Monday, September 14, 2009

umbilical



“Where the feminine is not valued, a man has no real intimacy with his counterpart. The denial of the feminine as partner and friend has robbed us of ecstasy. The wounded male, seeks his lost ecstasy in all the wrong places...”
Margaret Starbird

"When the justice is gone, there's always Mum"
Laurie Anderson

I could hear the muffled voices of other wives and families outside the door of my private hospital room. Though there was a door between us, the separation didn’t diminish their jovial inflections and laughter. I was alright with that. The fact that there was love on the other side of that wall made me content. I sat there in my bed, knees up, nestled to my chest under blankets and reading a book. I wasn’t lonely. I didn’t feel alone. My wife was only working that night and she said she would come up after my surgery. I’ll be the first thing you’ll see and you’ll fall in love with me forever, she had said. I smiled thinking about that comment, by myself in my quiet room. I let the book rest in my lap and listened to the voices beyond the wall. There was one woman’s voice in particular that seemed the most soothing; an older woman’s voice, low and husky. She was talking to her husband. I knew it was her husband because it wasn’t the tone one would use for a brother or a friend. She cooed to him with affection and I listened to her in gentle rapture. It was like music; the most soft, unobtrusive music.
I was in hospital to repair an umbilical hernia, where I was once attached to my mother. It was a returning hernia, recurring from its first appearance 35 years ago when I was seven years old, inexplicably now as then emerging and threatening to bring my insides to light through my abdomen’s seemingly weakest point. It might have been from when I was exercising at the gym, crunching abdominals on the machines, twisting my sixpack into shape. There was never any pain, but there were times when I was uncomfortable; especially during sex. I would be worshipping my wife’s body, storming her womb with all my strength, when pangs of discomfort would seize my umbilicus, twisting up and slowing me down, a few times even stopping my progress altogether. Life is all irony isn’t it? I didn’t know if it was from my trying to be a man in the gym or my yoni worship while in bed with my wife, but a balance had tipped and there I was, my insides trying to spill out like weather; from high pressure to low pressure, from full to empty, my excess surging forth with blunt gravitational force to reaffirm some kind of equilibrium, bring my guts to the world.
Where it came from originally is even more of a mystery. What could have caused a boy at the age of seven to split his gut into a hernia? I remember having stomach aches and calling home from school a lot. The stomach aches were always a nagging presence, but they showed themselves most sharply, most often at school. I was a nervous boy, always picked on and never fitting in, so when my belly tightened with worry, I would call home asking to be picked up. It annoyed my father, who always had to stop his work on the farm to come and get me, but the pains were real, I would tell him tearfully over the phone. Tearfully, because the pain really was real, and truthfully because I wanted to get out of there, away from the anonymous slaps on my neck to see how red it could get, away from the tripping feet and the bathroom stall invasions. I believe the hernia, then, came from the anxieties bundled up inside me, growing in the seat of my infanthood and wanting out; again that internal pressure wanting to escape to the wider vacuum of the open air outside. So my father would come with the truck and take me home to my mother. Mom would coddle me and worry about the frequency of my stomach aches, wondering what was happening to her boy for him to be suffering such regular pain. It was happening so much that she finally called the doctor, who called it a hernia, some how sensing the bulge in my belly that had yet to protrude. He set a surgery date two weeks hence and Mom kept me home until the day of the operation. My father protested this but Mom did not want to see me going to school and cause myself undue strain on my already weakened middle. Those two weeks were the best times of my youth. Mom would sit with me through parts of her busy day while I lay on the couch watching television, my head on her lap as she rubbed my stomach to smooth my pains down, humming in her sweet, lovely voice. My mother had the most beautiful singing voice in the world, with the smoothest vibrato, so soft and gentle. She had the voice of an angel. I’ve lost her now. She passed away just two years ago, less than ten months after my father died first.

