The fact that I have a cassette tape player in my car but no longer have one attached to my stereo occasionally subjects me to fits of nostalgia where I feel the need to dig out those plastic cases and flip them open and pop in music I haven’t heard in quite a while. The first 10,000 Maniacs album. Over-earnest guitar from Tracy Chapman. Old school R.E.M. Lovely, morose Smiths. Even those mixed tapes of the Velvet Underground and Prince and Marvin Gaye and Charles Mingus from old boyfriends that make me smile oddly, surprised at the collections and trying to place what hidden (or not so hidden) meaning each song was meant to convey at the time, all as I drive down the center of the city and try not to get smashed in the make-them-up-as-you-go-along rules of the road here.
Cassettes don’t give anywhere the same pleasure as old
records—what you’ll hear music devotees talk about: the sound only vinyl can
give; how it truly catches the human voice in the way the synthetic, digital CD
just won’t; the loved, habitual acts of sitting down and easing into a whole
album side, then walking over, gently to turn the record over, then settling
back into the other side with even more satisfaction. Cassette tapes get ratty quickly. They’re
unsubstantial. The spools of tape clatter against the frame. They are hardly
ever taken care of. The sound quality takes on a low hiss after only a month or
so of ownership.
But that’s what’s somehow wonderful about them. How I can’t quite tell what part of the recording of “King of the Road” is Michael Stipe’s misstep and what part is left over from having left the tape on the dashboard of my first car in the Oklahoma sun. How the music—and the object that carries it--involve an unexpected history, and how, in their imperfection and brokenness, they bring all of that back.
Most of the students I teach at the university are 18 or 19 years old. As I’ve looked out into the rooms over last semester and this one, too, I’ve been thinking about just what goes on in their heads, trying to get back to that place. A few years ago I could do exactly that—remember what it was like to be new to college and to the outside world--but I find I can’t anymore, because I’m so firmly on the other side of things. An adult, a real one, and not the adult even back then I somehow knew I was only playing at as, it turns out, I was.
My school year last year consisted of two miscarriages, the death of my father, several other deaths in my extended family, and the deepest tract of despair that I’ve known. It’s not that my students don’t have their own sorrows; one student nursed her mother through Stage IV breast cancer, another lost her father mere weeks after I lost mine. This year, for them, has included heart infections and suicide attempts. There are fathers diagnosed with dementia; fathers who have locked daughters out of the house for good to get back at cheating mothers; mothers who drink late into the night, and alone. Sisters with special needs who cry into the phone, not understanding why their brothers have had to go so far away for school when there are schools right there, right down the street.
When I stood in front of my students—kids, really—last semester, in the early and perilous early days of a new pregnancy, there was so much I wanted to tell them about my inner life. About why I likely seemed disorganized: how I wanted to answer against this by teaching them about the terror that comes after loss. About getting through the first day of classes while newly pregnant, while having to recognize the anniversary of my first loss at the same time. Trying hard to go in to the classroom and make logical, compelling sense in leading discussion when I’d been spotting the night before and into the morning and was convinced I was about to lose this, pregnancy, too. Teaching the day before my first scan. Turning up late to class the morning my mother called, in tears, not able to face the ashes of my father anymore in her house. Working through the noise in my head to lead discussion in a week I am waiting to hear whether the child inside me has a neural tube defect and will not live to breathe out in the world, as these students do without thinking.
But this was not a conversation I could have with them, even
those who knew deep sadnesses of their own; and even if some of them could
understand, I couldn’t face the ones who couldn’t, who would just stare at me
wide-eyed and off-put. And so I said nothing beyond the normal class material—let
them think I’m nervous, skittish, underprepared, even.
Still, every day I met with them in that hard semester, I thought about telling them—telling it all. But in the next breath I stopped myself. I knew I couldn’t bear the ones who’d use it—for whom it would provide fodder on evaluations, blustering against bad grades no one hoisted on them but that they themselves earned. That moment of openness is too hazardous in a group where some of the students are lashing out at anyone they can, where because I am one of the few teachers at the whole university who knows their names and their lives and their vulnerabilities, rather than come to me in gentleness, this can all backfire rather quickly, and I become the ready target for everything that’s wrong and not what they expected about college and, in fact, the promise and realities of their own lives.
