Excerpt from “Imperfect Orbit”

Caroline Shannon Karasik’s essay collection addresses the postpartum identity, the under-explored and often misrepresented transition into motherhood. Unflinching in its content, this essay collection includes themes of postpartum depression and anxiety, substance abuse, and what it means when a woman seeks to redefine the role of a mother for the next generation—her daughter.

This essay, Imperfect Orbit, is an excerpt of a piece that examines motherhood and mortality, as well as what it means to witness the death of a former identity, while navigating and sometimes resisting an unclear path to a new one.

*

The resistance began on the first drive home with our new baby at my side. I sat next to Claire in the backseat, my hand resting on her chest. I kept ruminating—internally and sometimes audibly—over the fact we were moving onto this new chapter. I wasn’t ready.

“She really won’t ever be in there again,” I said in a choked whisper, referencing my now hollow womb. “I just can’t believe it’s over.”

“Now she’s here,” Dan said, excitement in his voice as he turned the car onto the half-mile long hill that led to our house. I started sobbing, terrified by the realization I was climbing farther and farther away from the bubble we had built in the hospital. In there, the edges had been fuzzy, the next steps of what it meant to bring a human onto the planet were unclear.

When Claire was born, my bones, my flesh begged just a little bit longer. I didn’t hear it at the time. But it was there.

“Push,” the doctor said, this time to expel my placenta, the organ that had been the middlewoman between me and Claire, nourishing her throughout pregnancy.

I pushed, curling my body to the right so I could sneak a peek over my bent knees at Claire, who had been moved to a nearby table to check her vitals. Cold, sterile air crept between my legs, my vagina an open wound on display for the entire room.

It’s stubborn, my doctor said. Unwilling to move. She began reaching her entire hand inside of me and tugging at the placenta. She used her other hand to massage my abdomen—now loose and unoccupied—and encouraged it downward.

She yanked. Something fleshy in her glove tossed to the floor. Then, another piece flung to the ground. Another, another, another.

I think now how I should have said, “gentle” as she disassembled my pregnancy bit by bit.

Or, “not yet.”

*

At the center of a galaxy’s swirling ocean of dust and gas and curious dark matter lies a black hole, a point of no return. Holding it together is gravity, like skin works to contain muscle, brain, blood, heart.

There is a photo of a black hole, a circle nested in a galaxy’s fiery red-orange cocoon. Its gravity can tear apart a star, swallow light whole. It is known for consumption, like a Bermuda Triangle of the sky. A black hole can only be seen when it is illuminated by a galaxy. And yet, it will slowly chip away at pieces of its host.

Not entirely, but some.

*

I am six years old and spinning circles around our living room to Whitney Houston’s “Dance With Somebody.” Mauve carpet at my toes, my sister at my side. Her ponytail swishes loops and loops and loops.

“Nunny, go faster,” she says, and I do.

My mom hops in and twists her legs back and forth, hands left to right. Her brown curls spring up and down.

“I love you, Caroline Marie.”

She taps a finger on my nose and winks and I feel a sudden ache for her never to leave me. “Mommy, when you die will you ever come back?”

“Oh, honey.”

My mom eyes Amanda before bending to my height. “Well, I won’t come back, but you’ll find me everywhere, baby. In the flowers, in a rainbow, and in here,” she says, tracing a finger over my heart.

“I’ll always be with you, you know?”

My six-year-old mind teeters between accepting and dismissing this idea, but I nod.

My mom stands up, stretches her arms out, wiggles her fingers in my direction. Hands clasped between us, we lean back and begin to spin, quickly gaining momentum. We turn and turn until we run out of breath, fall to the floor, burst into laughter. We turn and turn until we are a supernova star, pieces of body shredded into space, pinks and blues bleeding into greens and purples. A burst of watercolors amongst the black.

We are a stellar explosion, luminous upon our deaths.

*

I don’t want to kill Claire.

Or myself.

That’s what I was told to watch for. When my obstetrician came to check on me a few hours after birth, she said, “Seems to be latching well,” about our breastfeeding and, “no intercourse for six weeks,” as she went over the recovery process.

And then, “Don’t be surprised if you feel weepy throughout the next couple of weeks as your hormones shift all over the place. But if it extends beyond that or you have feelings of wanting to harm yourself or your baby, you call us.”

