(0) No roots 

What’s it like to be a potato? So… independent. You know what I learned? The other day? You know how we call them root vegetables? Well, they don’t have any roots! Those things sprouting from their bodies are stems, not roots. I had to look up the difference. Stems grow  upwards, towards the sun; roots grow down. Stems can sprout buds and leaves; roots cannot. Stems store their living tissue close to their surfaces and grow from their ends out. Roots cluster their living tissue in their centers and grow from their cores. Technically, potatoes are “stem tubers”. 

I wish I could ask one how they felt about their reputation, but they intimidate me. I mean, look at them! Besides, the only spuds I’ve found so far here on my mind farm have stems sprouting out all over their soft mealy bodies already, like lepers, and I’m not trying to catch their blight, too. 

It’s usually airborne, by the way-- blight. Most plant illnesses are transferred like that, through air or water. Like, a wind spread the Irish Potato Famine. Weird right? I thought it was all the soil’s fault, through the roots, but it seems these roots actually just help plants send nutrients to one another. That’s why blights can be so bad for a potato. If it gets sick, no neighbor potatoes can send it chicken noodle soup. 

My grandma gave me some Chicken Noodle Soup-- ‘for the soul’ type-- way before the blight made my uterus disappear. Back then, whenever me or one of my siblings was looking for something, grandma Dotsie-- a small Irish-American-Raised-Italian-American woman bearing a fear of God and love of Estee Lauder-- would tell us to pray to St. Anthony, the patron saint of the poor, small requests and lost things: “Dear St. Anthony, please come down. Make appear what cannot be found. Dear St. Anthony, please come down. Make appear what cannot be found. Dear St. Anthony, please come down. Make appear what cannot be found.” And so on so forth until the lost object was found. I’ve tried it for this, but *mouth fart noise* I think it only works for socks.

My mom also had some Chicken Noodle Advice. She got hysterical, too, when she was pretty much my age , so she got some crystals and sage and prayed to the mother-goddess to take her back to where she lost herself (a cedar closet). Mother goddess got me finding myself at a loss. At least it smells nice. 

I can’t think of anything to do but to dig around for it.  I’m thinking the blight loosened up my uterus and I dropped it somewhere, or that when the blight struck, my uterus said ‘fuck this’, bounced, and buried itself here in my mind farm. No womb, yet, but you see these sick potatoes? These are a bunch of memories I’ve turned up. I thought they could help me out, you know, let me know if they’ve seen a uterus moling about, but even after so many torrential brainstorms, they still don’t talk to one another. Bad connection. No roots, as far as I can see. Potatoes got eyes only so they can look out for themselves. They couldn’t care less about me, let alone my uterus. 

 Hey, did you trip over any tubes on your way in? Let me know. I’ll tell you which direction I came here from so you can help me look. 

(1) The moment I fall in love with my mother and also learn potatoes can not be trusted 

I’m three. My little brother James has just been born. My parents still have one baby and two years of marriage left in em.  We’re in a parking lot of a hiking trail and we’ve yet to leave our mini van.  

My parents are arguing in the front, and I’m doing my thing in the way back. I always sit in the back because it has these little side compartments that I love hiding things in. By now, being sneaky and creepy is, like, my second favorite game.  I open it, put something in there, closeitopenit, take it out, put something new in. No one besides me ever sits here, so these compartments are super sticky with all my secret fun.

Today’s special guest is McDonald’s! HAPPY MEAL TOY, closeitopenit, NEXT, DRIPPY ICE CREAM, closeitopenit, NEXT, FRENCH FRIES, closeitopen- ohp! The parents have left the vehicle, folks. Dad grabs James out of his car seat. Before following, I look back at my compartment, and those golden arches stare right back at me. Take us with you, Emmie Bemmie. You’d have a little snackie-snack on your walkie-walk. It’s too much. I can’t hold their gaze. Without looking, I put ‘em in my pocket. 

I amble out of the mini van with those fries in my pocket and waddle through the archway into the forest as only a three-year-old with a clean diaper can. I’m feelin’ myself, doing my little big-headed kid thing until my mom scoops me up and stalks into the woods. My dad storms off with baby James in the opposite direction. 

Yay! Mommy and Me! Back to doing what I do, you know, just bumpin’ down the trail like I’m the mayor of this here forest, checkin’ on my constituents like, “What’s up, oak? How you doin’, chippie-monks?” Eventually Mommy and me come to a lake. 

A small group of geese have begun to follow us, and more are waddlin’ over, diaper-swag-walkin’ like me. Being the mayor and all, I think they’re just some enthusiastic citizens. Until!-- they start doing that hissy thing. Have you ever seen geese hiss? Oh my mother-goddess. I can’t-- They open their bills and jut out their tongues and vibrate them back and forth like they’re trying to choke themselves. It’s like its tongue is a rabid little worm mind-controlling it from the inside, and the geese know that but geese like it ‘cause geese are mean. 

At this point, we’re locked in by nature, trees got us surrounded and these bullies are getting closer, hissing louder and louder, when my mom realizes: we about to get jumped by these fat ducks. 

She takes my hand and books it. The geese flip out and chase us. Mid-stride, my mom pulls me up onto her shoulders. Amidst all the hissing and ruffling, I hear her ask me, “Do you have food on you?” 

I freeze. Oopsies.

