second trimester, followed by two miscarriages, bringing me to 2/4 in terms of wins/losses, living/dead, a ruinous 33.33 percent “success” rate—I can’t seem to stem the self-interrogation: What did you do?

What went wrong (with you)? Is the anomaly, perhaps, carrying two healthy babies to term, deliver[T]raumatized people have a ing them alive, and not the other tendency to superimpose their way around? trauma on everything around Do you get to begin again? them and have trouble deci- Does the body do that? Does phering whatever is going on your body? around them. There appeared to be little in between.

T

wo days after the November 2016 election, you start spotting. It’s faint, but the toilet paper’s pink tinge is unmistakable: it’s not not blood. Somehow, for you, this is linked to the tension and shock of the presidential campaign. The student on your campus who yells at another, We’re going to deport you! He’s not not emboldened in his xenophobia, his racism and misogyny. The monsters are coming out of their corners, revealing who they’ve been all along.

You’ve been crying since the election results and now you’re losing a fifth, a final, baby. Your last chance—you and J have decided. Of course,

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Four Before I Begin Again

you conclude. She can’t stay. Why would she, under this man, his future world of walls and bans and pussy grabbing?

When you tell J you’re bleeding, he falls to the bedroom floor. Dead end.

At the lab, you’re teary when the tech draws a vial of blood for the hCG count and another for the RhoGAM shot. She touches your forearm. Do you feel faint? You shake your head, but she gives you a tiny canister of orange juice and a packet of graham crackers anyway. She couldn’t know that two years ago, in this same room, receiving the same draw in the same arm for the same reason, your blood pressure dropped like a spent firecracker from the sky, then dropped further still, and when you woke beneath a blaze of lights and shouts, they had shuttled you down to the ER, where they’d worked over you with IVs and injections only to watch you slip further down, away, plummeting.

They were eyeing the defibrillator paddles just before, at last, you steadied. You stayed.

At the OB’s office, the nurse has delicate tattoos along her wrist and forearm, hummingbirds and vines and lilies and colorful wisps of things without a shape you can name. She tells you the RhoGAM needle is big, will hurt. She apologizes, thinks you’re crying about the shot.

Her slim silver watch catches the light. You say nothing. You’re not certain what will exit your mouth.

The next day, someone calls with impossible news: your hCG count has risen, not fallen. The number seems obscene, astronomical, right on track. For now, somehow, she’s stayed.

Susanna Childress

11

I

once heard the poet Li-Young Lee speak of breathing in terms of life and death, that the breath taken in is the life-giving breath. Perhaps obvious to some, but I’d only imagined the in-and-out as a unit. When inhaling, Lee says, Your body is filled with oxygen, nutrients, nitrogen. . . . your bones get harder. . . . your muscles and skin get flush, so you’re full of life. Then, in exhalation, bones soften, muscles go slack, nutrients abandon the blood. That, Lee tells us, is the dying breath, upon which, of course, rides our spoken words—All speech is born on the dying breath.

But this, too: I take 18,000 breaths a day, each one a sort of starting over.

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Four Before I Begin Again

T

he bleeding might have been from progesterone suppositories, a subchorionic hematoma, your softened cervix during sex, ectopic pregnancy, uterine fibroids. When you research each possibility online, the numbers float around you like shark fins: 12 percent, 25 percent, 1 in 200, 1 in 3, 20 percent, 12 weeks, 2 percent, 8.2 percent, 72 hours. Your scalp ripples with goose bumps.

Your chance of carrying a baby to term after a stillbirth and three miscarriages is 30 percent. You’re in the 3 percent who experience 3 losses in a row. You’re also 38 now, which means the chance of miscarriage has almost doubled since you were 34;

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13

since J is over 40, that likelihood spikes another 60 percent. Do you add, subtract, or average these percentages? All? None?

The numbers eye you. They circle.

Except for ectopic pregnancy, which you can rule out because you’re not folded in half with pain, the only thing to do, at this stage, is wait.

Ask for an ultrasound. After the ultrasound, which reveals a small hematoma, what you can do is: not have sex, not exercise, and wait.

Y

ou touch your breasts dozens of times each day. They don’t tingle. Do they ache? Do they ache enough? Stay if you can, you tell her. Go if you must. You want to mean it. When you’re teaching, you turn to the board and pretend to care if your students can identify iamb, trochee, spondee, anapest, dactyl—TELL me | NOT in | MOURNful | NUMbers. But as you send the chalk across the board with one hand, the other wrist is at your breast, pressing in, around, checking discreetly for tenderness in each one as if scanning for syllabic stress.

You tell yourself, This is a different baby. A new one. Breathe, you tell yourself. You try the breath you’ve been taught, a square of fours: four counts drawing in air, four holding it, four letting it go, four before I begin again.

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Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby is the size of a blueberry.

The only things growing faster than your baby’s brain may be your tingly, achy breasts, and as your embryo starts moving in the womb, morning sickness (which doesn’t just strike in the morning) may have you moving to the bathroom.

Week 7

. 1 4 3 2 1 . 4

2

3

3

2

4 .

1 2 3 4 1 .

Only, the counting seems complicated. Everything feels like a spondee, stress after stress after stress on the dying breath. Please. Please. Stay.

You hand out a poem—someone’s powerful something with such vivid whatever. You collect an exercise, not for a grade. You ache to vomit. You nurse your nausea like a kite you’ve set aloft into a fine, fierce wind. You test and tug the string. To LOVE | that WELL | that THOU | must LEAVE | ere LONG. The back of your throat: beautifully slicked with bile! You rush from the classroom and bang into a bathroom stall. Thank God. Thick, clotted liquid pours into the toilet. Thank God! After all, if you’re puking or at the edge of puking, she’s fine, right? All day, you tally your vomit like a score.

