29. Child of Fire and Earthquake
She rolls her eyes when I call her that, but it did get ridiculous. Two and a half months after the house burned down, seven and a half months into my pregnancy, as if we hadn’t gotten the message yet, the earthquake came and half destroyed the hospital where I was going to give birth. The brand-new labor and delivery wing with the new family birthing rooms with dim lighting and birthing tubs had to be cordoned off and closed down, they had to move everybody into the old postpartum wing, they squeezed us all in together, there were people on gurneys in the hallways.
The earthquake hit at 4:32 am. It shook so hard the house roared like a beast. It shook like a man grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you. They say it "had a duration of approximately 10–20 seconds, and its peak ground acceleration of 1.8g (16.7 m/s2) was the highest ever instrumentally recorded in an urban area in North America."
Nothing compared to what’s coming, but still.
And all I could think was, I'm so glad we're here together.
When it stopped we ran out of the house like escaping the belly of a monster. We stood outside in the pre-dawn chill, terror rising off us like steam, lights blacked out all over Los Angeles, black sky lit by a million stars.
And all I could think was it's so beautiful.
And I'm so glad we're here together.
And it’s so beautiful.
But let me go back.
The night of the fire we had checked into a hotel, laughing, punchy, I won’t say hysterical, but yeah. The hotel front desk clerk thought we were out of our minds. That last weekend with my parents, my mother believing my father was her father, believing he was trying to kill her, weeping and begging me to save her from him, had been so harrowing that the fire came like an afterthought. I had nothing left for the fire. It was like ok, fine, whatever. We saw the smoke; we left; we waited; we huddled; we watched the news.
We could see the glow of the flames, twenty miles away.
For three days we didn’t know if our house had burned. You couldn’t get back in yet, the roads were closed, there were spotfires everywhere, everywhere. We had some hope because we had seen it on TV, the helicopter flying over, the flowers blooming in the yard. But still we didn’t know.
Finally David went up, alone; I stayed with Janie. He called. It’s gone.
Everything is gone. Gone.
Here’s what it does to my brain; I have to stop and think: which was gone first? Which did I wait three days for, suspended, hoping and not hoping, before learning that everything was gone, first? My baby? Or my house? Which — when? Even after all these years, I have to stop and think about it. It moves around in my mind, it slips.
Gently we told Janie.
She looked at us, solemnly, said nothing. Then asked:
Did my dolls burn?
That pierced me. Gently we said yes.
She pressed her lips together. Her eyes turned to fog.
She said nothing. Nothing.
Her home, her dolls, joined the unspoken things, the unwept things. True to her lineage, she placed them there fiercely, unrelenting.
Psychologists wrote articles in the newspapers about how to help children cope with the fires. Help them express their emotion, process the trauma. Have them draw a picture. Tell a story. Write a little book. We got paper, markers. We used quiet voices.
Janie looked at us like we were out of our fucking minds.
She turned away. She said nothing.
I took her to the toy store to buy a doll. She didn’t really want it. We got some stuff anyway. They were collecting donations for the fire victims. I laughed bitterly at that: the lady who worked there was shocked. It's ridiculous, I thought. People like us didn't need free toys. People like us had credit cards, bank accounts, jobs, insurance. People like us would be fine. People like us were always fine. But all around us, everywhere, everywhere, were people who were truly homeless. All around us were mothers with children living on the streets, mothers with children fleeing across deserts and borders, mothers with children in battered women’s shelters, in hospitals, in war zones, in refugee camps.
All around us, everywhere, a bigger world, a bigger fire.
Leaving, I couldn’t find my car in the underground parking garage, I completely forgot where I parked it. We wandered through the gray depths, no idea where we were going.
After the fire, when my mother got home, she began to call me. All the emotion she had buried for all these years, all the passion contained by the crystalline geometric architecture of her mind, here it was, now, at last, flooding over the phone lines, flying across the continent, burning the wires. She wept, she begged, she told me my father had been replaced by an imposter, that he was evil, she begged me to save her. She told me she loved me so much, she wanted me so badly, she pleaded, weeping, come to me.
