“The sun and the moon could have been fighting.” Doña Luz pursed her lips in concern.
I breathed out, grateful she blamed heavenly bodies.
“An eclipse, Laurita. Without you even knowing!”
I nodded. For a moment I let myself indulge in believing this. “I’ll check my calendar. See if it
happened on an eclipse.”
A woman in a blue flowered apron and long braid walked down the dark corridor of the market
toward us. Doña Luz lifted herself carefully up from the chair and hugged the woman, who
then turned to greet me, excused herself for interrupting, and said she needed a pot.
Doña Luz burrowed her head into a pile of precariously balanced breakables and emerged
moments later with a large aluminum pot. Her tiny market stall overflowed with woven tortilla
baskets, wooden spoons, chocolate stirrers, clay dishes, metal cookware. It was a
comfortable place, like an attic converted into a cozy living room and plunked down in the
corner of a market. Years earlier, when I’d lived here in Huajuapan teaching English and doing
research on childbirth practices, she’d treated me as a granddaughter. Whenever I’d needed a
grandma she’d given me big hugs, and this visit—my winter vacation—was no exception.
While the women examined the pot, knocking on it and cocking their heads to judge the echo,
I sat on the doll-sized guest chair and thought about the sun and the moon fighting. It didn’t
surprise me that Doña Luz had shaken her head and clucked at a half-hearted explanation
involving random microscopic causes. Wandering outside during an eclipse seemed much
more likely to her. Menstrual cycles do correspond to lunar cycles. I liked this explanation, so
poetic and mythical, with forces astronomical and ancient affecting my body.
Back home in Colorado everyone—the midwife, my mother, my women friends— had assured
me it was a random event. “One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage,” they chimed. “Lots
of women don’t even realize they’re pregnant, just think it’s just a heavy period.” No one, I
thought bitterly, no one could mistake the fist-sized thing that slid out of me as a heavy
period. Statistics couldn’t make it less real; they couldn’t absolve me.
After the customer left toting the giant pot, Doña Luz settled down across from me in her
chair, smoothing her apron over her knees. “Or, Laurita, maybe it was a cold wind that struck
you.”
I felt glad her mind was still acute enough to pick up the conversation exactly where we’d left
off. Since my brief visit the prior year, she’d become thirty pounds skinnier, her hollowed
cheeks and thin voice betraying a severe bout of anemia and stomach infections.
I nodded. Her furrowed eyes sifted through seventy years of life experience.
“Or”-- and here she grew excited-- “you could have passed by a heavy place, where an evil
wind struck you. You travel so much you might not even know which places are heavy!”
For five months—since August-- I’d tiptoed around some explanations, one in particular, and
tried unsuccessfully to embrace others. My fear now was that my pregnancy had been a fluke,
a one-time shot and I’d blown it. I blinked back tears. “So what should I do?”
“Prepare your body, my daughter! Do a limpia with herbs. Put the heat back in your womb.
Wear a red strip of cloth around your belly. And don’t leave the house on an eclipse!”
The first woman who ever talked with me about her miscarriage was in the same rural Mexican
town, about five years earlier. At that time, sex was all about not getting pregnant. I wasn’t
sympathetic. I thought of her fetus as an it. She was a custodial worker at the university.
She had taken a series of herbal steam baths with an old woman up the road. “To bring the
heat back to my body,” she told me. “After I lost the baby, my womb was left cold.” I took a
steam bath with the old woman, not out of a concern for fertility, but curiosity, and to relax
my muscles.
Two years later, during my Masters research, women ages seventeen to ninety-six told me
how after giving birth, they’d entrusted their raw, vulnerable bodies to the older señoras who
“cooked” them with steam and herbs. The consequences of failing to restore heat were
disastrous: headaches, teeth falling out, chronic stomach pains, bloated bellies. One middle-
aged woman told me with regret that a cold wind had penetrated her back while she was
pregnant and stayed there, throbbing to this day. Another woman attributed her neighbor’s
infertility to injections with cold needles and sitting on chilly ground. Although I dutifully
recorded their experiences, I didn’t understand that one’s body could become a cold,
inhospitable, unwelcoming place.
My miscarriage had a ridiculous soundtrack: bluegrass. Knee-slappin’, yee-hawin’, chicken
dancin’ blue grass. Last July my old freshman roommate Mara was in town. For months she’d
been planning this trip from her flat swampy New Orleans home to the Rockies. She’d hiked
here with other friends from our college days and wanted a nostalgic re-play of her earlier
visit. For Mara, the mountains were pathways to heaven, metaphors for life and love. Months
before her trip, she called me to make eager plans, her Southern twang bursting with squeals
and sighs. She sent me daily e-mails confirming the three bluegrass festivals we’d go to, the
rivers we’d raft, the mountains we’d climb. In July I hesitantly e-mailed her that I was
pregnant, hoping she wouldn’t feel disappointed doing less strenuous versions of our original
plans.
