36 months post partum

For four nights in a row I have laid awake, watching the hours tick by. My mind is not racing though it is active. My body is restless. It mirrors the wind just on the other side of the wall, fierce and without end. I’m desperate for sleep.

—

My son is now three, a weekend of festivities under our belts, a pile of Legos on the floor, and a stack of leftover pizza in the fridge. “He is pure and full of joy,” says a friend when I send them a video of him playing in a balloon filled room (me having nearly passed out the night before executing the vision). He is. He is every good thing to me.

—

There are tiny cabins that dot the wide open prairie where I live, remnants of the first settlers and their attempts to lasso a mighty place. Misguided theft, flat out criminal, violently erasing the people and culture of the place in an effort to establish themselves.

—

Last night Wilder asked why people have different size breasts. We discuss at length breast milk, the amazing ability of my body to create it, to sustain his life with all that is in me. We discuss his ability to evolve, to feed himself, to harness energy outside of me.

—

36 months postpartum, as if life after death existed.

What am I now but a shell of who I was,

A being excavated.

So fully throttled

That’s there nothing left to give.

Only — with every bit of bodily frame

Used, I am finally open.

I scribble.

—

It’s the women I think of in these tiny cabins. Raising three, four, five, seven children in a foreign land, with no neighbors, no family, no community. I think of them on nights alone in the wind. Maybe the patriarch is on a hunting trip, maybe he’s gone elsewhere for supplies or to help build another cabin. Maybe she’s terrified without him, maybe it’s a welcome relief. She likely has little autonomy or agency, she likely didn’t choose this hard life, she likely didn’t have the choice. Or, maybe she did. Maybe she was the leader, the intrepid one, the strong, domineering kind hungry for something new, willing to draw blood, to battle rocky terrain, unknown sickness, endless work, fatigue, loneliness.

There isn’t an element of her that is lost on me.

—

My great-grandmother left Pico on April 17, 1921 when she was 19. She never saw her mother again.

—

I’ve had the good fortune of never doubting my ability or desire to mother. What a beautiful thing to believe yourself able to do something and then witness as you do it well.

—

I drive down Highway 78 and see a cow running in the snow to my left. There are two other black objects moving, the snow so high and their profiles so low I can’t quite catch a good look. Are they cats? I wonder, familiar with the black ones that meander through this particular ranch. The road lifts a bit and I’m able to discern two tiny calves, honestly the tiniest I have ever seen. They’re truly adorable, endearing, lovable as they gallop in front of their mom on their way to graze. It seems likely they were born yesterday.

“You know,” said Dean at this time three years ago in a story that has now gone down in Roscoe history, “The cows always go into labor during the deep freeze. Something about the barometric shift. Maybe it’ll work for you.” I definitely felt like a cow, and would welcome an early delivery, so I laughed and and said something like “Let’s see how much of a heifer I am.”

Turns out — quite a bit. My water did indeed break 2/22/22, not only an auspicious day but the coldest one of the year at -27 degrees Fahrenheit. Unfortunately for me, it was 70 hours of labor and an emergency c-section that finally brought my babe out of me and into the frigid air.

“Russia just invaded Ukraine,” I told James, looking up from my phone in between the delirium of having a child and being administered OxyContin. He was recounting to someone on the phone how neither of our cars would start when it came time to go, him and Dean gathering extension cords and space heaters and blow dryers, trying to cajole the engine to get us to the birth center.

—

At the time I was in shock, overwhelmed, a bit sad. Today I am none of these things. Instead I am exhausted, confident, inspired, liberated.

—

I wonder why we continually seek to place ourselves in narrow, palatable descriptions. I wonder why we uphold systems of oppression. I wonder at our ability to push away, I wonder why we’ve exercised the muscle to tune out.

I wonder at my desire, which seems reckless. I wonder why motherhood is everything to me and yet — not enough.

The wind continues to howl as I refuse to be simple and instead revel in my complexity. I pick up my son when he cries despite the sleep coach advising against it. I explain every decision though he’ll test a hundred times more. I ask for a moment to just finish this one thought though it’s rarely granted. I clean over and over and over. I kiss him a thousand times, and then again. Our lives are so much more than the narrative offers and I will not erase.