1/20/25
Dear Heidi,
On this night, sweet friend, I am thinking of you and your sweet babies as the crescents of my fingers hold this pen, resting against the night sky falling across my belly. I am frozen at the sight of the moon glow reflected in the flawless circle of Mila’s left cheek, full and cool in the winter air, its wondrous luminosity.
I remember so fondly, like it was yesterday, how you and I used to share and breathe the steam on our weekly visits to the bathhouse—the way our sweat would purge us of water even as we bathed in deep vats of it, like it was the most natural thing in the world, naked under windy, cloudless desert sky, speaking our wishes into becoming. I realize now how long we were both preparing our bodies for this.
I do not recall a time ever in my life my hands have sculpted such beauty, this level of perfection, this perfect sense of purpose in my hips providing shelter, my breast nourishment. This peaceful baby cradled in my hands the way I used to scoop and hold water before anointing myself with it, the way it fell on my head, the way my hands have gone from crescent to full, that I both savor it and fear the waning.
I do not recall the exact ways my mouth twisted itself as if in prayer for this life beside me. But I know I chanted like a drum to a God I was sure didn’t exist, burnt myself over candle flame, became smoke so that my words might float up to heaven, the place where I imagined wishes were granted, pretended to believe in.
I do not recall the moment when nor the process by which the boys began to notice me, my many shapes. When they started hiding their arousal in the sound of a cleared throat, something shaking loose in the thirst of their throats, the way their fingers unconsciously fidgeted with their belt buckles whenever a girl walked by.
Puberty was a tortured alchemy, a mechanism of pulling my limbs apart in order to become taller, a game of hiding baby fat, redistributed inside contraptions that elongated and compacted, raised my mountains skyward, allowed the river of life to flow through me one unexpected and ordinary day. And then the time finally came when the river gushed into ocean and in my hands suddenly appeared a miraculous creature who no longer possessed her tail.
In the months leading up to that day my waters had been storing themselves for the great flood to break me open, and afterward, a canyon left behind, a gash across my earth that will never fully heal. Do you remember a time when we were not yet mothers? Have we not always been mothers?
I know someday the river of life will stop flowing through me, some inner well will run dry, but it will continue on within my daughter, that thread will continue to connect me to the time I carried my granddaughters and grandsons in my womb, the thread that the doctor’s capable hands, bless her, couldn’t manage to cut that night she split us in two.
I watch my mother age, now living on the other side of this wall, and I am alarmed at her waning and shrinking, and know too, that as my daughter grows to fullness, I will gradually fade and disappear. I will remain hopeful that some part of me will somehow remain. Just as a new moon watches over her children no less than a full one.
I do not recall a future in which I imagined myself not present, just as I cannot imagine a future without having created her. I cannot imagine a world where she is not the center of her own universe, my own bellybutton a tether point, a doorway I squeezed through to birth myself, a room where I learned to become a mother. As well, I cannot imagine a future where you are not my sister, a place where, our children will not be the flowers and us the twin seeds planted under the light of a full moon, the light watering us in. I am so grateful to learn to be a garden with you. Without you, I would have sprouted and with no nearby example of loveliness and care and kindness, would never have learned to bloom.
I do not recall the ways in which I shaped myself into a mother, as if it happened on its own one day at a time, as if we all just learn how to do it. I watched my pregnant body on the monitor, so focused was I on the shapes my body was forming within me that I forgot to exist for a while once the process was complete, forgot that I was also reshaping myself.
In the months that followed, I became cloudy, a river of milk. I measured myself in ounces. Stored myself in clear bags laid flat in the freezer, in case I became an arroyo empty of its river, I feared this love would overpower me and I would evaporate, as if I still carried something of the New Mexico desert in me.
When I became a mother, I became an amorphous figure, the way water is shapeless and I was simply keeping my head above it, my efforts focused on not becoming a drowning statistic in those early months. I did not own a mirror in my new home. The walls had rearranged themselves and I was too busy keeping my windows shuttered so my child could sleep out of the world’s harsh light. Even there, no hope for reflection, anywhere I looked.