All day, you press your wrists against your breasts. As long as they’re both sore, she’s fine, isn’t she? If only one is sore, you check the other from all sides. If neither are sore, a trickle of panic begins at your earlobes, down your neck, shoots across your lungs, your innards, pools

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Four Before I Begin Again

We behind your knees, then sparks again also learned that in your sternum, your stomach. trauma affects the imagiBut O| for the TOUCH | of a nation. The five [Vietnam vetVAN | ished HAND | And the erans] who saw nothing in the ink SOUND | of a VOICE | that is blots had lost the capacity to let STILL. their minds play. But so, too, had the other sixteen men, for in viewing scenes from the past in those blots, they were not displaying the menn a second ultrasound to tal flexibility that is the hallmark check the hematoma, they disof imagination. They simply cover two tiny uterine fibroids. kept replaying an old There’s nothing to refrain from this reel. time. What you can do about it is: wait.

I I

spent much of my first decade in the Philippines. When we returned to the U.S., we landed in Kentuckiana, that strip of southern Indiana nestled against northern Kentucky. It took a while, but I learned to blow bubbles in my gum, that ice cream comes in all shapes and forms (sandwiches and dots), that he put oral in the car and warshed it translates to basic automobile care, and that Madonna’s song “Like a Virgin” has nothing to do with Mary or with Jesus. But some things remained the same stateside. For instance, my father liked to make a

Susanna Childress

17

joke about how I’d pass out in the mornings if he got too angry at me.

Don’t yell at Susie before breakfast, or she’ll faint! We laughed at this. It seemed important to laugh. I didn’t know it was so unusual, that it didn’t happen to my friends with their dads, the tornadic wrath, the falling unconscious under duress. Sure, he’d been through a lot (a war, drugs, the sixties), but my dad triple-stacked peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and made us “mud”—milk with chocolate syrup. He chased and joked and coached our ball teams and teased and tickled and kissed our bang-Os and built a slide from a jumble of lumber and told us every morning and every night, I love you. His booming voice would hide-and-seek us all across the five acres we lived on, a non-functioning farm salvaged after our unexpected return from abroad. He and my mother both had master’s degrees. He ran for and won a seat on the school board. He didn’t drink or smoke or work himself empty. And when I made him mad—a dropped glass, a sour face, the curling iron not put away, a wash of invective toward my brother, a lie—Dad would station himself in front of me like drill sergeants do in the movies, his nose an inch from my own, his voice swelling from hiss to roar.

As much as the volume, the depth and texture of his rage blanketed me, the eviscerating gloss of my attitude and person, each mistake I’d made connected by my malicious intent to another and another and another, all evidence of my true character. Often my father arrived at the fact—and I was coerced to confirm—that I did not love him, or my mother or sister or brother, not with genuine love, that even my

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Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby is the size of a lime.

That adorable little alien is starting to look human, as you start feeling a bit more human yourself.

Week 11

affection was self-serving, and though everyone else might be manipulated, he saw through me. He saw the real me, and I was a monster.

A

nother good sign: you spend so much time on the toilet, freakishly constipated. With it comes cramping and streaks of pain like dull fireballs—in your stomach, and your uterus and across your pelvis. You can’t tell While we all want to move beyond where the flame begins or trauma, the part of our brain devoted ends. Are you losing her? to ensuring our survival . . . is not very Vomiting makes the pain good at denial. Long after a traumatic worse, but you’re in love experience is over, it may be reacti- with your nausea this time vated at the slightest hint of danger —a great sign—puking so and mobilize disturbed brain circuits hard it sends piss coursing and secrete massive amounts of stress down your legs. You bring hormones. This precipitates unpleas- a change of clothes wherant emotions, intense physical sensa- ever you go, your body a tions, and impulsive and aggressive vat of unpredictable fluids, frequencies, hurt. Vomitactions. . . . ing and constipation, sore breasts. Such good signs! So many good signs. And this rudderless blast of aching in your abdomen that never stops: what does it signal?

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Four Before I Begin Again

W

hich is it, you ask yourself, trailhead or dead end? You’re in the dining room, lifting a fork to slide a striped cloth napkin underneath. You’re in the kitchen and you’re in the hallway and you’re in the office, and the pain stretches across your pelvis—an enduring, blank shriek. You’re sitting down to dinner with J and the boys.

You unfold your napkin. You’re familiar enough with the long, low ache of shit sequestered in your bowels that it shouldn’t scare you, but it feels like losing a baby.

Which is it, you ask yourself, colon or uterus? You wipe your mouth with your napkin though you’ve not begun to eat. The question echoes inside you as if you’ve shouted it across a cavern: colon or uterus? colon or uterus? colon or uterus?

It doesn’t seem to matter that you’ve made it further than the three previous miscarriages—one at seven weeks; the twin at eight; another at ten. You have three weeks left in this first trimester, each waving like a flag of peril.

Stay if you can. Three weeks plus two whole trimesters to go.

Please stay. Twenty-nine more weeks? Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

For the son who eats without complaint, you spoon more salad onto his plate, fishing out the extra pumpkin seeds he asks for. For the son who resists his five bites of spinach and carrot and seed, you hear yourself batten down. A flame of rage licks at your brain. You can eat it now, or you can eat it for breakfast, bub. An old trick you hated as a kid.

The choice is yours.

Susanna Childress

21

You slam your fist on the table when he says, My choice is not now and not for breakfast.

You slam your fist again and again. You don’t say no to me. And then you’re screaming, You don’t say no!

Your husband fits his hand around yours. His warm palm would otherwise be welcome—every part of you is cold—but serves now to solicit your shame. You’ve become a threatener, a screamer, a fist-slammer. When did that happen?

Okay, Super-Dad, you hiss. Be my guest.

