my memoir

 

Autobiography of a Sea Creature

– Coming Home to my Body

Prologue

Giraffes surrounded me on the wall, those long necks, Covered by plastic, they were cold when I touched them. The smell of alcohol reminded me of the nurse who would dab my arm with a wet cotton ball and prick me with a needle. Dr. Constad’s voice was warm gravel. “Look at you,” He said, squatting so his eyes were at equal height with mine. “You are a miracle.” Happiness filled up my little body, like air rushing into a green balloon. “Unbelievable,” he continued. “You weren’t worth a plug nickel when you were born.” The balloon burst. I was so ashamed I could hardly hear him continue, “but look at you now.”

As soon as I was naked on the examining table, his hands kneaded my stomach. He dug deep, asking questions with his fingertips and palms. I stared at the ceiling, afraid. What was he looking for? He searched quickly, furiously, but methodically, bent on discovering something hard, that olive of stone, seed of death. His hands seemed determined to find any possible intruder.

“I don’t feel anything hard,” Dr. Constad pronounced. “Nice and soft.”

“Will she have trouble with her stomach later, say when she’s fifty?” my mother once asked Dr. Constad after the examination.

“She shouldn’t,” he answered. “We’ll keep checking, of course.”

I had no idea what fifty meant. I was not yet two when I started to worry.

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Excerpt from “Horseshoe Crabs,”  Chapter One

In the records from my hospitalization after my suicide attempt at age twenty-two, I found the familiar phrase 26 days old.  My mother had told the social worker about the operation that I had undergone as an infant. He wrote no special note to follow up on this information. The narrative following my parents’ visit focused on my thyroid gland and the irregularity of my periods. Blood had been drawn, a gynecology exam administered. My T3 and T4 levels were of some concern. Hormones, or female problems, had contributed to my admittance in the hospital, the notes seem to conclude. My cold turkey withdrawal from Valium prescribed for TMJ—the actual precipitating factor of my breakdown, I realized later—was not something that I would have mentioned at the time. After all, according to the dentist, Valium was just like aspirin.

The notes discuss my one visit with the psychiatrist and his prescription for anti-depressants. Two weeks after my admission to the hospital, the social worker wrote: Patient advised to seek employment (want ads supplied). Patient also advised to pursue stable family life (stipend allotted for purchase of feminine hygiene products and new clothes).

Years later, I understood the origins of my instability. At the encouragement of my therapist, I drew the image I had of myself as a baby. On the paper appeared a floating monster, wound round with strands of red spaghetti. A fetal body with a blue belly and blue rubbery legs, feet small and webbed like a duck’s. Bald blue head, red face. Giant amber insect eyes as if on fire, the eyes windows to her insides. A gash on her belly, red and purple angry strokes. Her huge hands held up as if screaming, STOP! Yet her fingers were limp, wavy as if boneless. In fact her whole body was floppy, cast adrift, given up as if flowing with a current. This was the image of my beginnings that I carried with me—a larval creature floating in outer space.

As a baby, I had a condition called pyloric stenosis. The muscle around the pyloric valve between the stomach and small intestine swelled and food could not pass through. This problem is easily diagnosed nowadays and the remedy less severe, but in 1952, the obstetrician diagnosed my symptoms improperly and by the time I had surgery to open the passageway at 26 days old, I weighed only four pounds.

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Excerpt from “First Waters,” Chapter Two, about my relationship with my mother:

My scar from that early surgery came to symbolize our relationship—flawed, interrupted, conditional. The only time my mother mentioned it was to complain about its size. I might be toweling off after a bath or dressing after a swim at Linden Pool when she’d remark: “Gee, Wend, it’s too bad that scar keeps on stretching.” As a girl, I fantasized ways to make it disappear: applying make-up to it; erasing it like a pencil mark; or massaging it into my skin as if my stomach were made of Play Dough. Maybe one day, it would straighten its legs and hop away, like a grasshopper. Other scars on my body eventually vanished or left only the slightest trace. This scar, though, was there to stay: a spider spinning frantically, casting crazy webs onto my belly that lengthened and widened over time; octopus legs fused onto my skin; the lines of a telephone pole, going every which way. I was stamped—DAMAGED GOODS.

