Babies Are Messy
Body Full of Stars captures the gorgeous wonder of new life and love, and shows how these are inescapably entangled with hard work that pushes us to our limits. These days when pregnancy, childbirth and parenting take their place with weddings as a kind of competitive sport among us entitled middle-class Americans, Molly Caro May’s memoir takes readers to the messy, beautiful reality of the essential grind. “Essential” because the humbling moments of body fluids and arguments we want to forget, highlight the precious moments of spontaneous bonding that we want to last forever. “Grind” because — spoiler alert — talking and playing with children while getting ordered around by them and serving as a model of responsible adulthood can reach excruciating levels of tedium. May’s grind is not boredom, but the more serious challenge of the physical and mental toll new parenthood exacts, particularly when ideas about womanhood complicate the picture. I felt myself luxuriating in sweet scenes of daily life with her baby daughter, even as the book also struck me with an awareness of internalized culture such as this:
[A]t church, my mother and I stood in wooden pews and sang ‘One Bread, One Body,’ the song that made us both cry a little….[A]s I knelt in prayer, my thoughts would tumble over themselves until I ended up stranded and alone on a pile of debris wondering why we were praying over a man’s body. Didn’t every person come out, actually, from a woman’s body? Where were the women, what about Eve, the snake, what the hell?”
As a mother a few years past the all-consuming days of raising tiny people, I was transported to those gauzy moments of baby joy and also breathed a sigh of relief those years were behind me. The subtitle “Female Rage and My Passage into Motherhood” makes a promise of honesty that some readers might react to, and whether that reaction is negative — especially if that reaction is negative — I encourage those readers to look at what makes them want to look away. For the most difficult and self-focused scenes are the most instructive parts of this memoir because they expose the struggle between service and autonomy for women, and focus awareness on what we demand of ourselves.
I myself experienced envy and compassion and solidarity while reading. I envied May’s close relationship with her mother where mine was fraught and geographically distant by design. I envied her for her baby daughter because mine died in November 2006 during my eighth month of pregnancy (her name was Elise, and I relish the rare chance to write her name between these parentheses). I felt compassion for May’s postpartum woes, where her pelvic prolapse and incontinence further complicated the loneliness of motherhood. But solidarity forms the heart of this book, where May embraces her emotions as a way to understand and love more fully. She faces down conflict where I would run away or try to stuff down my rage, only to have it emerge as irritability, lashing out, self-blame. She sees how her baby’s father struggles alongside her and in conflict with her in their newly triangulated family. Connections with the self and loved ones, the world inside and outside get upended and reconfigured. “ ‘I have my own trauma about what happened during that first year after Eula was born. I tried to help you but you wouldn’t let me,’ ” May’s husband says to her. She observes that “Even when I wanted to hurt him, I never wanted to hurt him. He never judged. He retreated to protect himself….I move toward him and we fall into each other’s arms. His relief relieves me; his face is open and wide for the first time since my pregnancy. I think he has been heard. I won’t apologize for my feelings or rage. Just like he doesn’t need to apologize for his. He was mean too. But I am sorry for expecting him to rescue me. I am sorry for having pointed a significant portion of my anger at him. My unprocessed or misdirected anger hurts him and drains my brightness….It’s okay to feel angry. It’s not okay to attack people” (p.252).
Body Full of Stars is a book for anyone who wants to understand how they evolve in intimate relationships and their sense of self. It is a love letter to May’s family and support network, a tribute to the mother-child bond, and a celebration of earthly and spiritual humanity in all its complexity.