Come to me.
I held the phone to my jaw. Everything was rolling out from the center. Everything was emptying, nothing could get in.
But now my baby was moving, moving so much it alarmed me. She was pushing, rolling, tumbling. Elbows and knees were everywhere, everywhere, she was struggling, she was speaking the only language she had, trying to reach me the only way that she could. She could feel my soul leaving my body, she could feel it slipping into the fog, and she was begging me, pleading with me.
Stay with me. Stay with me.
I did not understand her language at first. I called Dr. Hussein, asked him if it was possible for a baby to move too much, and I don’t remember what he said, but I remember thinking: I need to calm the fuck down.
I need to calm the fuck down.
I tried meditation, I tried breathing. I tried walking, music, laughter. In the end I fell to my knees, I wept and prayed, though I did not know how to pray.
I prayed my mother would find some peace. I prayed she would understand that I needed to stay, to stay with my little ones, my living ones.
I needed to leave her behind, and stay.
I’ve come to see a mother’s body as a bridge; generation after generation, we bring our children out into this broken world, carry them to our farthest edge, then lay our bodies down for them to cross.
We’re so far from home; everything is off, wrong; “unsustainable,” as they say. We are lost in a ten thousand year storm, a ten thousand year war. We can’t go on this way. We know it in our bones. Wherever it is we must go, we won’t get there in this lifetime. The distance is too far; the crevasses too deep.
So we lay ourselves down.
Our children trip on our bumps and splinters and cracks and flaws. They bleed on our sharp edges; they fall through the rot of our weakness. We hurt them, sometimes badly. And yet we urge them on, on. Make what you can of it; make what you can of the good I can give you, learn from the bad and don’t die of it, please: whatever you do, don’t die of it.
That's all I can do now for my mother. Did she leave me unsoothed, self-loathing, my unlicked rat’s heart too restless, too unsettled, too fervent? Yes, of course she did. How could it have been otherwise?
But in the end, after everything, the birth was beautiful.
It seems implausible, but there it was.
We found a little house to rent. We bought some clothes and shampoo and toothbrushes and we moved in.
We walked to the park with Janie every day. We played in the sand, we poured sand through loose fingers into mountains, we placed sticks, rocks, bits of dead leaf. We made mountains and trees and houses. We pushed her on the swing, she sailed through the air. At night we curled up warm together.
As my pregnancy approached full term I read about birth. I read about home birth, non-medicalized birth, about birth in other cultures. I read about women who give birth alone in the forest, women who give birth held up by their mothers and grandmothers and aunts. Not because any of this was a possibility for me, with my history, but because I wanted to understand it, I wanted to know what was possible. I needed to know. Comically, the point that finally made it clear to me was where someone said, imagine trying to have a bowel movement in a strange room with strangers watching you. And bingo, like that, I got it. To give birth was so intimate, so deep, that to do it in a strange place, among strangers, went against everything that your body needed. And just like that, I saw it: how I had left my body before Eva was born. Not just after they took her away; but before. I was in the grayness, the fog, from the beginning.
So just like that, I saw the beauty of it: to give birth in your own home, deep inside your own body, all your souls inside you, your own people around you.
That was not for me, not in this lifetime. Too much had happened.
But deep inside, I began to understand that there was really nothing wrong with my body. I was not marked out by the universe. The wolves could be soothed, befriended. Dr. Hussein said I could use a daily aspirin to prevent clots instead of heparin injections; it was my choice, but his instinct was that it would be okay. I had a funny conversation with my new rheumatologist about it. We went over my symptoms, my blood tests. I had five of the nine symptoms necessary for a diagnosis of lupus, three of the blood factors. We talked about monitoring, we talked about statistics and risk factors. But then she did a thing I will never forget. She looked me in the eye, she held my gaze, and said, I believe that you will not get lupus.
I believe that you will not get lupus.
She said it like a benediction; a blessing.
I was not a person who would always get caught.