In my life, scars meant imperfection. Scars symbolized situations that weighed my family down with burdens it couldn’t carry. Perfection, I decided, would absolve me, make up for the pain I had caused. Requiring nothing of anyone, I would be the most wonderful little girl around. Mother’s best helper.

While my mother food shopped, I transformed the house. In the living room, I polished the fireplace brass; dusted every item and surface; vacuumed the carpet; shook out the throw rugs; straightened the paintings on the wall; and beat the pillows and cushions in the fresh air to make them plump and dust-free. I swept the kitchen floor, dusted the shelves in the bathroom, and refolded the towels. As soon as my mother arrived home, I raced out to the car to help with the packages. As I put them down on the kitchen table, I heard her exclaim as she walked through the house: “How beautiful! How hard you worked. Look at this bathroom!” I was a good girl. I had been worth saving.

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As a teenager, exhausted by perfection, I tried disruption. Troubled, I reached for trouble. I latched onto the black leather jacket crowd—a quick descent to hell. The summer that I turned thirteen, I told my mother that I was staying down the shore in Lavelette with my friend Mary and her mother. Mary and I bummed a ride down the Parkway with some kids in a stolen car. I got so drunk that I hung my head out the window as we drove over the bridge into Matawan and threw up onto the side of the car.

During the day, we begged for spare change on the Boardwalk and at night, slept at Pat’s Place. Pat owned an apartment building and a Laundromat. He let Ann, a young girl who had run away from home and who was trying to make it by working as a waitress, stay in one of his apartments for free, and she, in turn, let us girls stay with her. Later we learned that Pat pimped out the prostitutes who lived in the apartment next door.

We ate breakfast each morning at the corner store: Yodels, prepackaged apple turnovers, and coffee. Dinners were pork roll on a bun with mustard that we bought near the Wild Mouse, a ride where the cars tilted out over the ocean at the end of the pier. Every so often, the riders’ screams could be heard over the bells and buzzers of the boardwalk games.

Pat’s Place was about a half mile from the boardwalk, so we hitched rides. One guy who picked Mary and me up pulled out his dick shortly after we got in the car and played with himself while driving. I elbowed Mary who was sitting next to the car door and nodded toward his prick. We had strategies for these types of encounters. At the stoplight, she quietly pushed down on the door handle and at her cue, we rolled out into the street. Another time, running from a pack of drunken boys, we jumped into the back of a teal blue pickup that stopped for us. Sometimes, I ended up drunk at parties, not knowing how I got there or how I would ever get back to Pat’s.

One morning, Mary and I found ourselves with two guys in a parking lot, sitting in the open back of a VW van turned psychedelic bus. “Coming to me in the Morning,” a song by the Cream, blasted from the bus’s speakers. Mary and I had met them at Flo’s all night diner. We had taken mescaline with them on the beach at about two a.m. and had watched the sunrise, smeary yellow and orange.

My hair was tangled, my body unwashed, my teeth unbrushed, my mouth sour from chain-smoking. I felt honest, raw, and real. I was on the outside what I felt like inside. Since the water had stopped running in Ann’s apartment, we took a bar of soap to the ocean once a week. Washing in salt water does not make you feel clean.

Mary and I caught a ride back to Hillside with a friend of Pat’s, a man who drank whiskey all the way up the Parkway while driving in a torrential storm. He had one of those cars with a speedometer built into the steering column that looked like a 3D map of space. Each 10-mph jump in speed was a separate illuminated orbit. The car’s speed lit up in red numbers. The warm yellow light within the chamber calmed me. I stared at this dashboard drama all the way up the Parkway to keep me from thinking about the car wreck we were headed for. The rhythm of the windshield wipers beating back and forth soothed me. When he pulled off Route 22 and into Super Diner’s parking lot, I was amazed. The rain had stopped and I was about a mile away from home. As soon as I walked in the door, my mother grounded me. While Mary and I were away, she had bumped into Mary’s mother food shopping at the Acme Market. They put two and two together.

