Pillow Talk

the art of self-abandonment

While I was searching my Google docs for an older essay, I found a poem, Pillow Talk, which you will find at the very end of this post. I wrote it many years ago and I remember submitting it to a few places and then putting it back to bed. It’s been a long time since I’ve read it.

Sometimes I feel like I’m channeling when I write. I feel the labor, the contractions of an idea and I sort of leave my body. I often forget what I’ve written. I’ve had friends literally quote my own writing to me and I haven’t even recognized it as mine. I feel like I’ve been given morphine and the baby is born without me.

When I read this older poem, I cringed. I had a visceral reaction. I remembered what it meant.

Back in my cult years, the message was this:

• Women are the weaker vessel

• Women should be in submission to men

• Wives only commune with God through their husbands

• Men are the head of the household

• Women owe their husbands the “marital” due

• Women should be wives and mothers if they don’t devote their lives to the full time minstry

Sermons often focused on the “Proverbial wife and mother.” She gets up early, makes sure everyone eats before she does, she toils, she serves, she obeys her husband. Isn’t she the epitome of a female role model?

Even as I grew up in this institution, being groomed for this life since birth, I felt rage every single time I read those scriptures.

I was engaged at seventeen, married at eighteen, a mother at nineteen, and a divorced single mother at twenty four. That’s when I left.

This patriarchal, misogynistic imposition not only hurts women, it hurts these young men and husbands as well. It sets them up for a false sense of superiority, a complete detachment of their feminine side, instills entitlement, and false dominion.

When I think of that first marriage and I look at photos of the two of us, my heart hurts for us both. We look like babies. We loved each other as much as we could, and no one was really surprised when it ended.

I remember weeks after he left telling him, “Thank you for giving me a second shot of life.”

Did he know what I meant?

I meant that I most likely would never have left. I would have hurt myself, martyred myself and hoped that someday, somehow, someone would save me. Not from my husband, but from a system that dooms women and mothers.

Mothers. Oh mothers. Oh mother.

Both of my children were planned. I needed to become a mother. I yearned for it with all of my being. I remember writing a letter to my future child when I was only eighteen, “My heart is too big. It hurts. I need you, only to love you. You don’t have to love me back. I just want to love you.”

And I did, and do love my children fiercely. More than anyone on this earth. And to this day, I still don’t expect this love to be returned. But something their father said on Father’s Day really got to me. When I wished him a Happy Father’s Day, he wrote back, “I think becoming a father was the best thing that ever happened to me.” For him, fatherhood has been the most rewarding role of his life.

I was touched. Also envious. Also ashamed. Because as much as I love my children with this big, fat heart of mine, I can’t say it. I can’t say that I find motherhood rewarding the way their father finds fatherhood rewarding.

I would do just about anything for my children who are now twenty seven and thirty, and I have. But everything that is expected of mothers, blamed on mothers, projected on mothers, demanded of mothers, makes motherhood at least for some of us, dystopian.

Because it’s never enough. I’m never enough. I can’t make things better or different for the people I love most, no matter how hard I try. They suffer, I suffer, the world sees them suffer, and then the world tells me I’m to blame for it all. I never see it happen to the same extent with fathers. The expectations don’t even come close.

How could I, someone born into poverty, raised to believe she was inferior, raised to believe her only salvation lies in martyrdom, motherhood, and self abandonment, someone who struggled to find a stable partner, develop a stable sense of self, say it’s rewarding? This has nothing to do with my love for my children, because that is indisputable. It has everything to do with societal expectations. It has to do with the idealization of motherhood, and the insistence that motherhood equals sainthood, until you do it “wrong.”

I’ve brought life into this world. I’ve given my body over to husbands, children, and given it away again to men out of fear and because of the relics that formed the neuropathways that insist to my nervous system that I am not safe, that I’ll never be safe unless I give away my power, my body, my autonomy, myself. Until I abandon everything real and destined for me.

When I read this old poem. I thought of this girl who still lives inside of me. I remembered how far she’s come in some ways, and how in others she’s still terribly stunted. How she leaves her body over and over again. Forgets her power. Abandons her path.

Still, something about this poem though the tone sounds resigned, despondent, also speaks to the truth of how it feels to be raised in such a way that you believe your body is not yours, your life is not yours, your future is not yours.

I often wondered why the conventions and the lives that make other people so happy, or at least stable and satisfied, feel threatening to me. This poem reminds me to be gentle with myself. To remember that it is safe to return to my body.

Isis is the Goddess of my heart. I have dreamt of her and I have loved her forever. She appears in my dreams, she puts her hand to my back when I need the support or a soft reminder that I have support. But Kali-Ma, she’s the one who forces me to survive. To come back. To return to myself. Her rage is my rage, her ferocity is mine and we dance with fire beneath or toes. She’s the one who calls when I fall in line, when I forget that the rules no longer apply.

I give birth to other babies now. They look like stories and paintings or moments of soulful, authentic connection. They look like movie nights with my daugther. They look like buying my son his first Father’s Day gifts—matching pizza slice shirts for him and his son—and they look like the moments I can laugh at myself, when I can stop trying to make sense of everything that made no sense at all.

I can remind myself to let go.

Two nights ago I had a dream that I walked into a room that was suddenly flooded with Monarch butterflies. Right across from me stood a younger version of my niece Alison. We both caught a small butterfly in our hands and stood there, staring at one another, feeling the wings flutter in our palms. We were speaking to each other with our eyes, “How do we let go, when we caught something so beautiful?” And the dream ended before we released them, but even though it happened “off screen,” it still happened.

The idea of being what I was raised to be: dutiful wife and mother, obedient woman, revered and esteemed, wanted to hold on and keep me cupped in her hands. And I wonder if it wasn’t for my ex’s choice to leave, if she would still have me trapped even now. I think eventually she would have felt the flutter of the wings diminish and I think she would have known my life depended on it, depended on her letting me go.

Pillow Talk

For now,
I can be the body.

You can fold this body 
into an apology but you will
need to lengthen the neck,
loosen the throat, 
this body is tense 
and murky, as bodies go.

Remember this body will assemble
daughters, and sons and this body
will fill up with milk,
boys and girls will choose
their favorite breast.

This body is built of mandarins,
of riptides, yeast and platinum.
This body is hair and teeth, 
circling, beating itself empty.

You can sleep next to this body,
touch its bends, its knots,
its holes. 

You can enter this body,
nothing will wake the flat, 
elephant eye on the belly
of this body. 

This body lies still 
as you shake off the lashes
that are not yours.
This body of mine, 
like frozen bread. 

You can sharpen your tongue 
in the mouth of this body,
the dark lips on the face of this body,
the spider-shaped eyes of this body, 
this body is a reckoning in the 
heart-thread of your house.