The fight started like this: Ricky tells me to put the lid on the yoghurt tub because of “germs”. I, halfway to my daughter’s always unreceiving mouth with a spoonful of said yoghurt, reply, “Fuck you and your germ theory.” In my defence, Ricky has been insufferable about hygiene since Covid. He becomes incensed. I, replying sarcastically, watch myself do it, watch my tongue shaping a reply, watch how I goad Ricky, working him up. I relish it. I watch it. (Who relishes, who watches?) I feel something inside me, a stirring. It feels good to fight, to be angry and to receive anger. I want to fight, tear, scream. I laugh, snarl. I am sick of being quiet and calm.
When C pinches my breasts while breastfeeding I pull her hand off: Don’t pinch mommy. She pinches: don’t pinch mommy. She pinches. Don’t pinch mommy! She pinches. I want to throw her off, dash her against the wall. I want to dash myself against the wall. Why don’t I know what to do? Why does C pinch? Who doesn’t she eat? Why doesn’t she sleep?
Ricky and I fight. My defence is that he is micromanaging me when he tells me to please close the yoghurt because of germs (air germs). It’s a limping excuse but plausible so I run with it. Except I’m sort of performing, orchestrating. When Ricky trips over into real fury I begin to worry. And then get upset. He shouldn’t be so angry. Surely this is like a game of some sort?
I can’t feel my anger, not really, not completely. I know where anger could be. I know despair. I know shame, guilt. I know duty. But I feel this numbness where true, hot anger should be. I spectate myself, chewing popcorn: how will this unfold? This is not the Witness of Buddhist fame. This is a rubber-necker driving slowly past a car accident. I marvel at Ricky’s capacity for feeling, for his tight, working jaw, for his cold-shouldering, his cross-armed stand in the doorway. He is amazing. I want that. I want to be in touch, willing, alive. I want to be right there in the world, full of it, but awake, awake.
When I drank, I drank so I could feel. I laughed hysterically, talked full throated, felt the belt of my belly let out, let loose; I became elaborate, wept on the kitchen floor while listening to 90s bands. I would fight in bars, cry on pavements, climb electric-fenced walls to escape. It was full, final, operatic and the next morning I could die. What I could not be in the light of day I was in the turn of dusk and dark – all that sticky stuff: disease; and sleeplessness; and the gunk that gathers beneath the bath plug; small, constant, withheld angers; my drooping body that will one day die; my closed, aching throat; my profound, unworded love for my husband; friends I lost touch with or couldn’t connect with or who misunderstood me or I them; my unbound heart leaking and puking and hurting and covered up again; those polar bears starving on thin ice; and choking on rare meat; and a 2am knowing that you’ve lost your sweetness: you thought you’d have more time.
That is why I drank and what came out unconsciously with the drink. It opened a space for mystery, for the throbbing underground begging to burst. It was a space for helpless, hopeless, out-of-control ugliness. This is, in a word, if we could put words to it, the feminine in its form as Kali, the goddess of death, the devourer; or in its form as the void, the nothing that demands you keep back and hold open and trust.
Now, I wish to be awake and to experience these things, to surface them without destroying them with my clumsy hands. I do not want to inspect them, smash them to discover their constituent parts. This would be a masculine thing to do, the scientist, the watcher might be compelled to do this. I want to feel them, dare to feel them, but not to get lost in them, drown, go unconscious: it is more like a dance. Be angry, really, truly angry, without becoming the anger. Not expressing or suppressing, holding space for something outside my knowing.
I get a massage. I give and receive a form of polynesian massage called Kahuna. For years I have gone for massages and felt the energy building up in me. I longed to release, had heard of these epic screaming and thrashing releases, women bucking like rabbits in snares. I wanted it. I wanted to heal. I wanted to become clean. I wanted to inhabit an unembarrassed body. Though snot would run from my nose and I’d hiccup and burp and clear my throat and cry, over and over I’d come up against something inside me that said no, no further, I will not.
Finally, after years of this, I speak to this part, ask it what or who it is, what it wants. I am “told” two things: that I must be in a marriage with this part, and that I have been relating to it as though it were a toddler and I a stern parent. I was getting the response toddlers and prisoners give when fingers wag. Instead, I could relate to it like a lover. How? I don’t know.
But I schedule a massage. In the car outside I sit, breathe – as I always do: getting a massage is nerve wracking and difficult, following along the lines of my body, allowing a person, this woman, to touch me, press me, follow eddies and currents, to breathe with her breath, to let myself relax. So I breathe and then I say out loud: “My intention for this massage is to hold a space open to meet this part on its terms and to dance with it, and move with it as it is and as I am, now, right now, without being better than I am.”
I go in, begin. There is nothing. I hold open. Nothing. I hold open. I feel small currents of energy gather in my throat, or my feet. I don’t close around them, or pounce on them. I just let them be, feel them, observe them, let them go. I hold the walls of myself out and in. Out from collapsing around these sensations, choking them, trying to amplify them or squash them. In from going out to the massage therapist whom I like and whom I want to like me. I want her to feel good, so for all this time I think I’ve been somehow performing what a person getting a massage is like. I have been kind of acting so I can make others feel good. I want her to know she is having an effect on me, that I feel something. I don’t know how to feel something, so I perform “woman getting a massage and feeling something”. It is what I think it should look and feel like. I am acting on an idea, acting out an idea. I feel myself, tendrils of myself going out to her, wanting to connect with her and be likeable for her. I gently reel myself in. Go out, reel in, over and over.
I hold myself in the moment, which is so, so subtle. It is hardly anything at all. No theatrics, no great yelps of pleasure or pain, just something slowly moving. I am worried the massage therapist will feel bad because the session has no content, but I reel my worry back, hold it, let it be in the open space I’ve made. Ah. The session starts to come to an end. Nic, the therapist, is by my feet. My mind, which is usually right on the rim, watching, directing, note-taking, has slightly… not wandered, but sort of shut off, blanked out for a moment. I feel a whoosh of energy rush up from my feet. I sigh out in surprise. It is nothing I could ever have generated.
Then I feel a hand on my stomach. Nic was just on my feet, so it’s strange she’s come up to my stomach, but then, yes, no, I feel both her hands on my feet. This is another hand on my stomach. Definitely, yes, there, a hand or a pressure that feels very much like one. Nic starts her cleansing ritual to complete the session, when I suddenly feel her hand on the place in my stomach where I felt the pressure. She presses in, sweeps up. The session is over.
Afterwards Nic says something moved her body while she was doing her closing ritual and placed her hand on my stomach. I begin to cry, say, I know, because I felt something before she placed her hand there. Nic says my body felt like honey, that it felt completely different to usual. I had come to something, even though it felt like nothing.
Later I think of the biblical line, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, and feel afraid because what happened was so witchy, so conventionally unexplainable. Don’t be witchy, we are told, be pleasant, pleasing, in control. How will I raise my daughter to not imbibe this role that I am trying to shake off now? C drinks from my breast with a deep abandon, pinches my skin, reaches out, clutches, releases. She is only herself; she has not yet stepped outside to perform herself.
I want to fall into my own milk. I want to feel the keenness of my own desires. I want to hold myself open and in, so something real can rise in that new space.
Leave a Reply