I barely get to nod before my mom, breathing heavily, commands “Get it out, get it out.” Still reeling with guilt, I move my hand to my pocket, slowly, but the geese are getting too close, so my mom reaches up. 

She tries pulling out the whole packet of french fries from my pocket, but she couldn’t get it all so she just starts pulling them out one-by-one-by-one, the other arm still pumping, my head bobbing up and down with each step, my thighs squeezing her head to stay on this wild ride. 

Almost as quickly as it started, the geese stop chasing us. My mom pulls me off her shoulders. I offer my clammy, limp hand up to her, and she locks her strong fingers between mine. I waddle beside mommy,  poopy-diaper style, feeling safe in her callouses. 

(2) Strength 

You know how they say that a mom could lift a car off her kid in a life-or-death situation? They call that hysterical strength. That’s my mommy. That’s how she always was, hysterical… Living like everything was life-or-death. Hysterically strong, Hysterically fun… Hysterical. 

She got it from her mom. Grandma Dotsie. She was hysterical, too... in her own way... 

(3) Eye Contact 

I’m five. I’m examining the first spud I’ll ever peel in Grandma Dotsie’s kitchen. Small, bulbous, smooth. I begin to carve, and by the time I finish, I’m left with a raw tater tot, but it’s naked, so I’m proud. I plop it into the pot just as my Grandma had done and reach into the bag for my next potato.

I look at it, shriek, and throw it across the room. My grandma, quick to startle, shrieks, too, “What?! What is it?”

My insides convulse. I’m afraid my belly button’s gonna untie and I’m gonna spill! I back away from the counter. 

Grandma screams again, terrified for my safety, “What?!”

“What is that?” I stammer. 

Grandma picks it up off the floor and examines it. “What do you mean?”

“That--” I say. She holds the potato sprout out, so it’s staring straight at me. I shut my eyes. “It’s like a-- hard-- worm.”

“Oh, that’s its ‘eye’. That’s how they grow. They sprout from there.”

I glance back at the bag and realize most potatoes have these ‘eyes.’ “They’re all like that!” A wave of panic hits me. THESE POTATOES WERE NOT EATABLE AND I’M NOT GONNA HAVE ANY MASHED POTATOES THAT NIGHT!

While Grandpa is still alive, my grandparents live super close, and so my mom drops James, Gigi, and I off there before work a bunch. Grandpa gives me art lessons and grandma gives me food, and I give myself a lot of free time to color on the walls and experiment with my limbs. I learn a lot during these solo explorations, like that chapstick burns and not to put pearls up your nose. I also tend to gravitate towards the adults when they’re doing tasks that don’t involve taking care of babies, like carpentry or taxes. Also, adults have food, and I always want food, so I often find myself-- or, rather, I’m often found-- hovering by the kitchen whenever Grandma cooks. 

On this day, Grandma Dotsie’s making her specialty mashed potatoes, and I’m doing me, you know, staring straight at her. One thing leads to another, and eventually I find myself holding a potato. Instead of telling me to keep my tiny, sticky hands off the goods, my grandma places in my other hand a tool-- which she teaches me is called a ‘peeler’-- and tells me to watch. I get on a stool and lean in. In one perfectly manicured hand, she cradles a plump potato and in the other wields the peeler. Her thumb stays poised as she peels. That’s her style, elegant yet practical. The dry, dirty skin curls over her fingers and onto the cutting board, exposing the golden, wet flesh beneath. Grandma strips the spud swiftly, and plops it into a pot. “Got it?” I nod. 

Then, once I look the potato in the eye,there’s no going back.

“That’s okay,” Grandma sooths. “We can just cut out those parts.” 

The thought of ingesting anything that’s ever touched an “eye”-- let alone partook in germinating said eye-- ravages my soul. 

“I can’t.” 

“Oh, it’s easy,” she tries to reassure me. 

“No, I don’t want to eat potatoes anymore.”

On the tiny kitchen T.V. behind her, that guy’s talking on  Price is Right, but Grandma’s still looking at me. She then says, “Okay”. She smiles. She walks back to the other side of the kitchen. She picks up the remote and the peeler.  

Grandma Dotsie has five kids. Grandma Dotsie has sixteen grandkids. Grandma Dotsie knows that an hour later, when all has been said and done and dinner’s served, my little head will be peeking there over the table, mashed potato globs all over my face where I had missed my mouth, spoon up, asking for seconds. 

(4) Nesting 

I’m six. Grandpa dies. Grandma moves to some different farther away condo. Pete and Chris (older brothers) go off to do cool older brother things like college or Miami. Mommy, Gigi, James and I begin a new, large and relevant chunk of my childhood. Each of us has our own bed, but we always end up sleeping together in Mom’s: Mommy, Gigi, and I snuggle in a row, and James sleeps across the bottom with his little toddler booty the air like he’s trying to raise it and ask a question. 

We sleep together. We also play together. My mom invents this hysterical game, Mommy Bird. We three kiddos huddle together under a blankie and tuck under the edges and “mommy bird” comes and sits on us. Commence Incubation! We get warmer, warmer, warmer, until our eggs start cracking and crackling-- and boom! I hatch! (I was born first in real life so I get hatched first in bird life. Thank gosh Peter and Chris aren’t here or else I’d have had to wait til third to hatch). Anyways, I’m born, and so Mommy has herself a little happy bird dance moment and then… FEEDING TIME! Authentic bird-style, okay? (bird feeding and baby bird eating motion). Then, James (feeding), then Gigi(feeding). Then, we fly! We all jump off the bed, happy, soaring baby birds and their mommy. We do it again and again and again, just hatching and feeding and flying and hatching and feeding and flying and hatching and feeding and flying... 

