
Asha Dore
Your Body
Susan Holcomb
says my oldest friend when I tell her I am pregnant. She is
keen to share the horrors of her own delivery: the
third-degree tear, the bladder prolapse, the ongoing
unpleasant state of her stomach. “No one tells you this,”
she says, “but they permanently warp your rib cage.”
“They?” I ask, thinking she means the doctors. “The baby,”
she clarifies. “They force your ribs apart like when you
butcher a cow.” On the coffee cups between us are two
red-stamped brontosauruses. I imagine my
soon-to-be-altered rib cage becoming a fossil. “But having
your baby makes it worth it, right?” I ask. My friend sneaks
a glance at my still-flat stomach, nodding.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
say all the moms on Instagram, “BECAUSE IT CREATED
A MIRACLE!” Famous models post bikini pictures days
after giving birth; moms of multiples bare their distended
abdomens. At six months pregnant, I somehow end up
following dozens of devoutly Christian women with
between six and thirteen children. They take photos with
their husbands and all their kids wearing matching footie
pajamas. They live in bloated suburban houses or converted
school buses; they speak sincerely of their “relationship
with God.” Shamefully, I am just here for the bodies. I
touch my ever-more-rounded belly and try to divine what it
will look like in three months, four months, five. I scroll
until my feed is nothing but naked bellies, stretch marks
patterned around the navel like the markings on a sand
dollar, ancient things etched over millennia.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
I think as I hold my six-month-old daughter up to the
mirror. By this stage of parenthood, I no longer cradle her
with both arms. She’s sturdy enough now to be propped on
one hip, and even if I did start to drop her she would cling
to me like a koala. I notice my arms are different: a thick
triangle of muscle has built up near the shoulder. I
remember being so sore the first few months after giving
birth, carrying my eight-pound baby all around the house as
she refused to sleep. Now she is twice the size she was
then, but my arms are too strong to feel sore.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
says the doctor as he takes the cast off my wrist. I am nine
years old: I fell off the monkey bars. I didn’t break my arm
but I did smash the growth plate: that chunk of tissue at the
wrist is now crinkled like a crushed Coke can. After I fell,
my mother thought I was faking it, and she sent me to bed
with a copy of Vanity Fair wrapped around my arm to keep
it straight. I stayed awake all night as the pain throbbed and
subsided, subsided and throbbed, until finally we went to
the ER in the morning.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
says the dentist as he cements my crown into place. At
twenty-six, I’ve cracked my second molar: I’ll wear a
mouth guard to sleep for the rest of my life. Stress, biology,
a deficiency in magnesium: no matter the reason, I just
can’t stop grinding my teeth. The dentist says TMJ is more
common among women. Grind hard enough, long enough,
and you can change the shape of your face.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
says the instructor at the yoga retreat in Santa Barbara. My
husband and I are here for our tenth wedding anniversary,
and every day we FaceTime with our eight-year-old
daughter. “With every moment of your practice,” the yoga
instructor says, “you’re changing your flexibility, you’re
changing your circulatory health.” The instructor tells us to
imagine our bodies filling with yellow light. I inhale and
my breath expands in my forever-altered rib cage.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
says my husband as we ride our bikes up a hill. We are in
our sixties and I am out of breath, rebuilding my stamina
after my knee replacement last summer. The scar at the top
of my knee prickles; a strange sensation of warmth
emanates. “It’s important to stay active,” my husband says,
“because, you know, someday soon…” I nod. Our daughter
is newly married: we’re hoping, this year, for
grandchildren.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
say the dead bodies in the crypt on the day I arrive.
I have died after a long illness: my body is emaciated, old and
wrinkled.
(“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
said the doctor when he handed down the fatal diagnosis.)
The long-dead’s sense of superiority is the most annoying
thing about them: of course I know my body won’t be what
it used to be; already so much has changed!
I’ve felt my lips turn cold, the rigor mortis spread
down my limbs, the tickling sensation of my soul
curling up and out through my rib cage.
“But you have no idea,” the long-dead insist, “what it will actually feel like
as your flesh gets eaten up by maggots, as your skeleton decays.”
Merge me with the earth!
Merge me with the earth!
I think irritably, and hope the maggots will make for better company.
“Your body will never be what it used to be,”
say the other babies in the NICU to my day-old
daughter.
These babies have been here many weeks, hooked up
to feeding tubes and pulse oximeters—
my daughter is just here for an overnight
assessment of her lungs. But the other
babies feel compelled to initiate even the
NICU day-trippers into all they know.
“We are still young enough to remember,”
they whisper through their ragged breathing,
“when we were encased in our mothers’
wombs, when we didn’t have skeletons,
when our eyes couldn’t see.
“We remember when we were zygotes,
individual cells, atoms waiting to assemble.
“Back then we could go anywhere, through
fallopian tubes or down the toilet;
“we could choose whether to be or not to be.”
In my daughter’s direction, they whisper:
“Your body will never be what it used to be:
intergalactic, all-encompassing, nothing and everything.”
My daughter takes their words in
sleeping, half-smiling in the way that
newborns do, until finally she opens
her eyes to the bright light overhead.
Susan Holcomb holds an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and studied for a PhD in physics at Cornell. Her writing has been published in the Southern Indiana Review, Epiphany, The Boston Globe, Crab Creek Review, Ghost Parachute, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.