My Caesarean by Amanda Fields
Author:Amanda Fields
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2019-03-11T19:58:19+00:00
seam
Cameron Dezen Hammon
The first time I saw my mother’s scar I was small and playing with her hairbrush. I was seated at her pink-tiled vanity, dipping my fingers in her creams and lotions, spraying perfume into the humid air as she stepped naked from the shower. The ragged line ran from her groin to just under her ribs, and looked like it had been drawn with a red crayon, like the seam on my Raggedy Ann doll. I lowered my eyes, embarrassed, and focused on her chipping toenail polish as she wrapped in a towel.
Before I was born my mother was a beauty queen and a beatnik. A Catholic, she was crowned Miss Pennsylvania Junior Miss and then became a civil rights activist, helping to organize campus marches in Pittsburgh and Ohio. I wanted to be like my mother in so many ways. I was like her in the ways I didn’t want to be, but not in the ways I did. I become so still in anger that I frighten even myself (like her). I lack the extraordinary focus she’s always had—either with a cause, or a career (unlike her). And physically, our bodies are opposite; though petite, she is broad shouldered and long-legged. I am small everywhere, unremarkably built.
My grandmother’s body was nothing like my mother’s body: She was tall and elegant, and, I learned recently, gave birth vaginally. I’d always believed my grandmother had had a C-section like the rest of us. I assumed she shared our seam, which, from that first sighting in my mother’s bathroom had become, for me, a symbol of what we survive, of how we endure.
My grandmother was a single mother. Her husband had a second wife and family in the next state over and upon discovering this, she left him. Her parish shunned her though she fared well on her own, working as a secretary at Melpar, a Cold War government contractor. There she met a brilliant, depressed, nuclear scientist, whom she later married. He gave them all a new surname, Loving, and he was. But things got hard. He attempted suicide one summer night by rigging himself to the basement generator in their Cape May home, while my mother and father ate dinner upstairs in the kitchen. My grandmother survived all this, thrived, even, though my understanding of my grandmother’s strength has always been tied, in my mind, to her C-section. As it turns out, something else held her together. What, exactly, remains a mystery to me. She has been dead for thirty years, but if she were alive I would ask about her labor. Were her slender hips just wide enough to let a baby pass safely? Was her pelvis a degree to the right or left of where mine sits?
When my mother had me in 1975 she was thirty (or thirty-one, or thirty-two; to this day, she won’t tell me her true age), and they were ripping vertical seams in birthing women. When I was pregnant in 2006,
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