The Middle 36. My first home

An ode to my mother's body

I held the hand of my first home, the other day.

My fingers danced over hers, massaging lotion around and over her slightly arthritic knuckles. I noticed how their knobbiness was reminiscent of my grandmother’s hands. Hands I once held, too. The grief for my grandmother can arise in such small ways, sometimes.

I hiked through and traversed the well-worn map of veins on the back of her hand, mindful of how they once carried blood throughout her body to nourish mine growing within her. I massaged her palms, and considered how they once rested on the belly I inhabited. As my hands intertwined with my mother’s, I thought about how the first place I lived was her.

Our first home is a body.

mine & my mother’s hands

It is not the place we come home to after the hospital, the constructed walls and rooms in which we experience childhood. No, it is the body in which we grow.

This is a place of sacred connectedness. In my mother’s womb, my soul inhabited hers. They dwelled together in the womb that was my first sanctuary. Our spirits intertwined as my body developed, one cell to trillions. My guts grew in hers as I inherited the stories of my ancestors. They wrote themselves on my bones, etchings of protection and trauma and strength and faith.

She allowed her body to stretch and contort to make room for me, her fourth and final child. She bears the markings of my first dwelling place. Her cesarean scar an altar of remembrance of the ways her body became a safe abode to nurture life.

This beautiful, enlarging, extending, creating act.

A hated scar.

What blasphemy is it that the same body that gives life becomes a place of hatred? That the stretch-marked skin is seen as somehow wrong when it is those very marks that gave room for life? That the skin in which I lived and then rested upon is too loose? That even this scar could be interpreted as the body’s failure to deliver as it “should”? When, really, it is a monument to the gift of life my mother gave me?

Our world benefits from our self-hatred, for a body that is bad is a body that can be bought.

Injectables. Mushroom powders. Retinol and green drinks.
Stretch mark creams. Weight loss gummies.
More protein. Less carbs. Intermittent fasting.
Bounce back. Filter it. Fix it. Shrink it.

When we forget our bodies are already enough, the world profits.

And yet, these bodies that are policed and often hated are the very location where life is created and also experienced. Pleasure, pain, and connection all co-exist in this very flesh. Without a body, we are nothing. This is the place our soul dwells.

The body is not a problem to be fixed. It is a home.

As I cared for my mother’s body, I was struck by the beauty of it. The age on her skin, the markings of sun and life and wrinkles of laughter. The scars that mark my initial dwelling feel sacred to me, holy. I consider them with reverence.

My first home was my mother’s body. It was her gift to me. My second is, and will forever be, my own.

May I always treat it as a home.

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I have been blessed to have a beautiful relationship with my mother. I know that this is not the case for everyone who may read this, and that some of these words could stir up feelings of grief. If this is the case, I am sending care your way. May you feel more embodied and whole in the home that is your body today.

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Hey, you. Yeah, you. Thank you for reading this. I don’t know where you are right now. Maybe you’re in a grocery store line-up, maybe you’re on the couch. Wherever you are, I’m sending a bit of love to you. Giving my words your attention is a gift I don’t hold lightly. Thank you.