A sharp, commanding female voice came over the intercom to announce that visiting hours were over and patients were invited to have evening snack in the dining lounge downstairs. Excited, I slid out of bed and opened the door to the community of voices on the other side. Walking by the nurse’s station, I noticed a nurse looking at me and smiling.
“I can tell you haven’t had your operation yet, ” she said. ”you’re walking far too fast!”
“You’re right,” I laughed. “I’m fresh meat.”
She laughed with me as did some of the other men that were walking by at the time.
Walking away, I noticed a man talking to one of the other nurses. He was talking very rapidly in a thick East Indian accent and his wife was next to him, holding his arm almost as if to restrain him. He was dressed plainly in his teeshirt and pyjama pants, but his wife was in the ornate dress that Hindu women wear, a bindi on her brow and a bright red swath of vermillion in her hair. She seemed to want him to calm down as his young teenaged son just looked on, bored and impatient. The man was asking questions, charged with nerves and the nurse was calmly answering all his questions.
“You can take your shower before you go to bed tonight since your surgery is so early, and then you can come here and take your sleeping pill if you need it.”
“I don’t need a sleeping pill.” the man said quickly.
“It might settle you down.” said his wife.
“I don’t need to settle down.” he said.
“Oh, you’ll want it.” said an old man who had been hobbling by. The two men exchanged glances and the older man’s face was so sincere and benevolent, the younger man just laughed and shrugged.
When I came downstairs, the dining lounge was filling up with men looking for their snacks. We were given our choices of orange, apple or prune juice by the server girls, most of them pretty young teenagers in their white and pale blue uniforms. They smiled and waved us on to the tables; each of which had plates piled with muffins and slices of sweet loaves. I sat at a table with about 5 other men, all of us united by affliction and grateful to finally break our fasts, to break bread in fellowship. We dove into our food greedily and started to talk. Looking round the room, I noticed that there were no female patients at all in the lounge and wondered this aloud.
“It’s because we’re the workers- we’re the ones that strain ourselves to hernias.” said one man, older and looking like he had worked all his life to back up his comment.
“I don’t know,” I said. “we aren’t all blue collar here. Maybe we’re actually the weaker sex after all if we’re all blowing our insides out over nothing.” This made the others laugh but I really felt it was true. A girl came around offering coffee and tea and I took a tea, making sure she heard me thank her. She smiled and said I was welcome. We started to talk about private health care and how the public system is so poor when I drifted away from the conversation and noticed the Hindu family coming into the lounge, even though visiting hours were clearly over. They seemed lost as the father led them in although his family looked as though they had every purpose but to sit down with us. One of the servers came to them and seemed to tell them that the dining room was only open to patients. The man seemed to argue with this and the woman’s smile suddenly disappeared. His son stood there and rolled his eyes and looked pleadingly at his mom. To answer, the mother stepped in and told the man something that did not make him happy but put him in his place. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and left. His son followed her up the stairs, not even turning to say goodbye. The man stood there, not sure what to do with himself. He looked like a 4 year old boy facing his kindergarten class for the first time. He then noticed a chair at our table and came over to sit down with us. Our conversation was now about how 8000 people came through this hospital each year. I was floored by that number. It seemed like an awful lot of weak stomachs to me. The man however, just sat and ate his banana loaf, eyes scanning the room as if looking for an escape route. I wondered if he really understood what we were saying, or if he could even pay attention to us with his thoughts occupied elsewhere, probably on some car that was just now leaving the parking lot with his wife and son in it.
Snack ended quickly and we broke up the table, happy to finally have treated ourselves finally. We were all laughing but by contrast, The Hindu man got up without saying anything to anyone and went up the stairs slowly and heavily. I decided I wanted to go out and take a walk around the grounds, knowing that I may not have the chance to do this for a while after the surgery, seeing that the sun had already started to fade from its work for the day. I’d been admiring the view from the window of the lounge before with its plentiful trees and gardens and wanted to go out and be part of the view. I stepped through the doors, greeted by a gentle wind and a slight humidity that made the air soft. Through the gardens, I recognized some of the plants and flowers as ones that my mother had planted in our flowerbed; the marigolds and geraniums, along with other plants that were more exotic and I could never think to name. I made my way to the perimeter of the grounds bordered by forest, hoping to find a trail that would take me into a deeper part of the woods. I found one and would have missed it had I not been looking for it. The trail took me to a place where it seemed to turn away from the ravine and where the light seemed to open up from the canopy above. A massive dead tree stood above me as if it were the focal point of this turn in the trail, leaving me no choice but to look upon it, its size so impressive. It provided no foliage and its limbs were mostly gone, giving this little corner more light in its absence. Death had stripped this tree naked, though great swaths of bark lay down on the forest floor with broken branches laying on the ground, seized up by the process of decay. There were great labial knotholes in its trunk, from which branches had once stretched and born leaves and even more limbs. It looked like it a totem, this tree, so prolific it seemed. A historical tree, it was. Much bigger than any of the others around it, I thought to myself it must be the mother of all the other trees; a proud matriarch, gone but still standing as a monument to itself, surrounded by its rich, fertile legacy. I thought of my wife, hoping she was doing alright at work, thinking about seeing her tomorrow. It would be some time before I woudl be able to make love to her again; my incisions would make the act impossible, but I knew this would be alright still. My fear of infidelity was a cloaked, unspoken fear that I kept to myself. I never voiced it to her as that in itself would have been an unfaithful act on my part. I knew she would be patient with me. I silenced my fearful thoughts with the memory of her voice telling me she loved me. She would wait. There was a deeper adoration than the physical love I was thinking about and I knew that it would sustain us through this drought of absence and inability. She was my yoni, my shikta, my divine feminine. I loved her well enough standing there, feeling the wind, breathing the fragrance of leaves and soil around me. Soon however, I felt it was getting dark and moved back through the trail, through the deeper darkness of the thick woods before I emerged and made my way back to my room.

