Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot

Author:Terese Marie Mailhot [Mailhot, Terese Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Memoir
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2017-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

5

your black eye

and my birth

Pregnancy didn’t stabilize our relationship. The baby was a Thunder Being inside of me. His growing cells and tissue heightened my awareness and physically incapacitated me.

He took the best parts of my blood. I became anemic.

I told you that I could not take my medication anymore. The risk to the baby was too much. You told me that you were prepared for it to be hard. We want the baby. We decided that Isaiah and I would move in with you.

The night at the pecan field amused us at doctor visits and ultra sounds. We always found a quiet moment to look at each other and laugh. There were good omens of our new family. We walked through a greenhouse with Isaiah. The smallest pots with little sprouts made us feel sentimental. You almost cried when you gave Isaiah a stuffed animal from your childhood: Charlie Chips, a puppy dog. He carried it with him everywhere. Your mother gave us things to decorate the baby’s room.

It only took four weeks for the symptoms to appear. I yelled at my son in a way I never had, for no reason. I had the sense to apologize.

“Hormones,” I said.

“Yeah. Dad Casey told me,” he said, forgiving.

“You know that nobody, not even me, has the right to speak to you that way, no matter what you do?” I started to cry.

“I know, Mom,” he said. He got himself a soda and sat with me on the couch in silence.

The work for my graduate program required me to generate prose and read more than I ever had. I also taught composition, and I didn’t miss a day. When I was in the hospital, feeling crazy, I learned how to manage my symptoms in the external world. The techniques for coping worked outside. In the house, I was unsure how to cope. I wanted to cry, and hurt people, and I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know if what I felt was authenticity, or a disease that would overtake me.

I wasn’t sure I could control my behaviors. My disease was not an excuse to harm you, I knew.

My eating disorder became a full order of every food I had starved myself of. My weak, and easily bruised, deficient body became thicker, like cedar bark or a trunk.

I started to ask you what you meant after you said anything. I started to scratch the back of my scalp, nervously, until I broke the skin. I refused to heal over, and pulled the scales from my open wound. I chewed the top and bottom of my lip so much that I chewed part of my Cupid’s bow off permanently—the most protruding part on my heart-shaped mouth never grew back.

I began to tell you, often, that we were only a family because you chose me on a drunken night—because it seemed like a solution to a fight neither of us could ever win: Do you love me enough? Can I be good to you? I won’t ever put a toilet seat up.

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