Hysterical! Then, at night, even with her many hatchlings to look over, mommy bird still makes time to read to just me. Even if James and Gigi are smushed there with us in Mom’s bed, I don’t notice. All I see is high-quality-mother-daughter-book-bonding. I’m not old enough for Nancy Drew and all her shenanigans yet, so our go-to book is “Are You My Mother?”

It’s about another little baby bird. The mommy bird goes to get some food before her egg hatches, so she could be ready when the time came. Unlike MY mommy, this mommy is gone when her egg busts open and out pops baby bird! The baby looks around for its momma, can’t find it, and then whoosh! It falls out of the nest into this cruel, harsh world. The baby bird dusts itself off and gets to work finding its momma. It goes up to a kitten and asks, “Are you my mother?” and the kitten’s like, “Meow” (which is a ‘no’). The bird goes up to a hen and asks, “Are you my mother?” The hen’s like, “Bu-cuck!”  It goes up to an old dog and asks, “Are you my mother?” The dog’s like, “Bark.” It asks a cow, a car, a boat and a plane. It sees a tall power shovel , climbs to the top, leans into its mouth and asks, “ARE YOU MY MOTHER?” and the rude power shovel yells back “SNORT!” and the baby bird cries, “You are not my mother! You are a SNORT! I want my mother!” And the baby bird really starts crying and doesn’t even notice the power shovel starting to move and suddenly it’s whipped into the air and goes flying to unsure fate once again and the baby is terrified and alone and can’t fly and-- it lands in the nest. Its mother is there, and they reunite and recount their adventures. 

That ending really does it for me. Moral of the story: you just know your mom when you see her and vice versa. The mommy and baby are just like, “Ha! Oops!” and move on. No daddy bird or therapy needed. Just bad timing is all. Let’s move on, dig down in the dirt, eat some worms and get to flyin’.  

(5) Hystery 

Maybe that’s where my uterus went! It fell out the nest and now it’s looking for me but all it’s finding is some old dogs and SNORTS! Ha! Now that I think about it…  I know this one girl who has two uteruses, so maybe my womb went to go for walk or something and accidentally went back up the wrong vagina! Not hers, necessarily. It could be possible though… I should reach out to her. You’re probably thinking, ‘Why would your uterus ever want to come back when now it has a buddy? Double the ovaries, double the fun, right?’ Wrong. Get this: she’s sterile, too, so. Not exactly the fertile crescent those little tubes of mine are probably looking for, either. 

Speaking of, you know, in ancient Egypt, they thought when women went crazy, it was because their wombs dislodged themselves and were wandering about their bodies trying to get out and find a baby. Ladies would fumigate either their heads or hoohaas depending on if the womb needed to move up or down. In like 500 B.C., Hippocrates started calling this ‘hysteria’ from the greek word for “uterus”, hysteron? Hysteria literally means ‘wandering womb.’ This was the go-to medical diagnosis for unruly women until around the 1600s, and then they were just considered witches and instead of getting impregnated, they got burned at the stake. Oopsies. After a couple of centuries, society returned to the hysteria diagnosis pretty much until the 1980s, when the American Psychiatric Association officially removed it from the DSM , even though we all know wombs kept wandering. Case in point.

This is why I don’t trust doctors. Listen, I’m not saying I don’t like doctors. I do. Especially dentists. But sometimes they don’t know what they’re talking about, which is fine, but they also don’t know they don’t know what they’re talking about, which is less fine. I kind of get it though. It’s hard to be an expert like that. You just don’t get a lot of practice appealing to other’s expertise. 

Like, when my mom was thirteen, she started starving herself, just like I did, so her womb bounced and she, like me, lost her period. The doctors figured she was hysterical but they still her to a mental hospital. I mean, if you knew someone’s uterus was on the loose, wouldn’t you call a gyno first? Or a bounty hunter? 

Then, they made the whole situation worse when they locked her up because they accidentally locked the uterus out! I can just imagine that poor little thing outside in the rain, banging its ovary fists on the hospital door, like, “Hellooooooooo!”. They force fed her and gave her meds, but when that didn’t work, they just told her her uterus was gone forever oopssorrynothingwecando. She’s hysterical; her womb left because she was defective, unstable, a sterile home. But nothing was wrong with my mom; the problem was her environment. It was defective, unstable, sterile. She was in survival mode. Her uterus had to fight-or-flight, so it fled at first. That spawned blight, and everyone went into a tizzy and made the problem worse, and then as soon as my mom was free, her uterus was right outside waiting, ready to fight. It scurried right back up into her, planted itself, and got to sprouting. She met a man, busted out two kids, met another man and busted out three more kids until a bunch of new doctors had to go in and coax it into an honorable discharge from its time in battle.   

(6) Dangerously in Love  

I’m nine. A year ago, Beyonce dropped her first solo album Dangerously in Love. This year, my momma drops her uterus. 