Pulsing at the inner hollow of each hip is a strawberry-sized clot of hurt. It’s also angry. You fling yourself from the dining

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Four Before I Begin Again

room table up the stairs to the bathroom. You sit sideways on the toilet, your feet propped on a stool. You’re constipated, or you’re miscarrying. Maybe both. The stool is wooden, its blond grain swirling on each step, and in an hour, your sons will pull it across the floor and begrudgingly brush their teeth. They’ll leave bluetinted blobs of foam in the sink. But for now, the stool is yours: somewhere you’ve read that elevating your feet while you sit on the toilet creates a position more conducive to emptying your bowels. You’re desperate to empty your bowels. Isn’t that what they need? Isn’t that what hurts? Colon or uterus? Colon or uterus?

You lean forward to grip the top step of the stool with your hands.

Susanna Childress

23

Your elbows and knees, ankles, wrists, hips, and neck, all bend.

Droop. You work to breathe the square. Four counts drawing in air.

Four holding it. Four letting it go. Four before you begin again.

What your pregnant body yields: nothing, save one stark clap of gas. It has no shame, its switchback mile of intestines made sluggish with hormones. Who cares if your son eats his salad? His bowels are fine. You hear J’s patience downstairs, like you on the commode, straining.

It’s your choice, but—hey!—don’t you want to eat it now instead of for breakfast?

Another five minutes and what you manage to produce is a single dark walnut of poo—the best you can do, apparently. Now the moment where you ready yourself, every time you use the bathroom, for a smudge of blood on the toilet paper. You wipe and close your eyes and imagine the rust of red and hold the toilet paper up and open your eyes.

No blood. You pull the wad toward your face and look more closely. Nothing.

A clatter of footsteps stops at the bottom of the stairs. Your fouryear-old shouts up, his announcement laced with satisfaction.

Mama, he says, I made a wise choice!

Your feet push away the stool. Your fists pump the air though no one can see you.

Yes! you whoop. Way to be, baby.

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Four Before I Begin Again

P

uking is not foolproof. The son you lost deep into the second trimester, your third pregnancy, had you sickest of all, vomiting twenty times a day, even with prescription antiemetics. The two miscarriages that followed—a baby of unknown gender at ten weeks, and a girl at seven—had far, far less vomiting. So though it doesn’t mean everything, surely it means something—a fool’s proof—that you’re so sick, that you’re unable to eat anything green or from the ground.

One bite of broccoli or cauliflower, and you’re launched toward the sink. If you don’t make it, you barf into your hands, a sprawl of vegetal slime.

Victory.

But some days are not spent retching, not ten times and certainly not twenty. Some days, it takes more than an hour after dinner to lose your meal, and the silk of anxiety webs across your torso, wraps you around and around yourself in gauzy dread. You can’t speak coherently with J or interact with your sons. You don’t hear what they’re saying. You don’t care. They ask questions, and you repeat, dull as your fist against water: I don’t know. Honey, I have no idea.

If you’re not listless, you’re full of venom. One day, while you’re knocking about in your not-nausea, you and your six-year-old son make a pan of candy cane brownies for his millionth holiday party at school.

C’s giddy, unwrapping the candy canes one by one, dropping them into a plastic baggie, and smashing them to bits with a rolling pin. When you spill a spoonful of the batter, he licks it straight from the counter with his tongue.

Susanna Childress

25

What do you think you’re doing? you say, your voice spiking, your lips curled into a snarl. You let the metal mixing bowl clank against the counter. Get out of here.

C freezes, a brown smear It takes tremendous energy to keep of batter at the corner of functioning while carrying the memory of terror and the shame of utter weak- his mouth. You point to the ness and vulnerability. . . . How can peo- door and repeat yourself, ple gain control over the residues of louder and louder. Get out. past trauma? . . . The imprints from the Get out! You slam the bowl past can be transformed by having again, barely able to stop physical experiences that directly con- yourself from launching it tradict the helplessness, rage, and col- across the room. You want to see it hit the wall and lapse that are part of trauma. . . . streak its way down. You want to drown the room with screaming. Instead, you watch your son leave the kitchen, looking back at you with a wash of confusion, his brow puckered, his lips gone white. You’re panting. Inside the concentric circles of your fury, you feel an unspeakable amount of absolutely nothing.

M

y father knows I’m a pacifist though he’s never directly asked me why. If he did, I would tell him: Him. I might say how, in graduate school, I went a bit bonkers about Vietnam. I read

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Four Before I Begin Again

and read and read and read, and though no text is impartial, I sought out material of all sorts, from historical data to personal memoirs, from poetry to declassified Pentagon dossiers. After a time, I walked away from curating information and, in a sense, let the whole project go— armfuls of books I meant to open, armfuls I never would. I’d already gotten hold of what I didn’t know I’d needed: a general but manifest sense that my father, like so many of his era, and millions in the wars before his, had been wounded and never treated. Not his bullet wound, which healed into a little spoon of puckered skin I used to finger, but his brain. Or his spirit? His something. It came after me, a child. It came after him. It spun and punctured and whinnied and shivered and destroyed. And if that’s how war, how combat, works—nothing has convinced me otherwise—no one really wins. Ever.

After all these years, we’ve come to a point relationally that we know better than to speak of this. We mostly save speaking for what’s safe: the weather, our dogs, my boys, Mom.

I

’ve promised my therapist not to go online and look up pregnancy things. This is not something she asked me to do; it’s something I offered. Out of the largesse of my being—my foresight and pluck.

I’m a shit patient, so I try to make amends, which is itself an issue.

When I see an article entitled “The Psychological Toll of a President Trump: Making America Anxious Again,” I’m stepping into the gray

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area of my promise. In the piece, several clinical psychologists report heightened anxiety after the election. No surprise there. But it’s this comparison made by one trauma therapist that gets me: The amount of fear and grief—I haven’t seen anything like it, she says, and she can only approximate the response of 11/9 to 9/11. She continues: But the difference with this, compared to a terrorist attack . . . is the damage seems ongoing. . . . like it’s going to keep coming. Another therapist suggests that, for many of her patients, the election (and what’s followed) qualifies as serious trauma, especially for people of color: Folks who are already feeling subjugated and invalidated see this person who spews so much hate, who gives license to a lot of hate crimes. Add in the 62 million Americans who voted for him, or the 115th Congress seated to support him, and they feel at risk. Internally, is feeling at risk the same as being at risk—when you’re triggered, when you’re a target? Does the body understand that difference?