A thumbs up, and she walked out.

All of the labor and delivery classes, every single postpartum pamphlet, the questionnaire I had to fill out at the pediatrician’s office—they all said the same thing: “If you are having thoughts of harming yourself or others, it’s important to seek help.”

But night after night, I sit in a rocking chair and cling to Claire as if she is my anchor. Like I am featherweight, but also heavy, and I will either be sucked into a vacuum or flattened to the ground by the unbearable weight of dread atop my chest.

I become acutely aware of mortality—mine and hers. I am fixated on an undetectable external force that will leave Claire without a mother. Worse, I have realized birthing a person left me in the irrevocable position of creating a life that could also be taken away.

“It’s a miracle,” people say. No one says, “Someday you will die. Someday she will die.” Life means death. No one says that.

It is a miracle of sorts, by the way. I don’t know if I will ever wrap my head around the fact that human beings—whole human beings—come from women’s bodies. Science doesn’t do it justice. Neither does religion.

I pray, I pray: Please let me live long enough that she remembers me. Please let me live long enough that she feels my nudges, my guidance throughout her life. I want her to go to make a bad decision and hear my voice. I want her to recall my touch, what it felt like for me to wrap my arms around her, run my thumb across her forehead, blonde fuzz at my fingertip.

“Just please tell her how much I loved her,” I say to Dan through tears, over and over again.

When Claire falls asleep, I journal, obsessed with chronicling every minute of our day. Journaling started as a want to remember pieces of Claire’s life, but quickly morphed into an obsession with leaving behind a record of my existence. “If I die in my sleep, please read Claire my journals,” I tell Dan.

“I will see you in the morning, I promise.”

“But, if I do, then do you promise?”

“I promise.”

My thoughts are darkest at night and that is often when I am alone. When Dan is home, he plays the part of my therapist, fielding my anxiety-fueled spirals about everything from submitting requests on White Pages to deleting our home address (so predators cannot locate us) to preparing him for how to talk to Claire about me if I were to die. We are two people existing in fits and starts, all temporary remedial efforts to hold me together.

But Dan is often gone, teaching dance at the local university, setting choreography during late-night rehearsals. This had been our plan before Claire arrived and, yet, she is here and I have no idea of a before. Before seems ridiculous. Before seems like another planet.

*

September 27, 2015. Billions of people could see the blood moon that night, could watch as a total lunar eclipse occurred, the earth wedging itself between the sun and the moon and casting a shadow upon the second brightest object in the sky (the first being the sun). During a blood moon, some sunlight seeps through, sliding just past the edges of the earth and giving the moon that reddish, orange-y hue. Some say it glows. It’s radiant.

I was paralyzed by the idea of stepping into the night to see it. Instead, I scrolled through news reports and images. The moon as it illuminated a European hillside, a herd of deer dotting its curve. The moon as a faded backdrop, day breaking on the Boston Harbor.

This moon was bigger, brighter, and especially close to earth, the result of gravity causing it to travel on a tilted path, an imperfect orbit. It’s a supermoon, they say, this full moon with its swollen body pressed against earth.

It was the last time the two lunar events would simultaneously occur for eighteen years. That’s what all the scientists and Twitter scientists kept saying. Eighteen years.

Eighteen years and Claire would be an adult. She would be able to vote and buy a lottery ticket and open a bank account. Enlist.

Eighteen years. It was an anvil, leaden in the depths of my belly. Always that feeling when I thought of her existing on this planet, moving through space outside of my care. What if I wasn’t here to see her do it? What if there were abnormal cells eating away at healthy ones and silently forming a mass somewhere, anywhere in my body? My brain, my bowels, my legs playing hostess to a disease that would keep me from her. What if she needed her mom and her mom was dead?

Every lunar cycle, the sun and the earth shift, tilt, and rotate, all the while poking and prodding at the shape of the moon. Its former fullness turns hollow, its whole body is severed in half. It fades. It even disappears.

And then it reemerges, a new version of its former self.

Or does it? Maybe the moon looks that way at first glance, high in the sky, her expression turned proud for a photo. But does she see her face in a river black by night and wonder about what she’s become, about the pieces left behind that will never be retrieved again?

What if she doesn’t know how to be this new moon?

• 0