She tells to me that her uterus is “collapsing”. I ask “what’s uterus and what’s collapsing?” She tells me ‘uterus’ is an organ like your stomach but for babies and that collapsing means falling out. Basically, my mommy’s uterus used to be my bedroom and it could drop onto the floor at anytime so maybe mommy shouldn’t wear skirts. She tells me some doctors need to swoop in and scoop it out. To me, this sounds like the coolest thing ever. Imagine the street cred.

“Yo momma is so hood, that even her uterus is run down.”

I’m thinking, “Momma did it right. Look at all dem ladies, walkin’ around with dem unused uteri, all practical and shit.” Also shout out to me and my siblings. Let me see your kids do AAAAAthat. Other kids, if their first homes got condemned like that, would be sad, traumatized, nostalgic, but we partied that thing straight out.

My momma, on the other hand, doesn’t seem as pumped. I don’t get it: Isn’t this the bitch that loved HGTV? Here she is, being all morose and what not, basically on Extreme Makeover: Womb Edition, and I’m over here being all like “Move-that-bus!” and I’m the one that had actually lived there! She was just my landlady. It’s not like any more tenants could move in.  Besides, what’s wrong with the ones she got? 

It’s the eve of the demolition. Mommy chooses to spend her final fallopian night reading to me. This is my time to show mommy bird how much I love her… and want her to love me. I listen to her read me Nancy Drew with one ear and her heartbeat with the other, and I love it. I love the skin of her jaw move as she speaks. I love her overused t-shirts over her over-used titties.  I koala that bitch til she falls asleep, mouth agape, book still propped up. I watch her snore from her throat, so magical, before turning off the light. I smile to myself in the dark, feeling honored, proud. I don’t have to be her favorite child as long as we both agree that I am the undisputed best child. Still smiling, I fall asleep.

Not-long-enough later, I wake up feeling too cold in some places and too warm in others, if you know what I mean. And if you don’t, let me spell it out for you: some bitch had stolen all the blankets, and I’m in pee. My first instinct is, “Get it momma, you go ahead and get them blankies. I’ll go get a sweater. Also, oopsies, I peed myself.” Then, I notice my four-year-old little sister wedged between mommy and me, cuddling up against mommies side like a fetal cherub.  Oh, no, she didn’t. My vision turns red, but I’m bad at being mad, so I just stare at my mom, trying to wake her up with my mindpower. I eventually poke her until she says, all groggy, “what?” 

“Gigi peed MY bed.”

“What?”

“Gigi peed MY bed. And she snuck in. Did you let her in?”

Mommy Bird snaps. She turns the lights and starts screaming hysterically. All the hormones left in her uterus rush out straight to her biceps. She could lift a car to save me and also clean and press a couch to throw at me. In between tears, pleas, and apologies, I think, “Damn. That’s impressive.” Gigi sleeps like a goddamn angel through it all. 

(7) Fight, Flight or Blight? 

I wonder if she pickled it. Her uterus, I mean. It could be in her closet somewhere. I know some ladies who do that with their placenta or smush up their babies’ umbilical chords into some sort of supermom pills, but my mom wouldn’t need that, and anyways, her uterus had already proven it has a mind of its own. In all likelihood, it escaped before she even got to the hospital. It’s probably out wandering around without any eyes, asking cars and cows if they’re its mother… No, I hope it’s somewhere nice, buried in the earth alongside some potatoes. It’s warm and dark and moist there, too. 

It makes sense potatoes live underground. Seeing is scary. They have stems, eyes, not roots, and the eye of a potato is a stormy place. The world isn’t trustworthy, too flighty, too blighty, so potatoes don’t even bother with it. They assume all responsibility for their successes and failures. Everything they need, they bud from their own bodies. Potatoes are fighters. You know, that’s why they think the Irish took well to America. Nothing root-straps like the potato. 

I mean, look at the women in my family. They couldn’t depend on others so they fought for themselves. All they know is root-strappin’. 

Me, on the other stem… I wanted to be a potato, a fighter, like my mommy bird and hers and so on, but I just brought the blight back. 

That’s the third survival response: blight. That’s how this whole thing started. Great-Great-Grandma White and the Irish Potato Famine. As we already learned, starvation scares away many awomb, so when blight struck, my ancestor sailed to America hoping her womb would feel safe and return to her in the land of the free. Once she settled down in the Bronx, it did! But the American womb brought along with it a whole new kind of blight. Great-Great-Grandma White was ready, however. Or maybe this time she just didn’t have any other options left… Whatever, what’s the difference? Anyways, this time instead of flight, she and her womb fought, dug themselves deep, reaped and sowed  a daughter. The birth of this daughter, Great-Grandma, did not bring along the bounty or peace my ancestor hoped. Their lives were still barren. Great-Grandma was just a girl, a baby, so her mommy bird made the decision for her: fight, flight or blight?  Flight,  please! 

Spoiler alert: the womb comes back. Duh. I’m here, aren’t I? That’s Newton’s First law: “Matter cannot be created nor destroyed, and secrets can never really be kept between mothers and daughters.” Lying is physically impossible. Manmade words can fall as far away from reality as possible, but the body knows how to tell only the truth. It’s a matter of physics,  not psychiatrics.   

Flight it was until Great-Grandma grew woman enough to make the choice for herself: fight, flight, or blight? She began her own fight. She found an Irish man who gave her and her womb three babies before he got hospitalized for ‘melancolia’. Germans call this kind of rapid-fire-baby-busting “blitz-krieg”. The Irish just call it “normal.” Among these three sprouts was a budding Dotsie, my grandmother. Just as her mother did for her, Great-Grandma had to choose for her daughter: fight, flight or blight? Blight. 