Every night I awoke in a puddle of wet milk, cold against the flannel sheets, the edges drying from the outside inward hardening into a halo, a place where my body wept, sometimes with joy, sometimes with grief, sometimes with the grief of joy, and I didn’t have to admit to it being anything but milk. I know when, shut away in that wild overgrown cabin in the woods, the way the trees billowed in the wind, closing in on me, the way the snakes advanced, searching for a way in, the way the poison plants along the creek spread and multiplied, the road gravel doing nothing but welcoming uninvited visitors who all wanted to wake the baby, touch her with their fingers soiled in the world’s intolerable dirt. It was my body’s job to unfold itself like sheath and save her from every small thing that could harm her sovereignty. I know now that professionals call this postpartum anxiety.
To voice this out loud was to risk God taking her from my ungrateful hands, and then what other choice would I have had than to be forced to believe in god, to be a lump of clay shattering inside the bowl of itself? Do your children ever sometimes make you want to believe in God? Would it make it any easier sometimes to endure this impossible joy?
But, how strange to ascribe this clinical term to a feeling that feels like the only natural response in a world where danger lurks around every corner of the future, where a monster in the white house eats at our home from the inside out. When we are so sure of the demise of this planet that we are packing our bags for mars. Who can save us at this point? Who can lie feeling safe in their bed taking the moonlight as a sign that day is coming when the future feels so dark?
No, God is a ghost; this body is a haunted thing. I whisper my fingertips over her sleeping brow and disappear in every way except for the hand that holds her. Maybe a woman becomes a mother the way a friend becomes a sister, the way anything becomes what it always was. Half up front, the rest in tiny installments for the rest of our lives. DNA doing half the work, nurture doing the remainder. Longing doing everything.
I long for a safe world for our children.
With love,
Svetlana
P.S. The drawings are from Mila.
February 5, 2025
My Dear Friend,
I received your beautiful letter today- the day, one year ago, that I first heard my babies’ heartbeats. Two little drums with slightly different rhythms. I remember the feeling of awe that washed over me, after the relief and grief and joy and terror that had accompanied me on the path to motherhood. Like you, I forgot that I had a self when I watched those two little pulsing stars on the monitor. And for months, every morning that I woke to find my belly stretching further toward light, I wondered at it like a child wonders at the moon.
Tonight, after the hottest shower my body will allow, I rub vetiver oil on my belly, over the moon-sliver scar. This has become a nightly ritual. I feel the softness of my skin, softer since my sweet babies stretched me to the stars & back. I trace my slowly fading Linea Negra in wonder at the distance one can travel from navel to pelvis. A few inches become light years. I treasure the evidence of expansion in my body, receipts to prove: I did this. We did this. We are this—mothers.
How long has it been since those holy days at the baths? Years, of course, and yet our friendship has a way of collapsing time in on itself, an accordion exhaled. Even with states & seasons between us, I feel more connected to you than I ever have, as though we grow in tandem, two flowers reaching toward each other as if toward the sun. The most natural thing in the world. This is the best description of sistering I can think of.
I wish we had known each other when we were young. To have borne the “tortured alchemy” of puberty together would have softened the edges, made the torture more bearable. I was a late bloomer, watching in silent curiosity as my girlfriends sprouted pubic hair and spoke of PMS, saying, “Someday you’ll understand.” And when I finally did cross the threshold into womanhood, it came with the twisting pain and a tangle of emotions—both of which I tried to numb for years. To my great surprise and delight, one of the gifts my post-partum body has given me is painless cycles. It is as though my babies taught my body to unclench the fist of itself.
I cannot & do not want to imagine a reality without your presence in my life, beloved friend. I am honored by your assertion that I have had a part in your blooming and becoming, for you have tended & nurtured me with all the wisdom of a seasoned perennial. I always felt that you had lived many lives before this one, gathering stories & seeds, blooming and dying and resurrecting again & again. How else does one acquaint themselves with the mystery of poetry so intimately, but to have had lifetimes to learn it? How else does one (do you) love so well but to have practiced for millennia?
I read an article recently that explored scientific research on past lives of children, as told by the children. Some told stories of their previous deaths with uncanny detail. Some knew the secrets their mothers held while pregnant with them. Some had nightmares, & some found comfort in their memories. It read like part scientific paper and part mystery novel. I do not know if I really believe in reincarnation, but I do believe in the way every living organism is folded back into the bosom of the earth after dying and is re-born as something new. Even us. And I do believe in mystery. Maybe that’s all god is.