T

wo days after Christmas, your OB calls with the results of an extensive chromosomal test. You switch to speaker and hold the phone aloft so both you and J can hear clearly.

Can you say that again? you ask.

J gently grips your wrist and elbow, the phone shaking in your hand.

Yes, she says. I said, No abnormalities.

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Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby is the size of your fist.

Week 13

Oh, Lord, you whisper, Lord! You could weep with relief. You breathe through your nose.

And, your OB squawks through the speaker, clearly elated, it’s a girl!

J guffaws: I knew it! I knew it!

You did, too. You’ve known her from the start. You and J thank your OB with a profuseness suggesting she herself had something to do with the chromosomally normal girl-baby now perched in your innards.

You hang up and hug each other, rocking and laughing in the enormous bed of your in-law’s guest room.

Downstairs, the boys eat muffins and berries, and begin the process of losing at least one essential piece to their new Lego sets. Soon enough, J drifts back down into sleep, replete with peace, heat. You, somehow, are shivering, short of air, biting your knuckles to keep from shouting out. You scrape at your palms. No! Your pulse splinters.

It’s too perfect, you think, It’s exactly what we wanted.

You’ll lose all of it. Again. Your breath like a hatchet in your chest.

No, no, no.

You try what your therapist suggested, a chirpy little line that makes you want to paw at your face. Yes, you want to replace old physical experiences with new physical experiences, being in your body to help your body be. So you say it: I have this present moment. You lay one hand on J’s bare shoulder and one over the hitch in your lungs, your skin touching your skin. I have this present moment. You keep one hand on J and move the other to the grate in your bowels, the skin of your hand

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warming from the skin below your belly button, the skin stretched over your baby bump. I have this present moment.

As far as you know, she’s alive right now. That’s what you have. You’re here with her, also alive: feel your breath, the whisking of your gut. . 1 4 3 2 1 . 4

2

3

3

2

4 .

1 2 3 4 1 .

Two nights ago, you and J camped out for hours in the dingy ER of a strange hospital in rural Illinois because the cramping in your abdomen hitched up a dramatic notch. No one can explain the pain, but in the ultrasound, you got to see her dance, dipping and lurching within you.

Your little fist. You don’t know it, but packing up tomorrow, you’ll slip and fall hard on your in-laws’ carpeted stairs and drive in a fog for four hours straight to your doctor to check her heartbeat.

But in this moment, just inside this single one, she’s with you. And you’re with her.

Susanna Childress

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W

omen like Missy Lanning, whose viral YouTube channel “Daily Bumps” records her pregnancy after a miscarriage and stillbirth, recommend purchasing a pocket doppler.

My doctor wasn’t super happy about it, she says, Most doctors feel like it will cause more stress. That didn’t deter her: It actually calms my fears. . . . [A]ny time I want, I can sit down and hear the baby’s heartbeat.

Others say to fight that The stress hormones of traumatized people . . . take much longer to return urge. Replying to the Momto baseline and spike quickly and dis- tastic thread, “Should I Buy proportionately in response to mildly a Doppler?” Tink23 says it stressful stimuli. The insidious effects can cause more worry than of constantly elevated stress hor- reassurance: My fiancé and I mones . . . contribute to many long- went for my twelve-week scan term health issues, depending on . . . and saw the heart beating. which body system is most vulnerable . . . We visited the midwife for a checkup not an hour later, in a particular individual. and even she couldn’t find the heartbeat! So if the professionals sometimes can’t, I doubt you’d be doing yourself any favors. She continues, Try not to worry as that causes more harm than anything else, and signs off with three sets of animated smiley faces repeatedly nuzzling each other.

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Your baby is the size of a rubber ducky. As for Mom, those first trimester symptoms should be easing up a bit.

Week 15

I try not to worry. I resist the doppler. But after a second midnight trip to the ER and a second unscheduled checkup, it’s my OB who suggests I buy one. She also suggests I go off dairy and gluten to see if that’s what’s causing the pain. While I wait for the doppler to arrive, I snack on seaweed and coconut milk. I study pictures online of the colon: the cecum and sigmoid, the ropey grape-shape, the dark, pulpy pink. Is that it raging and enflamed within me? That and not the loosing of my daughter from my uterus, the losing of her?

Y

ou told yourself you wouldn’t, but you check her heartbeat like an addict. At night, you ask J if he wants to hear, and he does, and together you laugh when the sound of her kicking scorches the air.

But it isn’t enough. Three, four, five times a day, you sneak upstairs, shut the door, squirt jelly on your stomach, and lurch the wand around. There. O, God be praised. There she is. It feels like someone’s pulled the stopper from a cushion taut with air—There she is—the hiss and crimp of deflation. You drink it in, high on her heart. You pray, Let her stay, a mendicant on your back listening to the galloping of her four chambers.

It lasts for an hour or two, that reassurance. Sometimes, minutes.

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M

y therapist gives me no grief for this. But she wants to try something she describes as EMDR on crack: a new method of trauma neurotherapy called Brainspotting. I’ve done EMDR—Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing—years ago and recently.

Pretty much anytime I encounter my father, who’s stormed through my life with equal parts love and fury. It took years to see it as abuse, born of his own untreated trauma.

But I resisted EMDR after losing my babies. Why? I can see clearly that my grief has changed me, but it’s taken until now, thick into this pregnancy, to understand the losses as trauma. I, like most people, have an outdated conception of trauma. Trauma! Like some reptilian version of drama. Trauma? I’m not my dad, who, until very, very (very) recently, sneered at the notion of PTSD. He did two tours in Vietnam and then, one sunny day, was flown back home, deplaned, handed a paper bag of civilian clothes, sent on his way with a salute and a Good luck, son. No pamphlets or hotlines. No resources of any kind. Just in the last year, what sneering he’s done has shifted to recognition, resignation.