Whether intentionally or not, Great-Grandma bred Dotsie to believe her only blessing-- her womanhood-- to be a curse.  She did something worse than simply deprive her daughter of the womb; she trained Dotsie to deprive herself.Between them, the womb was something grotesque, perverse, dangerous. You see, it never really found home in Great Grandma, so how could Dotsie ever find home in it?  But that damn womb clung on just long enough for Dotsie to be able to  choose for herself. For the first and only time, she followed her mother’s footsteps. She fought.   

At sixteen, she married my grandpa and began to blitzkrieg-birth her own five kids. Number four is my mommy Claire. Grandma Dotsie could not believe my mom was a girl. She had just decided herself and still wasn’t sure she had made the right choice, and now she had to decide for someone else? As would be the nature of anyone reared in blight, Grandma Dotsie chose conservatively for her daughter:  Flight, please. 

The womb wandered, confusing my mom, who, like any baby bird, expected it to be there. She set about looking for it. Grandma’s body did not give any answers, but it certainly provided evidence that the womb did not wander far. Grandma’s coiffed hair, mink coats, and blue eyeshadow implied the womb lay behind the makeup counter at Macy’s. Her rubber gloves, laundry starch and maxims like “everything has a place and everything in its place” suggested the womb hid in order and Lysol. Dotsie’s cheesecakes, lasagnas, and mashed potatoes led Claire to believe the womb might be buried in food. All of these together pointed towards domesticity, but my mother did not feel this was home so knew it couldn’t be. She tried to dig deeper, and even though Grandma wouldn’t, the ground still shifted beneath them. It’s simple physics, Newton’s first law again:  what matters cannot be created nor destroyed…    

Do you think they made a deal with the devil? Potatoes, I mean. Hear me out. Their original sin: they wanted eyes. They signed over their roots. What a steal! For Lucifer, I mean. Potatoes could see others, now, sure, but they could no longer feel them, so they still felt lonely. Could you imagine? Thats like... take a deep breath. Now, hold it. That’s how it feels to cut your roots. Now, on top of that, imagine you’re opening your eyes for the first time and what do you see? Far away things and the terrifying space in between. They buried themselves so they don’t see anything. For a potato, ‘nothing’ is safer than fear, especially a rootless fear, a faithless fear. Feeling makes up faith, and without faith, how can you breathe? At least they’re brave. You can’t be brave if you’re not afraid. Then, you’re just naive. Oh, you can breathe out now, by the way.

My mom is so brave… a lot of fear makes a lot of fight, you know? And so when she chose for me, she chose fight, and grew me into a thick, rootless, wide-eyed potato just like her.  Or, at least, she tried. I fucked it up and made the blight come back, like some Poor Potato Pandora. I meant to battle the world alongside my mommy bird,I wanted to be the girl reaper of all the justice life owes her, but I just ended up fighting her. Neither of us liked this; our bodies made this obvious. But that’s the nature of the blight: the womb goes missing and you go hysterical looking for it with your useless eyes! Growing up with this as the norm would make anyone believe the womb to be an Old Wives’ Tale. 

(8) The Talk 

I’m ten. Mommy Bird corners me on the basement staircase, tracin’ a finger over where her fallopi tubes used to be, talkin’ real technical about some brave little egg trekking down to some “uterine lining.” My inner nerd is turned on and lovin’ the anatomy lesson. I hadn’t known that whole tube thing. That’s cool! But another part of me is shut off. 

I’m not mortified. I’m livid. For three major reasons: 1. My mom no longer has the relevant organs, so what does she know about periods?

2. I have absolutely nothing in common with my mother. Don’t matter if her uterus is in her or in that jar in her closet; if she has ever had one, I never would. I won’t have a uterus, or a fallopian, or a tit, or nipples, or a mortgage. Any uterus I would have had, she scared away, and the rescue mission was mine, not hers: that chord is cut.

3. Her whole guerilla-parenting pisses me off. It feels… showy. After-thought-y. No-thought-y, like she saw my little teets buddin’ through my secondhand Limited-Too tee and realized she might be too late to tell me about hormones. 

Well, she is! 

I know this stuff already! Shanice got her period last week. Nissa has had it for two years already. I watched that VHS Mrs. Washington played for us a couple months ago. I know how to put in a tampon (insert parralel, NOT perpendicular), how to get pads (go to the nurse), how to protect against STDs (don’t have sex). 

She can’t ask me for relationship advice one day and try to teach me about ovaries the next. Unreliably reliable isn’t a thing. We have an agreement. I make Ramen for myself and my younger siblings whenever. In return, momma can come home at her leisure, after a day at her four jobs. I make sure the kids were fed and the house didn’t burn down while she makes the money. 

I’m responsible for making sure the bad stuff doesn’t happen, so I’m also responsible when good shit does. My maturing is my own. My palette is mine, and it is sophisticated.  I’ve developed a taste for independence. I prefer solitary trial-and-error over being “parented”. I feel fidgety being mothered. So, like a baby fussing with her clothes, I pull at my mom’s attempts to make me wear “daughter”. 

