In my last blog post, I mentioned I was taking a poetry class focusing on women and how their bodies react to and carry trauma. My body has been dragging mine around since February 2014 and I’ve only now been able to write about it–and share it.
I dedicate this poem to my daughter and the beautiful women in my life who have handled her–and me–with care.
Here, For A Mammogram
I’m back in the radiology department
Of the hospital
Where my preemie daughter was sick
My whole body is attuned to the
beep-beep-beep
click-click-click
of the monitors and X-ray machines.
Here, time travels and it’s 2014 again
My daughter is lying in my husband’s arms
Quiet and still—scary still
Tiny
Limp
Blue gray
Babe, I don’t think she’s breathing
Is she breathing?
Fast forward eight years, then rewind
Here, I spy a young woman through a crack
She’s standing,
straight and stiff,
for an X-ray
beep-beep-beep
click-click-click
I wonder if she’s a mother
If trauma has wasted her like it did me
Back then, I see my one-month-old daughter
Slumped over
Dark, downy-haired head facedown
Flopping this way and that
Like an under-stuffed rag doll
Here, I feel my scars rip open,
Begin to bleed
And the seething beast nestled within
Awakens and crawls out of my soul
To devour me
beep-beep-beep
click-click-click
Like a reel on a projector screen
Fast forward eight years, then rewind
Fast forward again, rewind
The ghost of a preemie is mirrored
In the smoothness of your rosy face
Flashing before my eyes
Round as the moon and just as luminous
Real, alive, thriving.
Suddenly, here, I can breathe again.
*Image by Ingo Jakubke from Pixabay.
I’m glad you were able to write about this. The inclusion of the spoken lines are powerful-it puts us right in the room with you. And I like how you compare her face to a moon at the end. The moon is always feminine…cyclical, and tied to the mystery that is the female body, which brings together you, your girl, the mammogram. Life. Xoxo.
“Fast forward,then rewind”- how accurate. I feel like that is how we live through motherhood. An old sippy cup you thought you lost will instantly rewind to the day you got it for your baby, and then you are forced to fast forward to present to help that “baby” with homework. This constant rewind-fast forward makes you dizzy, anxious, nauseous. But how do we stop? We cant, we wont ever be able to stop. I think the way to get “normal” is to stop comparing yourself now to that “old” self. The “old” self that wasnt a mother, to embrace your anxieties and fears, to love yourself now
Now, the question is how? I think its a process. Thank you for your poems, they are beautiful.
I so agree with Iryna. “Fast forward then rewind,” multiple times a year with my deep emotional trauma about Gretchen’s first daughter Feighlyn. She was my first grandchild. Spending hours with her in the NICU in Jacksonville, FL. With the wires and the beeps and all of the machines. I lived so far away. My next visit booked to see her was 1 week… too late. Those sounds haunt me.
Sweet mamma, I didn’t know your trauma until now and I am so sorry.