I just couldn’t take on that anger. There was no room for it. Not in my life and certainly not in my changing body. Even as I stayed pregnant and found myself firmly into the second trimester with much less risk of loss, I was filled up with my own anger that could be called up at a moment’s notice. Anger of an adolescent ferocity, about infertility and loss and everything that accompanies that. Anger about the lies that filled up my life, from the doctors’ lips to the unspoken secrets my father, even on his deathbed, refused to tell.
But I learned to keep a tenuous hold on that anger, seeing firsthand how sour and mean it could turn some of my students who did not have the means to face their own tempers. I taught my body to use its weight and leverage to keep that fury at bay. Each day, it’s true, I felt a little less of its rise and push in me. I felt it taming, settling into that hold as its new home, no longer straining, but accepting the cage of my bones for the home it can provide.
The rattling I hear, then, is not that fierceness pushing against its case, but is instead a wonder about when I will be strong enough to be honest again. When I will not be so afraid. When the brokenness is part of me not just as a hidden, secret thing, but when I can come to talk about it, unafraid it will take me over and undo me. Can I think of a time when I can sing the wrong words and record them, play them back, let people upon people hear them, and I am unashamed? How messy am I willing to be? How real?
I am, remarkably, in the third trimester of a pregnancy I
once could not bring myself to believe would last. Speaking of it out
loud, trusting in it, was risk and folly. But here I am at 32 weeks of
gestation, when the likelihood is that even with an early birth, the baby would
survive with minimum complications out in the world. The fact is that I don’t
any longer have a choice in what I share and don’t in many regards. My belly is wide and
long, and strangers and friends alike ask to touch it. I am visibly pregnant;
everyone who sees me assumes I’m going to have a child. And barring any
birthing disaster (I haven’t grown so confident to rule that out), I will do
just that—have a child.
I've had to come to terms, suddenly, with the notion that there's no perfecting
of the soul, no life goals that will be suddenly met in the next eight weeks. I
could stay completely contained in my head and say nothing of pregnancy and still I would speak just by walking outside my front door. I have time enough to make sure the crib is screwed together adequately that it
won't cave in on the baby’s little, soft head. I do not have time to change my
life and make it complete. She is coming regardless of where I thought I wanted
to be when I had a child. There's no extension I could beg (unless, of course,
she decides to arrive late on her own terms) or new projects that I could launch into
with any hope of completion. I could write careful pages of an enumerated birth
plan, trying to predict every causality, eventuality, possibility, but I
also know that there's little conducting
of an actual birth that's going to work in real time beyond what this baby
demands in its own moment. I am just like those old cassette tapes I reach for--battered, loopy, and at the mercy of how the music decides to play out.
Each progressive week of childbirth class, I become aware of how messy birth itself is on every count. The teacher warns the partners to pack a change of clothing, given that they're going to be in what she calls “the splash zone.” I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth and take in not just the joy of birth these women tell through their individual words and stories, but also the sense of how physical and scatalogical it all can be. How the body just takes over: There is fluid and urine and blood. There is often vomit and shit in the labor process. There's no engineering against the facts of the body and its glorious heave and slosh and push that it takes to bring a baby out into the world.
I suppose this is an essential part of motherhood—setting aside the
I-thought-it'd-be's for the here-is-what-it-is's. But this is no moment of giving up everything I am and redefining myself as the mother of someone. It’s more about
reclaiming myself for myself in strength and not fear, thinking about what it means to be an adult woman
more able to understand the sadnesses around me, face it and help it, but most importantly
not take it in as my own. It's about recognizing each person's case and history, how the sun has worn it at the edges, how being out in the world takes different tolls on all of us. To sing loudly and slightly off-key and miss some of
the lead-in lyrics, but get to this, and proudly: I’m a woman of means by no
means. To screw up the words. To be messy. To be human in a way that I’ve
been so, so afraid to be. And to believe, for once, that I can open up my
entire body from its center and not break, in the end, into pieces.
Comments