I deserved to be happy.
Dr. Emilia Saroyan, grandchild of survivors of the Armenian genocide, carried their hereditary autoinflammatory disease, Mediterranean fever, that haunts the generations, one after the next, carrying on the deathwork of their ancestral tormenters. Breaking down bodies, twisting and torturing them, setting them on fire with pain and fever. Why is that, why is that, why is that, her mind restlessly asked her, that the hunted, the tormented, become the hunters, the tormenters, of their own bodies, their own blood? It would be another twenty years before the link between trauma and autoimmune disease would finally be made clear in formal studies, before the mechanisms of epigenetics would begin to be better understood. But doctors and nurses who knew their patients could see it, sense it, smell it, long before this. In the absence of conclusive data, the small-s scientific mind opens itself to a world of small details, half-seen patterns, subliminal observations, preverbal hunches. It shapes itself into an open thing, a receptivity, a question: why is that, that the autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, systemic lupus erythematosus, arise in abused children and women, in the trapped and the captive, in whole persecuted populations?
Science had not yet found the link, but she knew it was there, they all knew it. And she knew that if she was going to have this disease she would never make it through medical school, and she knew in a flash that she must be well, be whole, be strong, be life, and that she must be a doctor, a healer, bringing life back to her people, and all the people haunted by similar ghosts.
And yet she had discovered that Western medicine mostly lay powerless before this force that unfurls itself down through the generations, this worm in the bodies of a people that eats them slowly from the inside out. The tools they had were so crude. Steroids, immunosuppressants, anticoagulants, anti-inflammatory drugs that hack their way through the body, laying waste to far more than their intended targets, like machetes used to pick wildflowers in a meadow.
There is a gene for Mediterranean fever, unlike other autoimmune diseases, that runs through many populations in the Mediterranean region, Armenians, Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, Greeks, Turks, Arabs. And yet — it’s not so simple, so mechanical. The disease appears and disappears, even in those who have the gene, it turns its haywire inflammation on and off, no one knows why or how, but those who watch will begin to see.
Rage and pain in the house reinforces the mutation. The father who makes you cower in fear, the mother whose words stab like knives. Mirroring amplifies it. The bodymind of the child mirrors and molds itself around a thing that lives in the bodymind of the parents, a thing whose origins may be lost in time, a generation ago, a hundred years ago, four hundred years, a thousand, but that keeps happening, in body after body, like widening ripples in a lake, like endlessly repeating echoes of gunshots, of whip lashes, of cries of terror and pain.
This wasn’t a disease, it was an injury, as surely as a car crash is an injury, but in this case it was an injury to a whole genetic lineage, a whole intergenerational thread of life. Like an intricate cathedral half demolished by bombs, the delicate crystalline structure of life ripped apart, collapsing in slow motion shock waves down through time. Her patients were bodies on a battlefield, casualties of an ongoing war.
And yet
And yet
And yet for every power of destruction in the body there was a power of healing. The forces were meant to balance themselves; millions of years of evolution had built them for balance, and as impossibly precarious as it seemed, these billions of molecules and cells were made to speak to each other, made for an intimate unhearable conversation with life, made to collaborate in such a perfect delicate crystalline dance that they could keep saying life life life, that they could keep life flowing, unfurling, blossoming, instead of crashing in the crazed collision pile-up catastrophes that she saw in the bodies of her patients.
And yet
And yet the power of life was so strong, its ability to continue through so much opposition, its will to continue — this was the thing. This was the thing. And when you could find that vein of life, when you could tap into it, align with it, ride its energy instead of opposing it, it could carry you through the years like a river runner is carried past rocks and snags, onward, always onward, until finally the stream slows and carries you, gently, and lays you down, gently, on a gentle shore.
How to mobilize that magic was the question. This patient’s previous rheumatologist had told her that she had perhaps a fifty percent chance of having a healthy baby. He had said it like a curse, like a mark, scrawled on her body to pre-justify himself in the event of failure. Defective. Warranty invalidated. Like a man who uses a woman’s body as a human shield, he marked her body to protect himself.