I was eight weeks pregnant at the first festival. I had never listened to bluegrass much
before, but associated it with happy outdoor things, mountains and sunshine. My husband,
Ian, Mara, and I sat in lawn chairs in a shallow stream and watched people wading through the
sparkling water: pregnant hippie women in halter tops, mothers with Mayan slings toting rosy-
cheeked tow-head angels, naked toddlers building sand castles. Mara and Ian tapped their
feet and sipped their microbrews and I dutifully ate my high-protein peanut butter-apple snack
and wished my stomach were round and full enough to smooth my hands nonchalantly over
its taut skin. By October, I would look like that.
I counted months constantly, estimating the stages of the warm dark world inside of me,
moving my fingers in their secret patterns. When would the queasiness end? I’d ask myself.
When would the delivery happen? When would the baby’s ears be fully formed? When would
she transform herself from what my pregnancy book called a “miniature seahorse” into the
promised big-headed baby?
As freshman roommates ten years earlier, Mara and I would stay up late in our narrow beds,
talking tirelessly, examining our romantic flings from every possible angle. On her most recent
visit, I’d listened to her boyfriend problems with detachment. Birth had become the center of
human experience. Across the cultures I’d studied, motherhood bonded women together,
sometimes transforming them into goddesses, saints, heroines. After years of living with
Mixtec families, where women my age—twenty-nine— already had four or five children, my
childless state felt unnatural. On our most recent visit to Mexico, at least a dozen times daily
someone asked Ian and me when we would have our own children. “Mira, Laurita! Look at
your husband!” my pregnant friend whispered as we watched Ian spinning her nephew in
circles, making airplane noises. “You can tell he wants a baby!” For years I’d had the visceral
urge to hold a small soft creature at my suddenly useful breast. That summer— the start of
the limbo between my Masters and Ph.D. fieldwork—seemed the perfect time to begin.
I breathed out, grateful she blamed heavenly bodies.
“An eclipse, Laurita. Without you even knowing!”
I nodded. For a moment I let myself indulge in believing this. “I’ll check my calendar. See if it
happened on an eclipse.”
A woman in a blue flowered apron and long braid walked down the dark corridor of the market
toward us. Doña Luz lifted herself carefully up from the chair and hugged the woman, who
then turned to greet me, excused herself for interrupting, and said she needed a pot.
Doña Luz burrowed her head into a pile of precariously balanced breakables and emerged
moments later with a large aluminum pot. Her tiny market stall overflowed with woven tortilla
baskets, wooden spoons, chocolate stirrers, clay dishes, metal cookware. It was a
comfortable place, like an attic converted into a cozy living room and plunked down in the
corner of a market. Years earlier, when I’d lived here in Huajuapan teaching English and doing
research on childbirth practices, she’d treated me as a granddaughter. Whenever I’d needed a
grandma she’d given me big hugs, and this visit—my winter vacation—was no exception.
While the women examined the pot, knocking on it and cocking their heads to judge the echo,
I sat on the doll-sized guest chair and thought about the sun and the moon fighting. It didn’t
surprise me that Doña Luz had shaken her head and clucked at a half-hearted explanation
involving random microscopic causes. Wandering outside during an eclipse seemed much
more likely to her. Menstrual cycles do correspond to lunar cycles. I liked this explanation, so
poetic and mythical, with forces astronomical and ancient affecting my body.
Back home in Colorado everyone—the midwife, my mother, my women friends— had assured
me it was a random event. “One in five pregnancies ends in miscarriage,” they chimed. “Lots
of women don’t even realize they’re pregnant, just think it’s just a heavy period.” No one, I
thought bitterly, no one could mistake the fist-sized thing that slid out of me as a heavy
period. Statistics couldn’t make it less real; they couldn’t absolve me.
After the customer left toting the giant pot, Doña Luz settled down across from me in her
chair, smoothing her apron over her knees. “Or, Laurita, maybe it was a cold wind that struck
you.”
I felt glad her mind was still acute enough to pick up the conversation exactly where we’d left
off. Since my brief visit the prior year, she’d become thirty pounds skinnier, her hollowed
cheeks and thin voice betraying a severe bout of anemia and stomach infections.