Excerpt from “Nigricans,” Chapter Three:

At age sixteen, I became an environmentalist. Oceans Magazine had delivered news that I could not ignore. In Louisiana, scientists discovered that pelican eggs were cracking long before the progeny hatched. Paper thin, the shells could not hold. DDT was the culprit as Rachel Carson had warned in Silent Spring. It was 1969. I presented my report about the pelicans to my high school honors biology class, showing them photos of mother birds standing over cracked eggs—pelicans dead before they were born. Dead babies. Dead babies everywhere.

I would major in biology and save the pelicans. I would fix that which was broken; help those hurt before their lives had even begun; prevent the pain of future generations. I subscribed to Ocean’s Magazine, watched Jacques Cousteau and nature films on TV and tacked photos of scuba divers onto the bulletin board over my desk. I applied to schools that boasted superior programs. The University of Miami accepted me.

No matter that U of M was considered a party school by north easterners and that many of my friends were headed for Ivy League schools. No matter that both my best friend and the boy I was in love with were staying home to attend local colleges. I was heading off on a 747 into the blue unknown, leaving my old life behind. Lured by field stations in the Keys and South America, the international reputation of the graduate school, the research vessel, and the distance from home, I booked my flight.

Science promised stability. On exams, blank lines awaited correct answers: the scientific name of a carbon polymer; the acronym that stood for the double helix; the term for algae and fungi living in symbiosis. Every question was answerable, every mystery solvable. I wanted that perfect clarity: things were alive or dead, right or wrong, open or closed.

A deeper question drove me though, a question of which I had no conscious knowledge. Why was I born broken?

One of my biology professors, Dr. Jergens, described several theories about the origin of living beings. Perhaps life plummeted to earth on a meteor, the rock acting as a tiny spaceship, transporting the genetic material, maybe in the form of primitive bacteria. Maybe chemicals in the water, originating from the volcanic spewing of early earth, formed compounds that were one day zapped by lightening and an amino acid was formed. Thus, life began as a primitive aggregate floating in the water. This idea was a particular favorite as a scientist at the University of Miami’s graduate school conducted many of the experiments that corroborated these findings. When Dr. J. lectured on the origins of life, he gave it a mystical bent, which intrigued me. He urged us to read Teilhard de Chardin, a paleontologist who wrote about the evolution of the spirit. I bought the pale blue paperback The Phenomenon of Man but was unsuccessful at penetrating its meaning. Nevertheless, I knew that at the end of the day, when you boiled it all down, life—all life—seemed to come from the sea.

But how exactly had human beings evolved from this first aggregate floating on top of a vast ocean?  How did we become bipeds, strolling along the beach at dusk?  And why do some species thrive and others struggle?

Excerpt from “Divine Imperfection,” Chapter Five

My mother calls to wish me happy July 26^th. I have just turned fifty. My mother, age ninety, still lives alone in New Jersey in the house where I was raised. As usual, she tells me how I looked after surgery—tubes in and out of every hole, a creature from outer space. “You looked worse than a dead squirrel. I lost ten years of my life, from forty to fifty just like that.” The tone in her voice frightens me.  “I’m going to sue you, you know,” she says suddenly.

“I must have been a real fighter, huh Mom?” I ask, redirecting the conversation.

“Yes, yes, you were,” she admits, taking the cue. “You had the ability to endure. You had a lot of strength that way.”  This is a first coming from her.

Shortly after this conversation, I have an astonishing experience. During an acupuncture treatment, my doctor says, “You have a strong body and a strong spirit.” I have never heard anything close to this in my life from anyone. Her words strum a deep chord within, and I sense the truth in what she has said. It takes reaching fifty to consider that this could be true.

Like Alice down the rabbit hole, I am venturing into my scar, a dark place. While it’s true that I don’t remember my surgery, my body does. Perhaps breath memory is a better way to put it. My breath—the way I breathed—changed, probably even before the surgery. The blockage in my abdomen was likely very painful, especially after eating. In any case, I learned to breathe shallowly, above the area that was operated on. With the support of the Middendorf Breath teacher  and his class that I am taking, I hear the story my body has to tell.