Does this woman (my mom) have any idea who she’s speaking to? I’m ten.  I’m a woman amongst women. Don’t try to tell me I have a uterus. 

(9) Feeding myself 

Little did I know, in insisting I didn’t have a uterus, I brought the blight upon myself. I chose to make the womb go missing. Then, the water or wind spread it to my mother. 

But, like true potatoes, we set out to cure the blight on our own. You know that old maxim, feed a cold, starve a fever. Or is it starve a fever, feed a cold, do both for a blight? I’m pretty sure we tried everything... I did feeding, first, just like my great-great-grandma. She escaped the famine and the womb came skipping right back up in to her. That seemed to work for her, so I fed to fight.

My mom was fighting, too, planted right next to me. See, the problem was, we didn’t really know who our enemy was. Our wombs got caught in the crossfire, and struck by her blight. Somehow, she became my enemy. 

(10) Food Fight 

I arm myself with potato chips. Supersize fries. 2-for-1 Carvel Sundaes-- on Wednesdays. Wendy’s. Wise. Wonder Bread. With very greasy bite of Burger King, my lips smack a defiant, “Fuck you, Mom!”  Fuck your carob balls and sunflower seeds, you and your witchcraft restaurants. Fuck sprouts, fuck sage, fuck meat-alternatives, fuck you. 

On the homefront, my belly is in Claire’s direct line of fire. She cuts off its food supply. She infiltrates my ranks, commandeers the secret wrappers underneath my bed. I employ distal tactics on weekends with my father: surprise pick-ups-and-drive-thrus, McDonald-bombs, Fluffernutter nukes. Claire and he had established a Peace Treaty, but Mommy and me never did. I get redeployed on the shores of my mother’s house armed with Happy Meals. Claire’s not happy, but my belly is. 

Early on in the war, she executes a nighttime ambush. She catches me in a weak moment, watching TV in my bedroom. Instead of reading that night, she proposes, “Why don’t we do some pilates?” 

Out of either shame or love, I comply. She encircles her torso in saran wrap. “What’s that for?”

“To make me sweat more.”

She helps me wrap my own belly. I look at myself in the mirror. My pooch has disappeared. I’m ashamed to admit this, but in that moment, I’m hungered by the vision of a thinner me. My belly feels like a burden, and the control and power of perfection so appetizing. I’m tempted to abandon belly on the battlefield. I even pull my pants over the bottom of the wrap, so I can’t see my flesh bulging out. 

We begin mom’s standard home VHS pilates sequence: 100s, flutter kicks, crunches. Afterwards, we peel off the wraps and inspect them for how much sweat we’ve collected. Mine’s only damp. I go to bed with shame and determination to get wetter next time. I wake up with shame and determination never to give up on my troops like that ever again. I don’t know who I promise that too, but I don’t keep it. 

When I get my period at the ripe age of eleven-- completely flooring me, by the way, who had been heretofore convinced I did not have a uterus--, I did not tell me mom. I couldn’t concede she had won that battle. What’s more, even though my womb returned, the blight remained, which meant the war was not over.  I load up on pads from the nurse’s office as instructed, and when I run out of those, I lie and say my friend needs them for when she sleeps over and can my mom please go to CVS.  Also, can she get me some Cheez-its and NOT the reduced fat kind? 

The shame still lingers, though. When the TV’s off and the bag is empty, I still feel this eerie sensation, like something is watching me and that something is disappointed, and suddenly my salty companions start acting all innocent, like they don’t even know me. Here I am, still, there my mother still isn’t, and there are no more potato chips. Just fucking sunflower seeds. 

(11) Fight Food 

I thought if the womb stopped wandering, we’d be less hysterical. But no. The war only got worse. And guess what: this caused my uterus to flee AGAIN. Time to reconfigure my entire strategy. I listen to my gut. I don’t need sunflower seeds: I need a potato. More precisely, I need to be a potato. I’ve been ingesting them and acting like one, but still relying on other potatoes for sustenance and comfort, like a poser. To become the potato,I need to embody the potato. Self-sustaining. Entirely independent. Grown from and for myself. I’ll show the womb just how strong and determined I am. That lil thing will see my body as the perfect fortress, its sanctuary. And so, this becomes a war of attrition. First, I lose desserts, then snacks, then meals, then anything that’s left. 

Nothing beside books and Beyonce can penetrate my stone cold will power... Everything I want or need must be grown by myself, and everything I grow has to be excellent, flawless, so no one ever has a reason to look twice. Thin body implies thick roots. I appear invincible, indivisible, and perfectly invisible.  

(12) Famine  

A few years pass, and still no sign of the womb. Cue a trip to the doctors office. I’m sixteen, sitting on that crunchy paper and trying to find interest in some article in a last year’s Woman’s Health magazine, when Dr. Hormone Doctor finally enters. She’s a small woman, and her big blown out hair makes her look smaller. Her glasses perch at the end of her nose, so her head’s tilted really far back when she’s inspecting something and then really far forward when she’s judging me. While she makes small talk, she scrolls through my files on the computer. She probably says something like, “You go to so-and-so-school? My son goes to completely-different school.” and I probably say something like, “Oh, good for him,” but I can’t pay attention to anything other than the bright blue gum smacking around her mouth. 

“You an athlete?” she suddenly asks.

“Um… yeah.”

“What do you do?”

“I run cross country.”

“When’s the last time you got your period?”