Susie, he says, you may not believe it, but that’s just the way it was.

I believe it. While my father was figuring out (i.e., floundering in) a post-combat life in SoCal, Harvard-trained psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk had only just begun his work in veteran hospitals along the east border of the nation, work which would lead to coining the phrase PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. The entire scientific understanding of PTSD began in this context: my dad’s war. These days, medical professionals still question the idea of transmitted trauma; inherited trauma remains

Susanna Childress

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knee-deep in hot, nearly indecipherable debate. So I feel a little silly saying the word trauma relative to myself. But why?

At present, no one is asking me to explain myself except me.

For Brainspotting, like EMDR, I’ll have to go back into those moments, the ones sticking sickly to my innards, the ones rutting my amygdala’s wheels. I’ll have to give myself over to my body. My body is what I have in the present moment.

Research . . . has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant.

T

he next moment, of course, could bring disaster. When you pee, you might wipe and see blood. You might bleed and bleed and pass parts of the baby’s body through yours. Or go in for a routine ultrasound and have someone tell you the baby’s dead, then check you into the floor where other women are birthing their babies, their newborn mewling. Slip a needle in your spine so you can bear your body being delivered of your baby’s dead body, then place the body in your arms to take pictures, and to give you and J a few minutes to say good-bye.

She might be dead even now, and you, too, might face your own death in losing her. Again. Again and again and again.

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I

n an ultrasound to check the hematoma and uterine fibroids, they discover a low-lying placenta. Each could get worse, or they could correct themselves. What you can do is: wait.

I

forego my promise. I’m no longer vomiting all day every day, but my body won’t stop hurting, and I look up colon and pregnancy online: voilà, a 2013 story of a UK woman who discovered she had colon cancer sixteen weeks into her first pregnancy. This woman fell to the hospital floor in pain. Was told constipation. Returned, delirious, until someone took her seriously. During her hours in chemo, she created a comic book of her experience. The chemo, she’s informed, will not likely harm the baby. But how strange to have life growing inside her— a son—alongside death, sitting there with who-knows-what siphoned into her veins, trying to kill one and not the other.

Y

ou give up gluten, dairy, refined sugars, soy. You swig probiotics twice a day. You eat like a rabbit, a cavewoman—greens, beans, proteins—but sometimes, no matter what you eat, you sweat, shake, claw your way up under the waves of pain, panic from pain, pain from panic.

Susanna Childress

37

You don’t have cancer, but you don’t know what’s happening. It hurts. It feels like losing a baby, and even you, the addict, know you can’t doppler all day, every day. You slam doors and punch pillows and once, late at night, you throw a stack of mail across the room at J. The envelopes flutter maddeningly, halfway between the two of you, and you pick them up and throw them again, harder, and they slice through the air in all the wrong directions.

And then she kicks, the tiniest scrim of movement, not unlike gas but not gas. It’s her.

B

rainspotting works, but it’s a kick in the ass. Like EMDR, Brainspotting can create new neural pathways by targeting specific “intense” memories. Unlike EMDR, which uses bilateral stimulation for the brain as a way to move through those memories— my own therapist alternated tapping my right and left palms— Brainspotting uses eye position that’s connected within the limbic system to the activation of the traumatic memory, which I have to call up and press into. We find the eye position together with a pointer: she pays attention to where, high or low, my eyes keep returning as I describe the memory; on that latitude, she has me follow a longitudinal line, and wherever I can feel a visceral response, like a discomfiting hum, she stops.

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Your baby is the size of a sweet potato and can now yawn in utero.

Week 18

I stare there, at the tip of the pointer, that spot not truly external but a place within my brain that is, as one researcher puts it, a physiological subsystem holding emotional experience in memory form. I notice and attend to my body—shoulders, heart, gut, breath, back, and neck. In silence, I follow my thoughts wherever they go. I can talk or not talk; it’s being with my body in the moments of extraordinary pain that matters. Rinse and repeat.

At the end, the memory doesn’t feel quite the same. Less stabby, maybe? Or maybe it just holds less, like a cup spilled of its contents. It’s still a cup, but what’s inside is different.

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Y

ou and J decide to tell the boys. You’re only vomiting once a day now, sometimes every other, but they keep asking if they’ll catch whatever’s made Mama so awful sick.

You won’t catch it, J says. He draws the boys in close, so you’re all clustered near the couch, C lolling between J’s knees and S ambled up on your lap, running his fingers through your hair.

Mama’s been so sick because, well—he watches you—w e’re having a baby!

You grin fiercely. If she makes it, you think.

The boys look at each other. At J. At you. S’s thumbs hover over your earlobes like a held breath.

Susanna Childress

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And, J says, letting the word linger, it’s a girl!

The boys erupt. They whee, yahoo, woo-hoo. They trampoline themselves between you and J and one another.

A sister, they shout, a sister! They can’t seem to stop popping up and down.

If she lives, you think, then re-up your grin and duck under your sons’ undulating limbs.

Then C, your six-year-old, stops. Will she—. He looks away, deep into the corner of the room. He doesn’t want to ask if she will die, like the others. He says, Nevermind. I forgot what I was going to say.

But will she be small or will she be big? Will she get here before I’m five?

S’s questions fall like petals. What color is her hair? What can we name her? Can I feed her your milk in a bottle? In a tiny little bottle?

I

give up staying off the Internet altogether. She’s on the cusp of viability. This week, each day increases her chances by 5 percent. You need distraction from such fulgurant odds, and you’ve already dopplered half a dozen times, so you count your four square, pray Psalm 31—Turn your ear to me, come quickly to my aid. . . . Keep me from the trap set for me—and you try the Web again. Colon and pregnancy yields something helpful: an onset of Irritable Bowel Syndrome because of gestation, the result of hormones and, yes, stress.