In my first hands-on session, Juerg, my teacher, watches me breathe as I lie on the massage table. He observes where breath moves my body and where it doesn’t. “I’m always holding my breath above my scar, “ I tell him. Jeurg says that my breath patterns made sense because when a person breathes, the diaphragm presses on the abdominal cavity. I would have experienced pressure, he explains, and after the surgery, this caused pain. Also, he says that this running away, so-to-speak, of the breath is a survival response. “You wanted to save yourself. If you see a cinder block falling that will likely hit your head, you jump out of the way.” My breath jumped away from my abdomen and never returned. He slides his palms under the middle of my back. Breath fills my abdomen, a mound that gently rises and falls.

Early on in this process, I happen to see a photo in the newspaper. Surgeons in blue caps and gowns and white masks surround the pink globe of a uterus pulled to the outside of a woman’s body. One doctor grasps it with his gloved hands, staring intensely into it as if studying a crystal ball, in which the future of the world swirls. According to the caption, he is determining the position of a 32-week-old baby in order to correct surgically—in utero—a life-threatening condition, resulting from a missing diaphragm. What is the baby going through, I wonder.  Has the fetus been given anesthesia?  How will this affect her life? Maybe the parents and surgeons believe, as did my mother, that a baby will not feel or remember an operation, that the experience will be a void, a blank space.

I often find a reason for not going to breath class. Tracy, though an intermediate student, insists on accompanying me to the beginner’s classes. She knows that I may not go otherwise. She ought to know; we have been together for two decades. In class, we sit on stools in a wide circle. To begin, Juerg asks everyone to sit quietly and feel breath movement. “Where in your body do you feel the breath move you?”  I don’t have a body, is my usual response, but I can’t say that out loud. I settle down a bit and typically realize that I’m holding my breath. It’s ok to breathe now. You won’t die, I tell myself. Breath begins to flow more deeply. I feel breath movement in my chest, but none in my abdomen. It’s as if there’s a metal pole of rebar wrapped around my middle just under my breasts. If the breath goes there, I’ll die. Thank god no one can hear me thinking.

Juerg asks each of us to report our findings. “I feel breath flowing nicely in my upper back,” one woman says. “I feel breath in my knees,” says another. “I feel breath movement in the backs of my shins.” What are they talking about, I wonder, annoyed. My turn: “I feel breath in my upper chest. I don’t feel my abdomen at all.” Juerg nods and smiles a knowing little smile.

Excerpt from “Sponges,” Chapter Six

I am beginning to understand the complexities of evolution. Altruism, according to biologist Loren Eisely, is a force in nature that determines survival and, therefore, has its own validity in natural selection. In his book The Starthrower, he discusses a profound encounter, which opened his eyes to this phenomenon. Up at five a.m. one day and walking on the beach, he saw a man whom he subsequently referred to as the Starthrower. Each day, Eisley learned, this man rose before dawn so that he could scour the beach before others arrived. He would do this in order to save those starfish that had been stranded by the tide, throwing them back into the ocean as I had done with the upended horseshoe crabs as a girl. In this way, Eisely claims, altruism influences the survival of a species.

Anthropologist Jane Goodall also pays homage to the power of altruism with regard to species’ viability. She discovered in her observation of chimps that the fight or flight mode is only a part of what informs the behavior of an animal:

“From an evolutionary perspective, individuals form very close family bonds first.For a mother or older brother to be compassionate and caring to the infants, for example, benefits the family—makes it stronger, more members survive . . . When a member of the group is altruistic toward another member who is suffering, it’s beneficial to the group as a whole . . . So our altruism probably extended as our brains became more complex.” Altruism, a determining factor of evolution, has shaped our world. It certainly has molded mine.

My scar is a mark of altruism. Those who helped to save me were motivated by compassion. They recognized my parents’ plight and took action to alleviate suffering. This humanitarian effort moved a whole series of events forward. Dr. Constad, the pediatrician, diagnosed the problem; a surgeon was summoned from New York City; nurses fed me every day through a stomach tube and monitored my progress; my father and mother scraped up the money to pay for the operation and devoted their days to my recovery; my aunt and uncle cared for my brother after I came home from the hospital. The stitches of the scar are like so many arms reaching out. The scar is a mark of love.