YOU DIDN’T THINK YOU’D BE ABLE TO, not because you had been told you couldn’t but because of where you came from. You felt defective growing up—father abuse, mother neglect, sister abuse. You thought you were the one to blame because the people you loved the most shit on you. It must have been you, you thought, and the wires in your brain permanently rewired themselves. If you were defective, your womb must have been, too. This is really what you thought.
T was the first person to both love and desire you. You met at the fanciest and most ornate Italian restaurant in Little Italy—marble columns, brass railings, mahogany paneling, white crisp tablecloths, you get the idea. The waiters wore formal black jackets and black dress pants with crisp clean white button-down shirts. T was as a waiter and you were the cashier, both of you working your way through college. You never saw the kitchen staff, but they must have seen you. On a slow night, one of the guys from the kitchen drew a picture of you from the waist up. It was not a good drawing, something a kid would draw. He drew you with torpedo breasts.
One of the waiters–not T–gave you the drawing. You liked that one of the kitchen guys thought you had torpedo breasts, that he thought you were someone worth drawing, that he thought the drawing was worth sharing with the others, all of them laughing and saying salacious things about your torpedoes. You were naïve back then. You had no idea that the restaurant was a mob front for a guy with the nickname Matty the Horse who came from the Genovese Crime Family and was known as the sex czar of Times Square, where he owned a lot of topless and gay clubs.
You fell in love with T’s potential, which might be another way of saying you didn’t actually fall in love with him as he was but rather with who he could be. Mostly you fell in love with T because he chose you, and you were desperate to be chosen.
T was raised by a single mother, foreign born (from Colombia); money was tight. He wanted to be from an affluent two-parent highbrow American family with an Ivy League pedigree. But he was none of these things and could never be any of these things. Your hope and his hope that he might was what united both of you.
After a year, T moved back home to Colombia because the reach in New York was too high for him. You found yourself waiting and hoping for his return, just like you did with your mother when you were younger. T sent you love letters and a book of poetry and wrote something on the front page that you didn’t understand, something about two plus two equaling five. He flew back to New York several times without telling you and showed up on your doorstep in that romantic, rom-com sort of way, but you didn’t know at the time that you could have asked and expected more from someone. T wasn’t particularly warm or generous. He could be coarse with people and even abrasive, but you knew it was all a front. He was insecure because of that I could never measure up feeling (a feeling you will relate to many years later). But when he showed up at your doorstep, he was so hungry for you, you couldn’t resist.
After three years of coming and going like this, he surprised you one spring and said, I am back for good. Let’s get married. You had already moved beyond him by then, but you slept with him anyway because part of you could not resist that being-wanted feeling.
Six weeks later, your breasts became swollen and heavy, and you felt soft and fleshy, and you had missed your period. You learned that the baby inside of you was the size of a pea. You were twenty-five, in the middle of your master's degree, in the middle of writing a thesis about female writers reclaiming their voice through their female protagonists. You didn’t tell T about the pea. He told you he was going back to Colombia to get his life together for you, but you knew it wasn’t true.
While he was gone, you went to your gynecologist who put you to sleep and suctioned out the pea. You woke to a bloody pad between your legs. Before sending you home, the doctor said, There will be minimal bleeding and not much pain. Your mother picked you up and took you back to her apartment. You were happy to be weak and infirm and have her take care of you. You slept on her couch for two days. You bled and bled, and the cramps were hard and violent.
Six months later, you met P at a party that a friend from your feminist studies grad seminar invited you to. You weren’t looking for anything, so you didn’t bother putting on makeup and you didn’t bother dressing like you wanted attention. But after P ate a slice of banana bread that you had made, he turned to face a group sitting on the couch, a group that included you. Who made this banana bread, he said, and swallowed the last bite.
When you looked at him and when you told him that you had made the bread, his eyes shined on you and sparkled and turned up at the corners and not just when he smiled. You smiled back and tried to be shiny, too, but you felt your shine was nothing compared to his. You felt dull and dim in comparison. You wanted his shine, wanted it to wash all over you, wanted it inside of you. You felt like a like a cat who had been starved of the sun and suddenly had found a cozy spot by the window blazing with sunlight.
One year after you were married, you were in Hawaii because P was playing in a tennis tournament. While P played tennis, you read and slept and waited for him. You didn’t realize at the time that you were waiting for yet another man and that this would be a continued theme throughout your twenty-year marriage. The signs were there, and you waited for it to be like that first time, that shiny light blazing on you, but it came sporadically, and you never knew when.
The tennis players you met at dinner felt all the same to you, faceless middle-aged guys in pastel- colored polo shirts. They knew nothing about your life and your artsy parents and your absent mother and the mice that lived in your kitchen because you pretended you were someone else, a banker’s wife, but you kept it secret, and you didn’t even know how to play tennis.
You said to the man next to you, I’m so very tired.
And when he replied, You’re probably pregnant, you felt violated. Why would this faceless middle-aged tennis man in a pastel-colored shirt who you just met cross over to the inner sanctum of your womb? Why would he know something about such an intimate part of your body better than you?
The next day, you spotted a little but thought nothing of it. The day after that, you and P were home in Denver, and that evening, the excruciating cramps came and didn’t let up.
You and P went to the ER and a doctor put his fingers inside your holes. He did not ask you for permission and he did not tell you why, but he found nothing and sent you home.