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Your baby is the size of a small doll.

Week 23

I’ve changed my diet, my liquid intake, my sleep habits, my vitamins and supplements, my exercise regimen, and my breathing, but I can’t change the president all over my feed, already mucking up every single thing ever, his fake-tan face distorted with speech, his tumescent sense of self. Could he misuse Scripture to spread more harm to more people, please? Could all the Christians say once more, with a southern drawl if possible, how God selected him as our leader for such a time as this? To mock and ban and grab and put up walls. To hate-tweet.

I look up stress and pregnancy. Mistake. The numbers rear up out of the water, layers of teeth angling for me. I’m flooding my womb with cortisol. I’m killing my baby with cortisol. She’ll be born desperately pre-term and/or autistic and/or depressed and/or have ADHD because I can’t get my shit together.

Get your shit together, woman. Do you hear me?

W

hen you announce the pregnancy in a department meeting, your colleagues cheer. The sound seems to shrink your bones. You shoulder their hugs and breathe in a square. What did you expect? When a kind colleague offers to throw you a baby shower, you avoid her for weeks. At last, you make yourself walk to her office, tap on her door, and look her in the eyes. She’s gentle with you, her manicured nails—a dark coral color that matches her lipstick—lightly tracing up and down her forearms, but she’s worried about you. You can tell.

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Your baby is the size of a chuck roast.

Week 26

Are you sure? she asks, ducking her chin toward her shoulder. The tiny ringlets of her hair shine, her face tilted toward the lamplight.

You lean forward, fingers squeezing each other in your lap. What if, you say, I have to return all the gifts?

Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. . . . [T]raumatized individuals become hyperhough I might feel vigilant to threat at the expense of alone in it, no one’s spontaneously engaging in their dayquestioning my trauma to-day lives. . . . [They] keep repeating the same problems. . . . [T]heir —it’s not stigmatized or debehaviors are not the result of moral monized. I held my dead failing or signs of lack of willpower or child in my arms. I almost bad character—they are caused by died myself in the losing of another baby. I am the child actual changes in the brain. of a Vietnam veteran. Still, I wonder: who am I to have spots on my brain?

No one’s telling me to get over myself. No one tone-polices me. No one’s over-policing me. No one’s saying, Well, how do you know it’s because you’re Black? (Trans? Native? Korean?)

This is my privilege. If I need help (and I do), I can get it without trouble or fanfare. Whites, compared to African Americans and Latinxs, have far more access to mental health care and, in dismal irony, far less cultural complexity in its pursuit. If this is already true, then

T

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Four Before I Begin Again

how, under a presidency that’s spotting brains left and right, whose platform and policies point like pistols at people of color, will those who most need treatment for trauma receive it?

F

or the sake of this baby, I Brainspot. For my boys, too. My marriage. Myself. It’s not starting over exactly, but giving new tools to the amygdala, the hippocampus, the orbitofrontal cortex. Moving forward with better equipment, maybe like an upgrade.

In Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, his trauma cases are much worse than mine, and the evidence after treatment suggests no one is beyond healing. I wish my dad, with abuse from his own childhood and his years of combat, would read this book. I wish I could speak with him about how he coped, is coping. I wish the women and men at my church, who have, their whole lives, been the targets of law enforcement and the recipients of daily suspicion, stereotyping, microaggressions, and worse, could read it. When my pastor mentions Brainspotting in her Facebook post—after an incident in our church parking lot involving several blaring squad cars and police with rifles trained at the heads of unarmed Black teens splayed out on the asphalt—it’s the only slice of hope I have for our community. Oh God, come quickly to our aid. Stop the trauma. Stop the trauma. Heal our brains.

Susanna Childress

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My therapist flies out to Boston for training with van der Kolk. She says, It’s changing everything. She says, There are new possibilities in all kinds of situations now. She says, I’m sorry I didn’t know about Brainspotting when you came to me two years ago.

I want to hug her. Instead, I Traumatic memories persist as split- set up weekly appointments. I off, unmodified images, sensations, cringe with privilege. and feelings. . . . The most remarkable feature of [Brainspotting] is its apparent capacity to activate a seou dream the president ries of unsought and seemingly unvisits your father. His related sensations, emotions, imorange face, white flame ages, and thoughts in conjunction of hair, his nightmare cabiwith the original memory. net trailing behind him on your family’s rolling acres, your father embracing them. You dream you’re screaming at J, and your sons, lashing at the walls with your palms. You dream you can see the baby through your translucent belly but can’t stop her from suffocating inside you.

Y

A 48

n ultrasound reveals no present danger. The hematoma has reabsorbed, the fibroids have maintained their size; the placenta has risen.

Four Before I Begin Again

Your baby is the size of a cabbage.

Dreaming of baby? Your baby is dreaming, too.

Week 30

Y

our third boy didn’t make it to the third trimester, but you felt him kick. You knew him only by his fluttering, his tiny hamstrings and calves hoofing blithely within you, the popping of a kernel of corn. When you lost him, it was the kicking that shamed you most.

Why hadn’t you noticed? Though kick counts aren’t reliable before twenty-eight weeks, how could you not have registered the absence of his movement? The wave of self-incrimination sweeps further back.

With S and C, you marveled at their movement in the third trimester, elbows or knees rolling across your midsection like Loch Ness, but you hadn’t counted kicks with either of them. Back then, you believed nothing could go wrong. It just wouldn’t. You were #blessed.

Now you download two apps onto your phone, one for a half-count in the morning and evening (four kicks in a half hour) and one for a full count midday (ten kicks in an hour). Thankfully, this girl knocks into your gizzard with gorgeous, if irregular, vim.