Like you, I have prayed to someone or somewhere when I thought grief would annihilate me. I prayed to some still-hopeful part of myself that I might not leave this earth with empty arms. I don’t know what faith is, but maybe that comes close.
Like you, I “savor and fear the waning” that is age & change & unrelenting. I watch with joy and heartache as my babies grasp their spoons at breakfast, knowing my own grasp of them will loosen & soften as they become their own. What will I do with my hands then? As they rise to meet the arc of their life, I am beginning my slow descent. Is there anything more terrifying, anything more transcendent than mothering? However do we bear, as you call it, “the grief of joy”? Maybe this is why we find comfort in metaphors of nature. If motherhood makes a river of us, we can more readily accept impermanence, erosion, movement. Our tears become a current on which life is carried.
And then, as you know, there is the world and its terrors, its snakes and its poisons. Is anxiety a normal response to an abnormal situation? I have been feeling a mother rage and fear rising in me, sometimes shapeless, sometimes specific. I turn on the A/C in February and wonder what July will bring. Will the earth be too hot for my childrens’ bare feet in summer? Or will we suffocate from tyranny first? I turn on the news and turn it back off, but it runs through my mind like a ticker tape. Breaking news always broken, never the whole picture. I’d like to believe that the whole picture could be beautiful. I worry that my children are breathing in my worry, catching my fear like the flu. A friend recently said, “Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.” It helped me breathe to hear this. We cannot promise our children a world that is fair or kind, but we can teach them to be.
Last week I divorced myself from social media & started anti-anxiety medication again. I think some space has opened in my mind, some stillness in my hands that I do not rush to fill. Today, I took my babies to the river, where I’ve often taken my grief—releasing small gifts into the current, tiny bouquets of desert sage & globe mallow. Today, the air was so clear and soft I nearly cried. You could see the moon, three-quarters full and proud in the blue of the sky. Sandhill cranes flew in close pairs overhead, like lovers or friends in graceful play, effortless and intimate. It made me miss you, my friend.
Do you ever have trouble sleeping during a full moon? Each month, I feel a churning urgency in my body, like water with nowhere to flow. I find myself wondering how I might collect this energy, make it meaningful somehow, but so far, I only toss & turn, a tide of sweat trailing behind me on the pillow. I wonder, wise sister, if you have any suggestions? Or do I surrender to all the parts of me that are water, and let them churn and crash, as is their nature?
With love,
Heidi
sweet crescent falling across my belly
Notice my thirst hiding inside
mountains, allow the river to flow.
My waters break canyon,
a gash my earth will heal.
I carried womb, the cut that split us in two.
I watch my daughter grow, I disappear
some part of me new, no less full.
I imagine my bellybutton a doorway,
a room where I learn to be a well,
a place where flowers plant light,
so grateful to be a garden.
I am an arroyo
empty river, still a desert
amorphous, the way
water is drowning.
the walls rearranged and windows shut,
no reflection anywhere.
I puddle against the edge in a halo of joy.
I know this strange feeling
that danger lurks, eats moonlight
No ghost is haunted.
Maybe a woman a mother a friend a sister
becomes all DNA, half longing
everything safe with wings.
a self pulsing, morning stretching toward light
to trace Linea Negra navel to pelvis.
Light years of expansion
collapsing an accordion in tandem,
two flowers reaching toward the sun.
Sister, I have tended & nurtured
the wisdom of seeds
explored past stories, uncanny secrets
pregnant with memories.
I prayed still-hopeful
that I might know faith.
Savor the grasp, loose and soft.
My hands rise to meet the arc
of slow descent.
Transcendent mother,
How do we bear the grief of nature
If a river can accept a current, its terrors, its snakes
fear and rage rising, some shapeless wonder
what will the earth bare?
Breath, catch my fear.
Kind space, open some stillness today,
River, take my grief—tiny bouquets of desert air
I churn water I find wonder I turn a tide behind me.
I, wise sister, surrender to the urn and ash with love,
