A Circular State
Cathy Valk Fisher
In the year after my daughter was born, we had a quick succession of three homes, mantled and come undone. This was because of the pandemic. You might even say there were four, if you consider the circumstances of my daughter’s birth, which involved a string of unexpected places and events that in the aggregate suggested birth, and by extension life, happened by unequivocal accident. There had been no nesting, though this had nothing to do with the pandemic. The baby had suddenly simply arrived, warm and pulsing with uneven breath, like an aqueous creature that, by matters of tides and of chance, beached on human shores.
Her father had missed labor entirely. How had this happened so early? We were not even home.
The hospital had given her the status of pre-term, though it didn’t seem to mean much. She claimed discharge without visiting the NICU, as if questioning the relevance of timing to a being certain of its arrival. To be early is a relative state.
We left the hospital for a place that was clean, a one-bedroom containing almost nothing of ours, save for a stack of clothing and a bag of toiletries.
My daughter’s cheeks and belly were round and holding her offered the satisfying sense of cradling a warm football that had been unexpectedly tossed in my arms. There was the reflex of an instinct I didn’t know I’d had: catch now.
As it goes with what is unexpectedly embraced, retrospect changes the view. The circumstances of her arrival now strike me as being, rather than accidental, by design: welcome to a new home that is not home, as if portentous of the years to come.
What circumstances are necessary to make a home?
It is an act of stubborn belief to make home of an unrecognizable place. I bought olive oil and salt and placed flowers in a jar that once held tomato sauce.
Though what we needed, it would turn out, was each other.
My torso became first resting place of sorts, because the one-bedroom without our things also did not have a crib, and I could not summon the will to assemble the portable bassinet. My daughter spent most of the day wrapped onto my torso by cloth that hugged her cheeks to my chest. At night she moved onto her father, where she slept belly-down, rising and falling with his breath while he watched sports until too late.
We had, she was here to say, a home in skin.
This was new. After thirty-four years of having been indoctrinated in the insufficiencies of the female state, suddenly I was not only enough, but the easiest place, the place of needs being met. Becoming her first home brought me closer to mine.
We eventually got on an airplane and flew across the Atlantic to return to a home we recognized for having things we’d accumulated: inherited furniture that had once belonged in other homes; framed photographs, books, and street art that traced a path through place and time; memories.
There was so much turbulence on that flight across the Atlantic that a meal service was attempted and cancelled as liquids spilled onto passengers too afraid to remove the aluminum foil from plastic dishware. There was no standing, not even for the bathroom. When we landed in a new country I was relieved to be on ground, though this ground had borders that would soon indefinitely close.
My daughter, now five, asks in passing, “What is COVID?”. We speak about bugs and keeping each other safe, though I will one day explain it was also a state of being, one involving compulsive hand sanitation and second-guessed machinations through the day (who, how close, did they cough?), plus an irrational belief that the world would return to what we’d once known of it.
It was a state of being in which few things were recognizable, including our faces behind masks and the places for feeling free. Coincidentally, maternal life was similarly alien. I recognized none of it, not my breasts engorged with milk and not my perineum, held together by stitches, not my new inclination to cross the street when a stranger approached on the sidewalk and not the bottles of disinfectant I turned to throughout day as if in silent prayer to a god I didn’t believe in: protect us, if you’re there, from all we do not know. I sent this prayer up democratically, to both the goddess of mothers and the goddess of everyday life. They seemed to be different beings, though I needed them each. Grace me with something I know.
Nothing felt easy, though my family, in its succession of homes and the company of each other, did have it particularly easy.
Circles that still tolerate remembrance of pandemic years will offer competing ideas, all equally plausible and also unbelievable, telling of laboratory accident, evolutionary mishap, manmade virus, cross-specie contagion. What, in the end, constitutes the accidental, and how aleatory can matters of design be?
In that first year after borders shut, we played house roulette, changing homes with the impulse of a dice toss – could landing be somehow recognizable?
We had started in a traditional Lisbon neighborhood, in an apartment with shiny tiles the color of ripe cherries that was reminiscent of a fire station but had actually once been a schoolhouse, outside of which – when we could still walk outside – we would step onto cobblestoned sidewalks, often soiled by dogs, hostilely slippery in the spring rain, and in any case too narrow for a stroller.
When it became clear we would not be breathing freely on this sidewalk or in the apartment corridor for a period that was indefinite, we left. We rented a one-bedroom apartment one hour east of the red schoolhouse, in a place considered countryside, where we felt less trapped but saw more snakes. Here freedom depended on the wind, because in the house we could not open the windows on a still day for the infestation of flies that would swarm indoors, then linger on coffee cups by day and pillows by night, so we spent hot days sealed inside, sweltering but free of flies. To be near the baby, we slept on a mattress that we put on the floor beside a floor-to-ceiling west-facing window with no curtains. We woke in view of an olive tree and at night slept in the traces of an orange sunset. This the backdrop to my daughter’s first tooth, the day she pushed up to sit, her daily waking to world.
This move to the countryside happened with one hand, because on the day before we moved, I slipped while running by the Tagus river and smashed my right hand after tripping on a train track fallen out of use. I limped home with glass and gravel in my palm but with spirits high on a sense of now this. The hand became dark and intimidatingly large, as if a plastic glove inflated to burst. I did not see a doctor, because hospitals had COVID, and we’d been told they were exclusive to emergencies. Did my swollen hand count? It was hard to tell. That afternoon I put clothing into cardboard boxes with my left hand, my right saran-wrapped to an icepack and secured vertically onto my chest with a scarf.
That hand spent weeks in shades of color I’d never seen on skin. My daughter was six months’ old and had started eating what people call solids, which was really pureed fruit, which I spooned into her mouth with a dominant hand that was no longer dominant, but rather, moved as articulately as a fly swatter.
Eventually, there was less pain. Eventually, I could write. Eventually, I wore rings. It eventually almost healed.
When our countryside rental no longer was sustainable, for flies and other reasons, we moved again, to another remote place, one in which we were irrationally happy, though we moved out soon later, for a place that was central and shinier but in which somehow everyone was sad. As we were moving into the bright sad central place, I smashed my left hand, such that this move into a new home also happened with one hand. This time I knew it was an emergency, because I had run my left hand through a food processor while making meat sauce, severing two nerve endings and a tendon, which still have not fully healed, but which have come a long way. Plus I broke a bone, which is mostly better but now crooked at the joint, all of which happened as we settled into the shiny house that happened to be around the corner from cherry-red schoolhouse my daughter had first known.
As if saying: Home is a circular state. The curves can hurt. Remove the rings. One day it might heal, or almost. One day there will be recognition. Can you find the window with the orange sunset? Place your mattress there.
Bio-note
Cathy Valk Fisher writes non-fiction, poetry and children’s books, and her work gravitates around subjects of body, health, politics and culture, often at points of intersection. She is writing a book of lyric non-fiction that explores chronic illness, grief, motherhood and disability. Her writing has been published in Two-Thirds North, Gulf Coast Journal, The Mays Anthology, Hypaethral Magazine, Touchstone Literary Journal and Bloomberg News. Valk is trained in facilitating writing-for-wellbeing and has a particular interest in medical communities. Valk is Chilean-American and writes in English and Spanish, and her former career is in international law. She lives in Portugal. You can learn more about her work at www.valkfisher.com