But every once in a while, with a patient, she would get the feeling. The feeling that life was still strong in this one, and that descending into the dark labyrinth of tests and drugs and side effects and complications was the wrong direction. Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate. The tests and drugs were necessary sometimes. Sometimes the delicate structures of life were smashed so badly, crushed so deeply, they were unrepairable, and all you could do was mitigate the pain, slow the unraveling. But sometimes, you felt, this one could live, this body could still say life, and your patient just needed to know that. She needed to feel it, like a sweetness in the bone, and to learn to follow that feeling.
So my rheumatologist did a strange thing. She told me a story about herself. It turned out that when she was in medical school she had had a severe autoimmune condition, her body ruthlessly attacking itself, giving her debilitating pain and fevers. And finally, when she felt she couldn't bear it any longer, when she was at the end of her rope, exhausted with pain and fatigue, she reached a point where she saw it: if I’m going to have this disease, I will not have the life I want to live.
And she knew, in that moment, that she wanted her life.
And the disease went away. Just like that. Within days she was better, and stayed better.
In her years of practice she had seen it happen more than once. She explained to me that when you really look at the science (not the Modern Science, but the slow, patient, attentive, humble science) you realize that ultimately it is hubris to think you can command and control a homeostatic system like blood clotting in a mechanical way, with a drug that attempts a mechanical cure. Because the body’s responses are legion, and paradoxical. At least eleven factors that we know of now involved in clotting unfold in a mysterious cascade, a balancing of forces, a force for flow and a force that blocks the flow, one after another, a dialectic, a dialogue, the body in an intimate unhearable conversation with itself, with life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. And when you try to intervene, when you try to control the process, when you think you can dam or un-dam it at your will, it’s like thinking you can control the weather, it doesn’t work that way, and your body like a river finds a workaround, the force that drives the water through the rocks, a thousand pathways, a thousand rivulets, a roaring flood that drives my red blood.
And if blood is complex, the immune system is more so, it is an ecosystem, a world, a wildness, a web of relations and protections so intricate that trying to direct it or restrain it is like trying to direct or restrain the wind or the tides.
So in the end, will the baby live or will the baby die is not a mechanical question but a blessing, a balance, an alignment with life, a running of the river.
And she looked me in the eye and said, I believe that you will not get lupus.
She said it with a kindness, a gentleness.
A blessing.
And in that moment I knew it would be true.
Fuck it, I said then, fuck this shit. Fuck this self-loathing, fuck it to fucking hell. And I let it fall. It fell from my shoulders like weight, like rain.
And Dr. Hussein said the baby looked strong, and if we induced a week early I could go for a vaginal birth after caesarean. And so, despite all the trappings of a high-risk hospital birth in a half-destroyed hospital, despite the crowded halls and cramped post-partum room used as a delivery room, despite the IV, despite the pitocin, the monitor, the planned epidural in case of an emergency c-section, despite all that, despite everything, it was, for me, a beautiful birth. My labor nurses, miraculously, were both trained midwives, one from the Philippines, one from Ireland, and they knew how to help me, they rubbed my shoulders, they rigged the gear so I could sit, so I could walk, they held my hand, they helped me through. The anesthesiologist knew how a woman could birth her baby, she knew how to set the epidural dose low so I could still feel, so I could push, she knew how to help me wait for the crest of the contraction, to wait for the wave like a surfer, and to slowly build up my push so it merged with the crest of the wave and rode that power smoothly. Despite everything, despite everything, my body knew how to ride that wave and smoothly move my baby out into the world. And the pediatric nurse knew how a baby could stay warm with her mother, she knew how to bring the baby close to the heart of her mother, how the babies who stayed with their mothers were different from the nursery babies, she said, they were bright-eyed, alert, quiet, calm, looking and looking with bright dark eyes as though they had known you for a hundred years. The post-partum nurse knew how the mother's heart and the baby's heart could connect, she knew how they could synchronize, she knew how they could comfort and heal one another, she knew.