When I returned to my room, I opened up my laptop and found I had an email from my wife that she had left me from work. She was having a rough shift and was not looking forward to a night without me next to her in our marital bed. She was, however looking forward to seeing what I am like drugged to the head with anaesthetic tomorrow. It made me smile the way she made fun of me even though my experience with anaesthetic was not something I wanted to remember. When I was seven, coming to after my surgery, I found that my parents were not there. I couldn’t focus my eyes and the room swayed and rocked viciously. I felt like a dying kitten I had once seen before, whose eyes were filmed over with sickness and could not sit up from nausea. It made the most pitiful mewling, crying aloud for supplication, crying for its mother. I felt the helplessness of looking out from a weakened, low body and found no relief, like it was the miasma of death descending on me. Through the blur of my double vision, I could see my roommate’s mother sitting over him in the bed across from me and I called to her. She pretended not to hear me. I told her that I loved her and asked her to help me. She looked annoyed with me, told me she was not my mother and walked away. I fell back to sleep crying when a nurse came along to soothe me back to rest.

I went and took my shower as my surgery would be early in the morning, then returned to my room to start putting things away in drawers and the closet. I laid out my clothes that I wanted to get dressed in after surgery; my pyjama bottoms and my Superman teeshirt, then wondered if I had packed my rosary with me. After some digging through my luggage, I found that I had. I brought it out and looked at it for a while. I had taken it not so much for the Virgin Mary; I no longer believed in God, but I thought it might shed some good karma, good spirit upon me. I got this from my mother, the superstition and the reliance on ghosts. She was the Catholic in the family, although she never went to church. She held all the ephemera; the rosaries, the scapulars, the family bibles. After she died, we found the crucifix that had once rested on my father’s coffin kept, not hidden but secure, under her pillow. She had kept the faith. Mary may or may not have been watching over me, but it was my mother’s favour I was seeking through bringing this trinket of faith. All I needed during this whole ordeal was faith. Everything would be alright, so long as I had faith that it would be so. I set the rosary in my drawer took the valium that the nurses had left in a cup on my dresser for me. I felt like I would need it. I curled myself into my bed, heaved a deep sigh and let the sleeping pill secret me away from my thoughts.

The next morning came quick and abrupt. At six o’clock, a nurse quickly shaved me and had me wait to be brought to the operating room. Another nurse came and brought me to the holding area; a dimly lit ward of beds where other men like me were waiting for their surgery. Within minutes, yet another nurse came to me and gave me my oxy contins and my Demerol shot. I laid on the bed and let the drugs do their work. The doctor came to fetch me and had me walk to the operating table. I had no idea I was so woozy. I felt like I was walking through a dream, the doctor and a nurse holding me on either side. I was awake through the whole operation, completely trusting the anaesthesia, feeling more relaxed than I ever had before. I could feel each tug and snip but was not concerned at all. In no time at all, I was whisked away in a wheelchair and brought back to my room and helped back to bed where at last I fell into a deep and complete sleep. When I woke, the process of waking was slow and luxurious. I just lay with my eyes closed and breathed the breath of saints, deep and full. I could feel the shiver and tightness of my incision, but never felt any discomfort, just the aura of my numbness. On my back, deep in the cushion of the mattress it seemed, I laid perfectly still as if I had only now just returned to my body to resume my ownership. I heaved a deep, deep sigh and opened my eyes. The first thing I saw then, was my wife’s face looming in space above me, as if she were the Earth to my moon, my mother planet bright and reflecting sunshine into my lunar sky. I could see her clearly, even with my eyes so moist with the dew of sleep. She was smiling at me, wide and proud. My glorious wife.
“Hey, Superman.” She said.
“Hey,” I said, in a croak that made her laugh in the girlish way that I love so much.
“How do you feel?”
I considered the question, taking account, and I smiled. I wanted to get up and use the washroom.
“I feel good.” I finally said. She saw me trying to lift myself and scolded me mildly, telling me to wait. She went to the controls and raised the head of my bed up so I could sit up.
“Do you feel dizzy?” she asked.
“No, but I want to get up.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
I pushed my back off the bed and she came to help me, wrapping her arms underneath mine. I could smell the sweetness of her hair and felt the engulfing warmth of her embrace. I stood up so easily that I felt as if she could lift me up and carry me, light as a baby, to the clouds.