Sometimes, though, her silence catches you up short, like a hand smacked across your cheek. When did she last move? You lie on your left side and listen with your whole body. Why isn’t she moving? You mold your belly with your hands, pressing up and down against one side, and then the other, nudging the parts of her you can get to from out here, coaxing her, waking her. Why isn’t she moving? Breathe a square: four counts drawing in air, four holding it, four letting it go, four before you begin again.

Finally, a flicker of an elbow, a bolt of ankles, tiny buttocks shifting.

There. Oh, God of wonders. There she is. Each hiccup like Easter.

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Your baby is the size of half a gallon of milk. She’s practicing survival skills like sucking and breathing while your uterus is practicing some Braxton Hicks contractions. Don’t forget to count those kicks!

Week 32

A

s I write this, an essay I mean to finish before—if-when, when-if—I birth this baby, I read it aloud. It rides the dying breath. Poet Li-Young Lee suggests, The nature of speech is this: I take a big breath, I’m full of life. . . . As I begin to talk, my meaning gets more and more disclosed, more and more divulged. There’s more and more meaning, but less and less breath. . . .

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O

n Fridays, we watch a movie and eat pizza. Well, J and the boys eat pizza. I have a salad and a couple of corn tortillas with “cheese” made from almond milk toasted on top. It tastes like nothing—like I’m eating crunchy air. I inhale the scent of real mozzarella, real homemade dough, tomato sauce made from scratch with beer and sugar, and though it’s absolutely worth it to eat my own dinner, to keep the pain from spiking, not to be huddled in bed worried— still, again, as ever—if I’m losing her, I eye my partner and children.

I miss real pizza rather rabidly.

Susanna Childress

53

Tonight, we’re watching Zootopia, an anthropomorphic tale of a determined bunny and her unlikely partnership with a fox to solve the mystery of reignited predator instincts in the evolved former predators, and it mesmerizes us—my boys because it’s strange and smart and funny, me because of its relevant exploration of bias, assumptions, the vicious danger implicit in our fear of Other. But it’s at the end, when Shakira—as a tail-shaking, upright gazelle—sings “Try Everything,” that I find myself, without warning, weeping spectacularly into my tortilla pizza. Part of it is the infectious beat, and the righteous harmony, but most of it is the song’s indefatigable spirit: No, I won’t give up. / I won’t give in / till I reach the end / then I’ll try again. / No, I won’t leave. / I wanna try everything. / I wanna try even though I could fail.

The film’s credits roll, and, as with most movie endings, my sons jump up, twirling and leaping and flailing with joy, at the music, the triumph of the story, the chance to dance about after so much sitting. I’d join them, but physical strain still makes me skittish even though the no-exercise clause disappeared along with the hematoma and low-lying placenta. So I sing instead, as much declaration as entreaty, wiping at my face, sucking back snot so as not to scare my sons. I’ll keep on making those new mistakes. / I’ll keep on making them every day— / those new mistakes. / Oh oh oh oh oh, try everything / Oh oh oh oh oh, try everything.

I don’t dance, but I raise and bounce my arms, fingers extended as if in ecstatic prayer. As if I’m coming back to life. Of all the hotshot, high literary shit I teach and read, it’s a pop song in a cartoon movie that’s made me feel as if, just maybe, for a moment, I’m resilient.

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Your baby is the size of a large cantaloupe. Your doctor may check for labor signs, while in the womb, your baby prepares for birth by sucking, turning, and breathing.

Week 37

Y

ou seem to do little else these summer days but scuttle back and forth between your obstetrician’s office and your therapist’s. At thirty-seven weeks, you begin non-stress tests every three to four days, measuring the baby’s heart rate against her activity for half-hour sessions. On your back, the pads of a medical-grade doppler stretch across your belly, and every time you feel her move, you press a button; beside you, the machine slowly emits a sort of ticker tape graph. You won’t deny it: it’s glorious to hear her heart thumping, minutes on end, the squelch of her kick and turn. Though you’re not meant to read the graph paper, you hold it in your hands as it spits itself out, study the leaps and dips, bumps, spikes. She’s not just alive; she’s well.

But sometimes it takes her a while. She’s sleeping. Or something’s wrong. Is something wrong? It’s been too long. You shift your position. You try to shift hers, pressing resolutely on the bulge that’s either her head or her butt. You toggle what could be a foot. The same nurse who gave you a RhoGAM shot those many months ago, tattoos flickering whimsically across her wrist, brings you a tiny box of organic apple juice—the back of the carton says twenty-seven grams of sugar per serving—and then leaves the room. Your stupid trembling fingers shed the tiny straw of its tiny plastic sheath and poke it into the tiny hole. You suck. Mere seconds after the thin, cold line of sweet slides down the back of your throat to coat your stomach, she startles. Lord, you breathe. Lord Jesus. She jabs and flits and tamps. Thank you. It’s the best damn moment of the day. It might be the only moment at all.

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A

t the therapist’s, I end up talking about what will happen to me if something does, in fact, go wrong. If she dies. I think, I say, stalling but unable to lie, I will die, too. Or I’ll want to.

Well, my therapist says, that may be true. Or feel true, anyway. She shifts in her seat, crosses her long legs, brings her hand up to cradle her chin. But you have Brainspotting now.

Yes, I say, uncertain where this is headed. I take her to mean, whatever trauma I experience, I can be treated. Right away.

It won’t be like before, she says tenderly but not smiling. This is no sales pitch.

My eyes flick toward the window. I finish her sentence in my head.

Even if she dies. Is this true? I want to scoff, there on the wide-weave blue couch, my therapist calmly pressing her fingers into her face, propped up by her elbow. Haven’t I just been at the OB’s office, unhinged, even as I heard the beat of her heart? Wouldn’t I, excepting the chance of gestational diabetes, slurp down sugar all day, every day, if it meant she squirmed in solid intervals, reassuring me? And yet, something inside me—a larger portion than I’ve reckoned with—doesn’t even pucker. Cannot scoff. I, who have clung to my fear. I, startled with the possibility of healing. Some pocket of me, indeed, knows this to be true: if the worst thing comes, it can, not in whole but in part, be undone. Spot by spot.