“Three to four years ago.”

“When did you get it for the first time?”

“When I was eleven.”

“Hm…” She gets up and starts to snap on some rubber gloves the same color as her gum. “Your estrogen levels shouldn’t be this low. They’re post menopausal. Do you make yourself throw up?” 

“Uh, no.” 

“You don’t have to lie. Bulimics always have an inflamed glands right here, like you do. All the acid makes the jaw look bigger.” 

I try to clarify that I’ve never made myself throw up, that I even tried but couldn’t get a gag reflex, that I just starve myself, she walks over to me, tilts her head back, and begins to press along my jaw. She tilts it forward and concludes, “Yeah, inflamed.” 

She snaps off the gloves, tosses em, and types something up.  Smack. Smack. Smack. Smack.“Really, self-induced vomiting wrecks your body. Destroys your teeth.” She looks above her glasses at me. “You should consider taking a hormonal birth control supplement to bring these levels up to normal.” She writes some recommendation down and hands it to me. “Take care. Keep reading.” Smack. Smack. Smack. Good bye. 

Dr. Hormone Doctor, along with others, is fooled by my peaceful demeanor, but let me assure you: mine is a nonviolent protest only by default. I want to pick up a couch and throw it, too. I want to yell, “You don’t even know me! Get it straight! I’m anorexic! I just have a strong jawline!” I want to use all my hysterical strength to make this goddamn womb come back… But rage takes energy I don't have, so I continue my hunger strike, just like my momma did, convinced we’re in opposition when really we’re protesting the same thing.     

(13) Sideways 8  

My mom and I were like two potatoes, planted side by side, seeing the other and the distance in between. We just ended up staring at one another from afar, questioning the other’s intention, detesting the other’s independence, starving ourselves of love. I saw her, and I saw her seeing me, and I felt her, but I didn’t feel her feeling me. Even if we did try to send the other nutrients through the soil, she had no roots so I had no roots, and without these to connect, we couldn’t feel the other imploring us to hold her. 

We’re still tangled up in the mess we planted ourselves in. 

(14) Flash Bulb  

You know that whole idea of a “flash bulb” memory, an important moment you remember so vividly? Apparently named after a camera flash that burns into your eyes, ‘cause apparently your emotions burn this memory into your brain? Some memories though completely bypass my brain. I still have flash bulbs, but they’re more like the bulb of a weed. The memory plants itself in my body and explodes its roots into and around every part of me, except for my brain. That’s how I store truth: in my body. What matters cannot be created nor destroyed. It reminded me the day your mother died.  

I’m perched on a boulder, looking out at the Pacific, crying inexplicably. At this point, my womb is still wandering, and so my period’s still gone, so it can’t be PMS. A group of friends is playing shirts versus skin football on the sand nearby. As I watch the waves crest-and-slam-crest-and-slam-crest-and-slam against the jagged cliff faces cradling the beach, the girls playing football wander away from the game, one by one joining me in my silence. 

The last time I saw grandma, we washed her naked, papery body together. I know you would've cried, but your Paxel doesn’t let you. 

A weather-beaten-graffiti-ridden house roosts atop the far cliff. Its windows and doors gone and its face gazing out over the ocean, the building seems to be sighing out, able to rest at last. “Wanna go check out that house?” I ask the girls. They agree. We begin to walk.

You were two divorces and five kids deep before you learned that you and your mother had been molested by the same person. Your grandmother, her mother, my great-grandmother. 

The closer side of the cliff seems easier to hike, so we begin there. The firm, packed sand crunches beneath our bare feet, and dense shrubs provide hand holds for when we have to scramble. The girl in front of me begins to pull herself on to the next ledge when I pause to look down. The other three girls trickle behind us, intently searching the ground for safe terrain. They confer with one another and decide to turn around.  The closest girl begins to descend. I look up. The girl in front of me, I realize, is actually three meters above me, and our hands hold more weight than do our feet. At some point in our ascent, the climb had become completely vertical, and the soil had transitioned to sand. The shrubs-- now sparse-- fly out of the earth like they’re fleeing towards the Rapture.

Grandma left home when she was fourteen. You kind of left at fourteen, too, when you went to an hospital for the first time. I was the same age when I thought I escaped you. 

I hear a shriek and rumble beneath me and look to see one of the girls scraping down the cliff side, arms grasping at roots that pull mockingly easy from the soil. She slides five meters down before slamming onto a rock. The girl above me and I make eye contact, seeing in the other confirmation of our reality. For us, with no solid grasp or foothold but with so far to fall, turning around is no longer an option. Our only way is up. 

Twelve years earlier, you pinned me against our kitchen wall and pressed a knife to the flesh of my throat. 

We’re higher, now, and deep grooves intimately carve into the cliff. We have to press our hands and feet out against two vertical walls and slowly push our way up. We try to reach for a rock or plant to hold and it crumbles between our fingers and blows into the ocean. I don’t watch them fall. 

Ma, every time you pounded your fists against my back or stormed out of the house, screaming that you were going to drive our mini van off a cliff, I held on, because I knew you would. I knew the thing that weighed on you the most wasn’t your dense, wild, overgrown pain but your inescapable, raging passion to live. You love me and James and Gigi and Christopher and Peter and life with all your twisty heart. I knew, however hard you yanked my hair, you’d hold on to life and joy even tighter.