I nodded. Her furrowed eyes sifted through seventy years of life experience.
“Or”-- and here she grew excited-- “you could have passed by a heavy place, where an evil
wind struck you. You travel so much you might not even know which places are heavy!”
For five months—since August-- I’d tiptoed around some explanations, one in particular, and
tried unsuccessfully to embrace others. My fear now was that my pregnancy had been a fluke,
a one-time shot and I’d blown it. I blinked back tears. “So what should I do?”
“Prepare your body, my daughter! Do a limpia with herbs. Put the heat back in your womb.
Wear a red strip of cloth around your belly. And don’t leave the house on an eclipse!”
The first woman who ever talked with me about her miscarriage was in the same rural Mexican
town, about five years earlier. At that time, sex was all about not getting pregnant. I wasn’t
sympathetic. I thought of her fetus as an it. She was a custodial worker at the university.
She had taken a series of herbal steam baths with an old woman up the road. “To bring the
heat back to my body,” she told me. “After I lost the baby, my womb was left cold.” I took a
steam bath with the old woman, not out of a concern for fertility, but curiosity, and to relax
my muscles.
Two years later, during my Masters research, women ages seventeen to ninety-six told me
how after giving birth, they’d entrusted their raw, vulnerable bodies to the older señoras who
“cooked” them with steam and herbs. The consequences of failing to restore heat were
disastrous: headaches, teeth falling out, chronic stomach pains, bloated bellies. One middle-
aged woman told me with regret that a cold wind had penetrated her back while she was
pregnant and stayed there, throbbing to this day. Another woman attributed her neighbor’s
infertility to injections with cold needles and sitting on chilly ground. Although I dutifully
recorded their experiences, I didn’t understand that one’s body could become a cold,
inhospitable, unwelcoming place.
My miscarriage had a ridiculous soundtrack: bluegrass. Knee-slappin’, yee-hawin’, chicken
dancin’ blue grass. Last July my old freshman roommate Mara was in town. For months she’d
been planning this trip from her flat swampy New Orleans home to the Rockies. She’d hiked
here with other friends from our college days and wanted a nostalgic re-play of her earlier
visit. For Mara, the mountains were pathways to heaven, metaphors for life and love. Months
before her trip, she called me to make eager plans, her Southern twang bursting with squeals
and sighs. She sent me daily e-mails confirming the three bluegrass festivals we’d go to, the
rivers we’d raft, the mountains we’d climb. In July I hesitantly e-mailed her that I was
pregnant, hoping she wouldn’t feel disappointed doing less strenuous versions of our original
plans.
I was eight weeks pregnant at the first festival. I had never listened to bluegrass much
before, but associated it with happy outdoor things, mountains and sunshine. My husband,
Ian, Mara, and I sat in lawn chairs in a shallow stream and watched people wading through the
sparkling water: pregnant hippie women in halter tops, mothers with Mayan slings toting rosy-
cheeked tow-head angels, naked toddlers building sand castles. Mara and Ian tapped their
feet and sipped their microbrews and I dutifully ate my high-protein peanut butter-apple snack
and wished my stomach were round and full enough to smooth my hands nonchalantly over
its taut skin. By October, I would look like that.
I counted months constantly, estimating the stages of the warm dark world inside of me,
moving my fingers in their secret patterns. When would the queasiness end? I’d ask myself.
When would the delivery happen? When would the baby’s ears be fully formed? When would
she transform herself from what my pregnancy book called a “miniature seahorse” into the
promised big-headed baby?
As freshman roommates ten years earlier, Mara and I would stay up late in our narrow beds,
talking tirelessly, examining our romantic flings from every possible angle. On her most recent
visit, I’d listened to her boyfriend problems with detachment. Birth had become the center of
human experience. Across the cultures I’d studied, motherhood bonded women together,
sometimes transforming them into goddesses, saints, heroines. After years of living with
Mixtec families, where women my age—twenty-nine— already had four or five children, my
childless state felt unnatural. On our most recent visit to Mexico, at least a dozen times daily
someone asked Ian and me when we would have our own children. “Mira, Laurita! Look at
your husband!” my pregnant friend whispered as we watched Ian spinning her nephew in
circles, making airplane noises. “You can tell he wants a baby!” For years I’d had the visceral
urge to hold a small soft creature at my suddenly useful breast. That summer— the start of
the limbo between my Masters and Ph.D. fieldwork—seemed the perfect time to begin.
The Sun, the Moon and the Baby
by Laura Reseau
by Laura Reseau