The disappearing mothers of victorian baby photography
They blend in, scaffolding the still wobbly child in the foreground who despite their efforts is a little blurry, unable to stay still the length of time the shutter needs to capture the light. An aura of movement glows around the babies’ downy heads. Like the glow coming off infant jesus. Like a visual stutter. With their layered dresses and glassy eyes, they are enchanting, so you might not notice the mound of human topography behind them unless someone tells you and then you can’t stop seeing them, cheap ghost costumes the wrong color with no eyes cut out. Mother-shaped masses of fabric, their phantom hands occasionally protruding. If they paid the man to expose the film with a flash that left the air saltpeter heavy, to watch the image paint itself in the chemicals, even added the upcharge to tint the sepia cheeks pink, dot the eyes with blue, why not just be in the photo uncloaked? Were they still paunchy or already heavy with the next one? No matter, now they are stilled forever in a phantom embrace, trying and failing to execute the impossible sleight of hand of motherhood that is caring for your children and disappearing. Their presence is more obvious especially to those of us with our own phantom arms, ghost thighs, residual limbs, we were unable to crop out, like in the one photo with Santa where my child is obviously terrified and I’m clutching him from the back desperate to make it look like this isn’t all staged and crumbling, trying like always to make my scaffold invisible or at least inconspicuous, to create a fiction just long enough to capture the light.
Phoenix
To bear our universe she was ripped open and stitched together again and again, rendering a glossy plus sign across her abdomen made by subtraction. And with each new child, each new slice along the midsection, the unmet need widened like a chasm, the hollow to fill got deeper. And it was dark down there, like how deep in the ocean colors disappear, one by one. Yellow is the last to go, and then it is just gray. And each time at the bottom of that dark pit, unable to really see what she was working with, she built a new world out of nothing, like how universes are born from the energy shrapnel of an exploding star. When we couldn’t hide anymore, when they tricked my little brother into opening the door and rent-a-center repossessed the couches, the end tables, she shaped new furniture from the ashes from all the burned down futures, singed by impossible tautologies of bills and no money. The ashes had to be barely moist (add too much water and they go right through your fingers, a sieve), so she was very careful, moving a little here and there, like the magnetic fuzz drawing toy where you tease the slate sparks into an image. She shaped the heaps of spent carbon here into a studio apartment, here into a car that may not have heat but runs. She made nothing into noodles, an off-brand backpack from Dollar General, a shared bedroom with no door, just a mattress on the floor. Again and again she made us a home out of remains. Where necessary for structural integrity, she added bits of her flesh. Despite the divots this left, she was a miracle of lipstick and feathered hair, leading us around the ashen world she made, looking back at us whispering two important reminders: if you don’t tell them, they won’t know, and that she brought us into the world, and she could take us out.
Offerings
- Kin-dling
In the animal kingdom, some species use a surplus strategy: ants, fish, coral. They spew tens of thousands of tiny pearls of possible life. They are playing the numbers, acknowledging that only enough survive to make the next link in the chain. The others become food, scaffolding, carbon. One out of 100,000 will emerge, crawl over its sibling corpses, stand on their shoulders, ribcages, legs, tentacles to make its way, to make everybody’s way. When in protest monks drench themselves in gasoline and light a match, is it the same instinct? They present their limbs, face, torso as fuel to sustain others. Is that how they stand calm, completely still as their robes already fire-colored, now aglow and growing, dance, whipping into the sky, trying to free the body, to offer it to something bigger, praying it will accept?
II. Natural Causes
Once they reproduce, mother octopuses never eat again. They hover over their thousands of eggs, glistening like gelatinous jewels, and stay stone still, for months, ever alert, growing less and less voluminous. Why do they starve to brood, to breed? Egg guarding is a full time job, defenseless and delicious as eggs are, but even handed an already lifeless fish, mother Octopi reject it. In captivity, they turned the hunger strike button off and female octopuses lived long lives after they have copied themselves, occupied the same tank as their descendants, finally dying of old age. So this intentional wasting isn’t essential, just an efficient adaptation: what use could they be after fulfilling their duty? So they fast to death. Shapeshifters already, muscles that can make themselves into anything, they gradually convert to flaccid goo, and then, finally, are torn apart by the predators they eluded pre-maternity. Sharks are messy eaters so little bits of their bodies fall like slow-motion snow, to be a meal for whatever is waiting with an open mouth. Often they are dead before the eggs hatch, but sometimes the barely visible newborns glide past the mother’s body shrapnel, baby and mother the same size now, identical to the naked eye, but for the way they are moving in opposite directions.
III. To make a path through the thicket
I must pull from an almost empty reservoir, my nails scratching into the sides, clawing to get any last bits. Then refill it from nothing, a magic trick, a quarter from behind the ear, a rain dance. I have to make weather, pull the moisture from the sky, desperate for it to be enough, and in the end, I will be drained, spent, a time-lapse photography version of a tree, in the final frames being digested by fungi, microorganisms, my hollow shell a habitat. But, nearby a seedling will have taken root against the odds, will nurse off the organic matter the rain leaches from my body, will take advantage of the break in the canopy I have left, and rise toward the light.
Marigolds
One day after she had come to live with me, I found my mother smoking and tending our flowers on the back porch. Her fingertips coated in nature’s cheeto dust. She was pinching off the heads of dead marigolds to make me homemade seed packets for the future–each little strand is a seed she told me as twisted the buds to separate them–which was shocking but somehow obvious too, they were made out of nothing a dense packing of thin threads, how else could they reproduce? We had together at the grocery store bought a few of the gold and yellow flowers for our porch planters, a little grab at beauty and some had inevitably dried out, and now she was making a nest egg of future beauty out of them with her florid handwriting labeling the shade of flower and the packed on date. As a kid we’d lived in apartments, and cars, single floors of a house, never anywhere long until we had to get out, sometimes because our things were on the lawn. Sometimes, I had to live with others because where she was staying was even less forgiving. Sometimes I didn’t know where she was. When together we were surrounded by a pool of concrete or patchy grass. Never anywhere where decorative flora was a consideration. So I never saw her plant anything, watch it grow, certainly not preserve its fertility for some future where we could make even more beautiful things. I didn’t know that she understood the earth’s machinations, or where she had learned them, or if it was something programmed in her bones, but now this knowledge emerged, preserved and dormant through all of that just waiting for conditions to be hospitable, like these strands if I plant them (and I never did mom-they were crushed to dust in a junk drawer, I’m so sorry now when we would all give anything to see you alive in some way) and if suddenly there is enough light, water, and fertile ground they will stumble miraculously from the earth. Who knows what else was locked away inside of her waiting until the coast was clear?