Wandering Womb

The etymological root of the word “matter” is mater, Latin for “mother”

May 05, 2024

“I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour.” —Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Wandering womb was the belief that a displaced uterus was the cause of many medical pathologies in women. The belief is first attested in the medical texts of ancient Greece, but it persisted in European academic medicine and popular thought for centuries.” —Wikipedia

The word “essay” comes from the French word essayer, which means “to try” or to “attempt.”

Wander

Walking is one of the great pleasures of living in the city. When I need something from the pharmacy or the grocery store—bandaids, tea, oranges—I walk the few blocks to and from my apartment building door to pick them up. To visit friends who live across the park, I walk, or if they live in a neighborhood a few miles away, I walk to the train or bus, and ride the rest of the way. I love the shifting personalities of each neighborhood block, the way the storefronts changed based on the people who live there, and the shifting styles of clothing and hair and speech of the people chatting on corners. I love the changes in architecture, the way the light hits buildings at varied angles or sneaks out between alleys.

Among the books I’m reading right now is Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse, recommended by a friend. It offers an idiosyncratic portrait of women walking for pleasure in the city, examining what the “walking woman” represents historically by looking at women artists who themselves were inspired by the act of traversing their surroundings on foot. The author intertwines this with narratives about her own transformation from a suburban Long Island girl to a 20-year resident of Paris. Her love of walking the city was central to her relocation.

Womb

My love of walking has been challenged, recently, as I’m experiencing the city from an unfamiliar angle: that of a pregnant person. I am 12 weeks pregnant as I write this. (And 14 weeks when I send it.) It’s a surprising new experience. The fatigue is real, and significant, in a way I couldn’t have foreseen as someone who typically walks four or five miles on an average day. I no longer walk quickly from place to place, but at a crawl, letting people pass me on the sidewalk on both sides. I move at the same rate as my neighborhood elders, pushing their grocery carts home.

The worst and most overwhelming pregnancy symptom is nausea. It began in week six and worsened by the week. Where before pregnancy, I’d assumed I’d feel ill for a few hours in the morning and brighten up by the afternoon, instead, I feel okay for the first hour of the morning, and then spend the rest of the day sliding into a slow and miserable decline, nausea growing by the hour. It’s vile, merciless, and gutting.

If I smell anything aside from fresh air, mint, or citrus, I gag. If I walk too fast? Gag. If I let some toothpaste accidentally slip down the back of my throat, that does it. I wretch smelling coffee, trash, and especially the cat’s food.

The worst part is that this state of being makes me unable to do many of the things that bring me embodied joy: walk, run, stretch, dance, do yoga, eat, drink, cook, stroll the city, hang with friends, or even comfortably shower. (Hot water, like hot beverages, seems to trigger my nausea.) I have crying spells that feel unrelated to the hormonal changes and more tied to the fact that I would probably cry if denied access to the majority of my favorite activities, even if I felt well.

Transformation

Pregnancy brings back, viscerally, a reminder of the years in my late twenties and early thirties when my chronic pain condition was at its worst. I experienced excruciating and seemly random pain on and off for years, with no real results or help from the small armada of doctors I visited. Eventually, one doctor told me what I’d dreaded hearing for years: It’s a hard condition to live with—there’s not much we can do. I wondered how I was supposed to continue living as I had been, intermittently, painfully, and filled with longing for a life I might never live again. I was ashamed and despondent. My experiences during the worst and most disabling years are knocking on memory’s door as if to say hello. My current condition, though, is temporary—the baby arrives eventually if all goes well—and I chose it (if not the symptoms themselves).

Pregnancy is transforming me as intensely as that illness once did: from one person at 22 to another by 28. Now, pregnant at age 34, the healthy and able-bodied person I’ve become reacquainted with over the last few years is becoming someone new.

For company, I’ve been reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, stories the poet pulled from Greek and Roman mythology, retold and arranged into a volume moving through time from the creation of the world to Ovid’s present in 8 C.E. I’m in good company: transformation abounds. Women turn to trees, birds, cows, spiders. Lovers turn to mountains, nymphs to echos, men into flowers, lovers’ blood dyes the petals of the magnolia tree red. Notably, again and again, men and gods rape women, girls, nymphs, and goddesses. At least a third of the stories incorporate rape in some way. There is a play between power and powerlessness throughout the poems as the powerless get revenge on the powerful or the powerful punish one another; there is a lot of hubris and competition with gods by mortals who should know better, and who are roundly punished for thinking they stood a chance against the divine. Defeat is everywhere.

