Bodywork

When I got pregnant with my daughter, 25 years ago, I was a skinny post-adolescent hippie with long dreaded hair. A womanly shape had thus far eluded me. I was as tall and straight as a beanpole, with budlike breasts and a "negative ass," as one boyfriend had put it. So I was happy when my hips began to spread and my chest began to inflate. I finally felt like a girl.

During that pregnancy, my daughter's father, David, and I traveled from Key West, Florida, to the Russian River Valley in California in a red VW Beetle. We slept in the back, which began to feel increasingly cramped as my stomach grew.

In my sixth month, we finally settled in a cabin that lacked a working well, that is, running water. With the dry California summer hitting temperatures over 100 degrees, I did battle with the heat during my last trimester. Every afternoon, I'd trek on foot down the mountain on the dusty dirt road into the valley to cool off in an irrigation ditch.

Everything was raw for me during my first pregnancy. My body was bony and sharp-edged. My stomach practically grew out into a point. We lived close to a subsistence lifestyle. David dug fence post holes to support us. I baked bread and drank raw goat's milk. When my time came, I squatted in a trailer with the lay midwives, my dog and cats as labor coaches. Jade was born by the light of a full moon. Her father cut the cord.

After Jade's birth, my body never returned to its pre-pregnancy form. My hips were childbirth-tested, and my ass became "positive." After 20 months of breast feeding, I was no longer nubile. My belly never regained it's taut teenaged form. As a mom, my body became strong but also cushiony.

Two and a half decades later, to my surprise, I became pregnant again. This time, I was middle-aged. Suffering from a chronic illness, surviving cancer, and being 45, the last thing I expected was new motherhood. But it came, like a warm breeze in December.

I attribute the surprising healthiness of this pregnancy to the fact that I'd been practicing yoga for several years in my 40s. Yoga changed my body and my life. The contraction, stretch, and compression practice in a highly heated room sent blood and oxygen to all the right places, including, I guess, my ovaries.

My belly ballooned though in this pregnancy. Jericho was big, but my belly looked as if it contained twins. Every day on my way to court, I confronted packs of strangers in the elevators of the Criminal Justice Center in downtown Philadelphia. My belly was the main topic of conversation, loosening the tongues of total strangers.

I never liked the men who would say things like, "Wow! Looks like you're ready to pop!" Or the coworkers who would shout across the hall, "Oh my God!" and point to my belly as I got huge. Or posit, "You look really uncomfortable." And they were right. I was uncomfortable. And the childbirth was a lot less far out than Jade's. Instead of a trailer, I bore Jericho at University of Pennsylvania Hospital in the company of a team of doctors and nurses. It wasn't a natural childbirth. I was the happy recipient of an epidural.

But I felt proud of the fact that I pushed out my big baby and didn't have to have a Caesarian, as everyone thought. "The old girl still works," I said to my doctor, in a fit of pride. We all were proud and happy as we stared at the perfect little miracle baby. All those female parts that are so labeled and scrutinized and judged and demeaned and fantasized about. They all just come to this.