The Mama Politic: Mapping a New World
When I became a mama, I became a taker of photos. A photographer in the sense that I cannot let too many moments, between weeks, between haircuts, between months, between long legged growth spurts to occur before the chance to capture all the changes happening under the skin of my one and only four-year-old wonder of all wonders, vanishes. I snap as she spins, I click as she runs, usually a blur of blue and yellow, her eyes and hair spun like a sunflower on a summer-sun, blue-sky background—a moving life. I don't really care what occurs in the pictures or if there are half chewed dog bones on the floor in the background or if she never ends up smiling in any picture, ever. I just want to have the moments, in their realness as a map backward through our lives together.
Before our daughter was born, her dad was the photographer. I did not handle the camera. I did not really care to. He is the filmmaker; he is the one with the manual camera, the long lens, the red filter. He only used black and white film and photographed in graveyards, shot snow-covered landscapes and snapped photo after photo of me in still life form. Stored in a box, my old self lays dormant—me laying on Raymond Carver's grave with a pack of Lucky Strikes, me reading Anaïs Nin's Little Birds naked on the bed in my creamy fluidity, me standing nude on the deck, the Seattle skyline in the background, my back inked with Sharpie: a giant octopus he drew swimming languidly over my hollowed spine. Memories of the way I used to use this body of mine—the way it played chase with a secret sway and peek-a-boo with minimal clothing. The photos are a time warp, a frozen narcissistic journal of what we use to be—free, loose, and sexy in our naiveté. One of the last pictures he took of me in this form, before I clasped the camera strap, was four days before our daughter was born. We stood in a wheat field under a full July moon. My belly, in its own full-moon phase, is stark against the golden swaying wheat. We were sure she was pulling from me with the gravitational tides. This photo hangs in our bedroom, the last moment I have capturing my daughter in her perfect form before we, and the rest of world, could lay their hands, ideas, and judgments on her. It reminds me of our last bit of innocence, of being only responsible for ourselves. Then four nights later, my sister held the very same camera. In these photos, a feathery-haired head emerged from my body, a giant tear streamed blood as our midwife moved aside so that my partner in making this new life could be the one to guide his daughter into our world. Painful to look at photos; pictures proving my skin quaked, shook, and cracked under the pressure of this emerged presence. There are literally dozens of this same photo as I strained and pushed everyone waiting hours as the tiny head repeatedly peaked out of me and then swallowed back in. After these shots came back from the drug store, I hid from the camera. I did not want to be the one under the focus of the lens—my face tired, my jaw slack, my breasts leaking, and my clothes baggy from expanse/retraction. My landscape became loose, in a second skin, one yet to shed. I sidestepped the pointed gaze of the now digital device we use on a nearly daily basis and became the one behind the scenes. My focus singular in view, honed in on the freshness of new skin, laughing eyes shining through the new soul of my biggest, newest production. I shielded my body with my newborn-turned-toddler turned kid who can add numbers and memorize entire books. Then one night, I left my husband on the couch and shuffled to bed after capturing a few hours of uninterrupted, no-kid writing time. As usual, I found my way to bed in the early morning darkness. I wrench and stretch those hours of freedom between nine in the evening and one in the morning. They are my reprieve from constant concern and negotiation. That night, I wound my way through the piles of clothes and toys that are always at my feet and began to undress. An old, turn-of-the-twentieth-century mirror that we found by a dumpster during our still life days, hangs by the bed with the reflective silver faded, spotted and chipped away. We use to think it harbored ghosts of reflections past but as I stood naked in front of the one lamp in the room, covered in a gold scarf, all I saw was this new, naked me, no ghost, no spots, just a golden mama born of struggles and herself. My camera sat on my bedside table, left over from taking shots of my daughter reading. I picked it up, switched on the timer, set it on my perpetual stack of books, and clicked once, clicked twice, clicked a dozen times. My new nakedness photographed for the first time, and this time, it was with my own hand. I turned and spun as if it was I in the sunlight. I watched myself in the mirror as my hair fell and my neck bent. I studied myself, and instead of feeling all stretched out and baby-felled, I saw my body as a map. As I turned left, my stomach swelled between my pointed hipbones like a softly stretched pouch that carried my daughter swallowed in water for nine months. Tributaries of angry red marks have dulled to a peachy white, marking her travels beneath my skin. This flesh now serves to hold her as she straddles me to be carried, hugged, and coddled. When I stood looking forward, my left breast plunged, the breast that packed the most milk, the favored suckle; the one that kept going when the right one was rejected after only a few months. As I stood right, the scar from my breast surgery glistened as a reminder of what use to be but is no more. This side still has one gland that hangs onto the last bit of milk—leaking out every few days—a biological form of not being able to let go. My favorite picture is of my back, my arms up, the muscles in my shoulders protruding, ribboning between the blades, powerful from carrying the forty pounds of child who so often desires to be in my arms. My lower back sways and curves, my spine, thick, strong, and arched like a bend in a leaf. This vision of me, without a face, feels true. As if this side of me really performs all the work, as if the armor of my vertebrae allows all tender bending, swooping up, and tucking in to happen. My daughter touches this body with such care. She strokes my hair out of my face, lifts my shirt for a long last peak, pointing, patting, and chanting "booby." She lays her head against my tummy as a gentle reminder of where she came from and where she is always welcome to read, to talk, and to cry. When we bathe together, she looks at my skin with only love and longing; soaping my spine and playing spider down my arm to the crook of my elbow that is in constant contact with her as we walk, often still as one person. My new body is no longer something I think about as being temporary. For a couple of years, I kept my old size-four clothes, which now look ludicrous and underdeveloped. I use to try them on every now and again, buttons gapping, seams straining. I thought for some reason, they would someday cover this new map, topography altered, yet strangely familiar and somehow even more comfortable than before. Even though I sometimes miss the ease of movement that comes with my previous taught skin, I love this new stretch of land I see before me; this old world comfort of being the moveable earth my daughter comes home to. In my body's new form, it has an angular, hard won, earth worn raw, sensual hue that was missing before. I turn the camera off and instead of slipping into bed in my dizzy, nether world, insomnia wandering, I travel back down stairs to the couch, taking my daughter's dad by the hand and leading him to bed with me, because in this new world, I've found, I don't want to travel alone. I want to share this stark-raving, rock-strewn, skin wrapped path that has become me. |
Michelle Taylor
 Michelle Taylor has taught in a New York City public school, at a New York Penitentiary, and at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently a teacher at a community school in Seattle where she has packed her daughter Autumn-Wilder around in a sling, a backpack, and upside down for the past four years. You can find her other work at Mama Out Loud and The Living Classroom. Read more of Michelle's Mama Politic column. search mamazine:
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