It will be, but it won’t be the end of me.

Susanna Childress

57

T

he more I consider the movie Zootopia, the more troubled I am. I mean, Disney’s never impressed me with socially progressive ideas (or even, say, acute cultural awareness), but here, the veneer of humane thinking seems particularly dangerous. At the outset, it took me in. Yet, in the film’s anthropomorIn contrast with the subjects phized cosmolwho improved on Prozac— ogy, with people whose memories were merely of color porblunted, not integrated as an trayed as former event that happened in the predators revertpast and still caused consider- ing back to savable anxiety—those who re- agery, framed by ceived [Brainspotting] no former prey in the longer experienced the distinct whodunnit plot, the imprints of the trauma: it had metaphor gets ribecome a story of a terrible diculously messy. As in, event that happened a long outright racist. And, it strikes me now, historitime ago. cally inaccurate: it’s Caucasians who have, for centuries, been unbridled predators.

Online, I’ve been gobbling up the work of Dr. Joy DeGruy. Her book is titled Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and I watch video after video on YouTube of her presentations, which explore the impact of direct

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Your baby is the size of a small watermelon. Your baby is producing surfactant, which will help him take those first few breaths.

Week 39

and indirect trauma on slaves, how trauma was transmitted, the ways that trauma continues to this day, and a plea for the recognition by all people of the original and continued trauma. People of African descent are extremely resilient, she says in one video. In fact, I think we’re a miracle. While talking to a group of mental healthcare workers, she clarifies, Far be it from us to pathologize and . . . cast this idea of a weak and sick people. Oh, on the contrary, we are profoundly resilient. Because we’ve done everything we’ve done this far with no help, without even the ability to have this discussion. It would be typical for a majority culture, namely ours, to inflict damage and then blame the survivor for being affected.

In fact, a more general diagnostic name change is being batted about, almost a decade after the publication of DeGruy’s book: instead of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, it ought to be Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, or even Post-Traumatic Stress Injury. Syndrome suggests it isn’t permanent or irrevocable. Injury is altogether

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Your baby, the size of a jackfruit, is finally ready to meet you! Through she may not have gotten the memo just yet.

Week 40

less stigmatic. The voices in this semantic fight are largely politicians and healthcare professionals, and the prime examples—those seeming to carry the most emotional weight—are veterans. In terms of insurance and social standing, veterans certainly stand to be affected by this shift in terminology.

And what about those who have been preyed upon in all manner of ways since the founding of our country? Whose bodies we still strip and rape and shoot and work without fair pay, whose land we still steal, whose children we still sell?

T

he night before your due date, you begin to bleed. In your underwear, a small, slick pool of brown blood. You’ve been checking the toilet paper each bathroom trip for so long that it both surprises you and doesn’t. Still, at first, you’re excited. You waddle to tell J, where he sits on the back porch with the boys, finishing chicken and veggie kabobs. It means something is happening, and not a second too soon—your OB’s insisted on inducing tomorrow. You make yourself eat a piece of charred zucchini, a warm cherry tomato bursting against the inside of your cheek. You finish packing the bag you’ll take to the hospital and give J instructions on whom to call so he can join you during labor if you don’t come back home beforehand, and you film your sons on the stairs singing, We’re going to have a sister to-mor-row, to-mor-row! We’re going to have a sister soon-soon-soon! But on the drive over to the hospital, you feel another gush, and it’s not your water breaking, and that means it’s more blood, and in that moment, you understand

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with a clatter of certainty that though you’ve come so far, you still have so far to go.

Please stay, you beg her. Stay!

You slap your hands against the steering wheel to keep yourself from weeping. She careens within you, kicking high, twice, near your ribs. Then she rests again.

I have this moment, you think, one hand guiding the car into the lowerlevel parking garage—where even now, at day’s end, birdsong echoes off the cement—and the other hand palming the place on your body she’s just touched. I have this present moment. . 1 4 3 2 1 . 4

2

3

3

2

4

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1 2 3 4 1 .

Susanna Childress

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SUSANNA CHILDRESS’s two books of poetry won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and the Society of Midland Authors Award. A book of essays, Extremely Yours, is forthcoming from Awst Press.

Her essays, short fiction, poetry, and hybrid pieces can be found or are forthcoming with The Rumpus, Oakland Review, Relief, Ocean State Review, Best American Poetry, and Image. She lives along the western shore of Michigan.

About the process of writing “Four Before I Begin Again,” Childress says, “In the middle of my last—my final—pregnancy, I saw a call from a literary journal with the theme of ‘Starting Over,’ and just the phrase itself caught my breath up short, how deeply it aligned with what I was already asking myself nearly every day: Is that possible for me? Is it possible for anyone? I was interested not only in the start of new life but whether one can begin again, mid-life, especially if trauma is involved, shifting our sense of self and of possibility(ies). So my exploration in this essay is in neighboring these questions with consideration both to new life and renewed life: how our bodies and our brains are or aren’t able to ‘start over’—and what it might mean to seek or see healing along the way.”

Susanna Childress

Iron Horse Literary Review would like to thank its supporters, without whose generous help we could not publish Iron Horse successfully. In particular, we would like to thank our benefactors and equestrian donors. If you would like to join our network of friends, please contact us at ihlr.mail@gmail.com for information on the various levels of support.

Benefactors ($300) Wendell Aycock Lon and Carol Baugh Beverly and George Cox Sam Dragga Madonne Miner Charles and Patricia Patterson Gordon Weaver Equestrian ($3,000 and above) Charles and Patricia Patterson TTU English Department, Chair Brian Still TTU College of Arts & Sciences, Dean Brent Lindquist TTU Graduate School, Dean Mark Sheridan TTU Provost’s Office, Provost Michael Galyean TTU President’s Office, President Lawrence Schovanec