But when you hold that blade to my throat, for the first time, I feel afraid. I don’t fear death-- that feels secondary-- but something so much closer to the bedrock of being that these words barely reach: I can not be loved. The one who gave me life deems me unfit to live, and so my existence will only ever be a burden. My pounding heart-- which I thought was the same as yours, pleading to live and laugh and love and be loved a little longer-- can not be trusted. 

As we climb in silence, with stone cold resolution, you are on the other side of the country, remembering holding your mother’s papery hand, watching her last breath escape her tired lips. 

I do not look at the blade. I do not cry. I look into your eyes, stormy with past lives moving too fast for talk. I seal my jaw. I refuse to let you see the very soil beneath my being-- which, before then, had only gone as deep as my shame-- crumbling. You will not witness my broken heart rip open the earth within me. You will never know the ravine left when fear uprooted my faith. 

A week after the cliff incident, I return home from college. I spend the day making myself small again. The space around you feels different, as if all the molecules in the air are watching us both. At some point, I notice an old picture of a young girl and ask you who it is. You tell me it was grandma. I ask if we have always had the picture, and you tell me no. When did you get it. A couple days ago. She looks like you. Not really. 

At night, your friends come over, and the unease sharpens. Your other children are around, doing other things. Your friends and I gather around the dining room table. I listen to you speak to one of them about something I don’t remember. My focus wanders, and I find myself staring at the photo. My grandma, about sixteen, poised as they did back then when taking a photo was akin to going to the prom.  Next to the picture frame is a porcelain jewelry box she had kept on her dresser, a series of photos of my grandparents throughout their fifty years of marriage, her monogrammed gold necklace draped across Scrabble tiles. 

The friend you aren’t speaking to notices my gaze, locked on my grandmother’s sepia eyes. She puts her hand on my arm and rubs her sympathy on me. With this and without any words from you, I learn grandma had died. 

We climb coldly, methodically. I look to my side and see the ocean, still churning, and the sun, now setting. We are at least fifty meters above the rocks and waves. I look back up and see my companion is gone. I freeze. My heart races. Part of me accepts my fate and begins preparations to die politely. Then, I hear a voice, “It’s safe up here.” I keep climbing. 

(15) Our family of Things  

Your favorite poem is “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

“Take me back to when I lost myself,” you asked, when you lost your place in the family of things, when your roots were cut, and the dense earth under which life buried you muffled your calls for help. Meanwhile the world and your womb went on. It headed back home long enough for you to sprout from yourself your own family of things. 

But all you knew was how to root-strap, so you soon returned to isolation, this time burying yourself. All I wanted was to let the soft animal of my body love what it loved: you.  I would sacrifice my childhood to mother you so we could keep our womb. I offered myself to you, announcing my love and my life over and over again, in as many ways I could imagine. But you never told me your despair and so I never told you mine so how could our world go on?

I scramble over the ledge of the cliff onto flat ground. The soil is still crumbly and the ground still split into deep crevices, but it’s walkable. The house is just some unremarkable derelict building where homeless people sleep and teenagers smoke pot. It is on the other side of some dark gorges, and the highway is on the other side of some less dark gorges, so my friend and I turn toward the road. We leap over the mouths of the cliffside and carefully press past thorn bushes until we are on the pavement. It takes us a good half mile of walking back in silence to admit that we had been scared.

… 

I found it! My Uterus!

… 

The thing about eyes is: they can look only one place at a time. If something goes wrong, a potato may go looking for it, but if it looks in the wrong places, it will see nothing and go crazy! It’ll spend all its time looking back and miss what’s in front of it. Of course they go hysterical, mommy and daughter potatoes! A girl, a woman scours her mother’s eyes for some sign of being seen, but this leaves the girl, the woman blind to her own child, who’s doing the same to her. The whole lineage tries to make eye contact, but can’t because, despite what they may tell you, potatoes don’t have eyes on the back of their spuds. 

Mom, when you tried to kill yourself last month, I didn’t feel rage like I would have in the past. I didn’t feel the urge to run or the grind of my heart to force feed you my despair. I felt only the most tender, devastating love. That’s how I remembered I’m not a potato, and neither are you, ma.  We have roots, and that is the womb. 

It’s okay we forgot. We were in survival mode. Not naive or innocent but simply overwhelmed, we bit from the apple of the earth. We had to. We opened our eyes and saw our own nakedness and the vastness between our soft bodies. We became blind to the garden of which we’re all a part. Betrayed by our hunger to live, we believed we must do everything on our own. We buried ourselves alive. Foreigners in our own flesh, our own daughters and mothers became threats. This is how the blight began, and this is how the blight continued. Hysteria doesn’t strike when the womb wanders, but when our vision does. Everywhere we look, we see evidence of our aloneness and loneliness. Sure, roots can’t see at all, but they can feel, and they feel in every direction. The womb’s stays while we fall and fall and fall from grace.

But, Ma, don’t you hear the womb calling us back home? 

I know I fell out of the nest, but the first and only thing I did was search for you, and that must count for something. I didn’t find you at first. I found a kitten, a cow, a snort. But then I fell again, into faith, and I felt my way back to you. I remember the way. Follow me. 

You don’t have to be good, Ma. You don’t have to be there when I hatch. You don’t have to watch over me or be hysterical or walk on your knees for a thousand miles. You just have to close your eyes.