Later, the cramps continued, but this time you went to a different ER where they gave you a pregnancy test and told you that you were pregnant but not where you were supposed to be. You were sure that was right because you were never where you were supposed to be. You weren’t really a banker’s wife. You were defective. You could never forget that. The doctor called it an ectopic pregnancy and told you that you needed to take care of it, or you would bleed to death.
Later that week, your gynecologist shot a long needle in your ass and you bled but then you didn’t bleed enough, so you went back for another shot in your ass.
In a couple of months, you were pregnant again and you bled again but not as badly as the last two times you were pregnant. This time, it was an early miscarriage, and the blood was more like your period.
Four months later, you were pregnant once again but in the right place this time, and your uterus held the baby this time, except you bled in your second trimester at a cocktail party, the wedding of a friend of P’s from college. The blood ran down your leg and you thought, I am not like these people. Blood runs down my leg and it doesn’t run down theirs.
Your doctor put you on semi-bed rest, but your daughter came out of you just fine at forty weeks. She had big eyes and long eyelashes, and she was fair like you. She cried and cried and never napped and you didn’t know what to do. You put her in her car seat on top of the dryer while it ran, and you turned the blow dryer on near her because she seemed to like that noise, and you put her in the car and took her for long drives.
Eventually she settled down. She started kindergarten with a big smile on her face, she was well liked and had nice friends. She easily learned her ABC’s, and when the teachers brought in pumpkins with the tops cut off so the kids could dive in with their hands and pick out the seeds, she was the only one who was not afraid of getting her hands dirty with the gooey pumpkin slime. She rather liked it.
In the second trimester of your second viable pregnancy, you and P had just moved into your new home in a fancy neighborhood in Denver, the first home you owned. It was so much bigger than your childhood home that you could not imagine how you got there. Each child had their own bedroom and bathroom. There were extra guest rooms with bathrooms, too.
Something was not right, though. Maybe your body felt it before you did. P was quiet, pre-occupied, withdrawn from you. You wondered what you did wrong, and you tried to be better. You tried to be good so he would splay his radiance on you once again.
But then you went into pre-term labor at twenty-seven weeks and took yourself to the hospital with stomach pain.
You were in the hospital for a week and then you were home on full bed rest for ten weeks. It was hard. You had a one-year-old. You didn’t have family to help because they lived so far away and had their own families and you understood this. Your mother assumed, as she always did, that you were fine because you were now the banker’s wife, so she did not come visit and take care of you. You made some good friends and they helped you with your daughter and they dropped off food for you too and brought you books to read.
When you were thirty-eight weeks pregnant, the doctor told you that you could get off bed rest. No baby came after a week, so the doctor stuck her fingers in your cervix swirling them around and it hurt a little, and after that happened your son came out so fast that you had no time for an epidural. The pain was fierce; you felt like your body was ripping in two. You screamed motherfucker at P and at the doctors even though you were not a curser back then like you are now.
Your son came out of you wide-eyed and curious and had olive skin like his father. As a toddler, he had a bad respiratory virus and then he had walking pneumonia and then bad rashes where he scratched his back all night and then he had a bad deep cough that lasted until middle school. You worried about him all the time but he outgrew all his sicknesses and one day he became taller than you and he read philosophy and cooked you roast chicken just the way you liked it with the leeks soaked in the chicken broth at the bottom of the pan so they got nice and sweet.
You stopped sleeping after your son was born. You lay awake every night no matter how tired you were. You felt like you were in a fog every minute of the day. You felt like you were drugged. You felt alone. You felt desperate. You saw doctor after doctor. They told you that you were depressed, and they prescribed meds that you never took.
Finally, you made your way to a sleep specialist. He told you; Let’s make a plan without meds. Let’s get you to a solid six and go from there. He helped you and you slept a little better and you thought later, Maybe he just saw me. Maybe you just wanted someone to pay attention to you.
You smiled through it all, through the bed rest, through the babies you loved — even though caring for them was much harder than you thought — through the sleep deprivation, through your messy childhood home and your parents who weren’t able to be real parents, through always feeling that you were alone and through always waiting for P to show up with his shininess, but you weren’t really smiling because you were happy all the time. You were just hungry and hungry for a lot of things. You thought your smile was about wanting people to like you so they filled the holes up inside of you, so you wouldn’t always feel so alone. But maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe the smile was a front for this thing you were hiding that had quietly lived in your body since you were a little girl that grew and multiplied over time like a parasite that had invaded your body and if you stopped smiling you’d throw it all up, the rage, the indignation, the madness of it all, all of what had happened to you and what you let happen to you, you knew if you stopped pretending and stopped smiling it would all break apart and explode. You weren’t defective after all, you knew that. You were just furious.
About the author:
Jane Myer is a writer currently at work on a memoir. She is a graduate of Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.
That last line! You bring us along with your poetic voice, as we watch with you - and then BAM you find yourself and take us along for the ride. Can't wait for your next piece.
“You weren't defective at all, you knew that. You were just furious.” I nearly fell over when I read this… Jane, this piece is beyond incredible. Thank you so much for sharing it. I read it after my toddler had to give some blood for a routine exam, nothing serious, but as you can imagine, it was a terrible way to end a Tuesday. He’s finally asleep, and I’m so tired, but also so encouraged to keep writing because of the way words like yours make me feel. Alive. Less alone. Brave. Let me tell you … thru every word here, you shined.