The most powerful story for me so far is that of Arachne, a young woman whose weaving is legendary throughout the lands of Greece. When Minerva, otherwise known as Athena, goddess of weaving and war, hears about Arachne’s tapestries, she disguises herself as an old woman to see if Arachne will honor the goddess for her gift and skill, for which Minerva believes she is due thanks. (There is no evidence in Ovid’s telling of the story that the goddess did, in fact, grant Arachne special powers.) Arachne, self-made, refuses. The disguised and affronted goddess challenges Arachne to a weaving competition, to which she agrees. They work furiously at their looms and reveal their final creations to the crowd of women who watch them as they weave—their jury. Minerva’s tapestry depicts the greatness of the gods, Mars, Jupiter, Neptune, and herself, as well as four contest scenes depicting episodes where mere mortals dared to challenge the gods—and their punishments in transformations into mountains, birds, and stone.

Arachne’s tapestry, instead, reveals the gods’ myriad forms of sexual violence against mortals, a condemnation of their alleged greatness. She shows the image of Europa, when Jupiter abducted her, disguised as a bull, and led her into the sea. She shows the Spartan queen Leda, raped by Jupiter and transformed into a swan. It showed the gods tricking—often in the form of animals—and raping Proserpine, Antiope, Danae, Medusa, and Mnemosyne. Arachne's tapestry revealed twenty-one scenes of the crimes of the gods, including Neptune, Apollo, Bacchus, and others.

Viewing the tapestry, even Minerva must admit that Arachne’s skill is unparalleled. In a rage, she turns Arachne into a creature that will spend the rest of her days practicing her art: a spider.

Womb

I have never felt in such a somatic, bone-sure, and visceral way how critical it is that a woman have the right to an abortion as I do now that I am pregnant. This is the first thing I cry about seemingly out of the blue in my early moments of hormonal fluctuation. I think of the tens of millions of women in the U.S. who no longer have legal access to that right in their home states. The brutality of it is beyond words. Pregnancy is a profound and unsettling transformation, one you should not be forced to endure unless it’s chosen by you and safe. It is violent to force a woman to endure an unwanted pregnancy, to force her to bring a person to life without her consent or desire.

In my early twenties, undergoing a period of politicization into true, intersectional feminism, a friend and I decided to read only women writers for a year. It was an attempt to rebalance the scales of decades of our cultural consumption. I feel today the same, fresh levels of injustice that I did as a 22-year-old as I do now, as a 34-year-old pregnant person. It is as if I am being reinitiated into another chapter of what the capacious tent of womanhood is. Pregnancy is a metamorphosis.

Wander

In the beautiful, book-length essay Linea Nigra by Jazmina Barrera, she writes:

“In a bookstore, during a group discussion about Little Labors, a man in the audience says he doesn’t understand why motherhood has suddenly become such a popular topic in literature. ‘It’s not clear to me why anyone would be interested,’ he said.
I know of other female authors who are also writing about pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding. More fragmented texts that quote from The Pillow Book. I love this new mode of writing and hope that it will become much more than a fashion. That there will be more of us. Many more. In my opinion, there will never be enough of us. I think of newspapers, lists, letters, herbals, textbooks, pregnancy journals and diaries, homemade cookbooks: all these forms of writing are, or can be, literature. The same thing is true of baby diaries. I want there to be more than enough of them, and for them to be good, bad, or indifferent books. I want a canon and a tradition. And also a rupture, counter-canon books. New literary genres.”

I don’t know if this essay constitutes a new literary genre, but surely it wanders. Lately my attention comes in fits and starts. I don’t mind. It falls differently on the city in a way I’m intrigued by. I suspect the transition to parenthood will only continue this process.

Recognition

I’ll leave you with an excerpt from “Recognition,” a poem by Sasha West, that I can’t let go of as I hold in heart and mind the women and children who have been brutalized, starved, tortured, and murdered in Gaza since October: