Little Red and La Loba
Thoughts on gestation and repair
I’m working hard on new writing, which I hope to be able to share here eventually—and I’m also caught up in the swirling of… just too much. Too much swirling.
On this Mother’s Day morning— a deliciously cool and rainy one, unusual for this far into May—I sat on the screen porch with a hot cup of coffee and my dog sleeping beside me and finished Orbital, a beautiful, slender novel set in an international space station orbiting Earth. It manages to convey the vastness of space and the insignificance the astronauts feel out there, and also their role as part of something much larger than themselves, while simultaneously brimming with human emotion and vividly personal details of their specific, individual lives. It’s a marvel.
Anyway, as I sat for those brief minutes I tried to let birdsong and the tranquility seep into me, as much as possible. I also thought about the red wolf mothers in dens across the country, whether under human care or the fields and swamps of Alligator River or Pocosin Lakes refuges, perhaps with days-old pups curled up beside them (it’s that time of year! Prayers up).
Motherhood more than anything has forced me to acknowledge my animal nature; I remember watching the red wolves at the museum several years ago and being reminded of early mornings at my house when my children were still very young, and they struck me as most cub-like: rooting, pawing, clambering over our bodies as we clung to sleep. The four of us would lie entwined, like a single, many-limbed organism—my daughter’s mouth on my breast; my son’s sleep-mussed hair tickling my nose. When the irritated wolf-mother snarled warning at a pup, I saw myself groaning in tired protest, perhaps gently batting a small, sticky hand away from my face. Those days with my little cubs were indeed so fleeting and I think of them now with love and gratitude and wonder.
Below I’m posting something I wrote a few years ago. It contains brief references to miscarriage and assault. As I move further away from writing about myself, and focus on new and exciting writing about the red wolves, I feel compelled in some ways to share some older things, which still resonate now for various reasons.
I hope you find moments of peace and tranquility today, to strengthen you for days to come.
Beautiful print I recently framed by Normandie Syken: “Grandma’s House is That Way!”
I wake before dawn, the sky over the woods just tinged with pink, and dress quickly in the darkness—jeans, hoodie, parka, boots. I creep out of the sleeping house as quietly as I can, then cross a frost-covered field toward the parking lot. I’m headed into town to buy a pregnancy test, and inside I feel as frozen as the grass beneath my feet.
Not knowing how to feel isn’t a new experience for me. This pregnancy—if it is a pregnancy—isn’t exactly unplanned; I stopped taking birth control just a couple of months ago, my husband and I agreeing to see what happened. If conception did occur, we figured, it wouldn’t happen right away. I’m thirty-one years old, but I’m not sure I’m ready to be a mother, or if I ever will be. I’m at this residency to finish a novel that was supposed to launch my literary career years ago.
I climb onto one of the several loaner bicycles, a rust-flecked ten-speed. Just before I turn onto the paved road, I glance back once more at the field I crossed and see a rainbow hanging over the forest. It’s hard not to take it as a sign, a knock upside the head from the universe. Hey, kid: be not afraid.
In town I buy a test at Walgreens, then pedal back up the hill and along the property’s winding dirt roads to my studio, a shingled cottage at the end of a short, curved lane. Not just a room of my own— I have an entire house in which to write, to do with as I wish. This reality is still surreal to me. The term “imposter syndrome” isn’t part of anyone’s lexicon yet.
I’m still shivering from the cold, so I decide to make a fire in the hearth. Until now I’ve been scared to try, even given the very specific, step-by-step directions taped to the slate mantel, and the ample firewood and kindling provided. I’ve never made a fire before; until recently, I’d never been to an artists’ residency, either. I’ve never published a book. There are lots of things I still haven’t done but want to accomplish. I arrange the logs and the kindling, strike the match. When at last a feeble flame takes hold of the wood I go into the bathroom, open the test, and once again follow directions. Then I come back out to wait.
The studio cabin is silent, aside from the soft crackling of my fledgling fire. I don’t even hear the wind outside, or acorns falling on the roof. This is one reason people come here, to MacDowell—the silence, the lack of interruptions of any kind. To get away from life’s distractions and throw themselves fully into art. The cottage is surrounded by forest—oaks and maples aflame with autumn colors, a few slender white beeches. The high-ceilinged room contains a double bed—though I’ve opted to sleep in the guest house, less anxious knowing there are at least a few others sleeping nearby—a desk and a baby grand piano, with huge windows facing out to the forest.
Looking back later at photos from this time, I’ll feel an overwhelming solitude. All the images are of frosty fields or roads stretching on into the distance, never another person in sight. Even a shot of the main lodge, where the other artists and I gather each night for dinner, with the loaner bikes parked out front and smoke drifting from the chimney, somehow evokes isolation: perhaps because it’s taken from the outside, looking in. Many veterans of artist residencies mention a necessary adjustment period—how, for the first few days, the silence and absence of demands are so unfamiliar as to feel jarring. Decadent. You are there to create, and you have abundant time in which to do so, and nothing else to worry about, at least in theory. This feels luxurious to an absurd, unnerving degree. Many report spending their first days at a residency overwhelmed by exhaustion.
For the duration of my time at this residency—the shortest stint a person can apply for here, just two weeks—my husband will be in China on a work trip. I don’t want to tell him about this pregnancy—if it is a pregnancy—over the phone, and I don’t want to tell anyone else before I tell him. I will just have to keep the news—if it is news—to myself until we are reunited.
Perhaps it’s a preemptive awareness of this potential secrecy that brings to mind the first pregnancy test I ever took, which was after a rape. The fact that I am in essence alone here, with no one to talk to about such a momentous event, also probably contributes. Perhaps being back in New England, too, where it happened—and at the same time of year, mid-Autumn. I’ve taken other pregnancy tests in years since, of course, and these circumstances couldn’t be more different. I’m married now; I want this baby—at least, in theory. I’m not sure if the sudden intensity of my isolation is causing me to feel such foreboding, or if the feeling itself is dredging up memories of that dark and lonely time. I doesn’t matter, really; I only want to shake off the darkness.
When the prescribed minutes have elapsed, I go back to the bathroom and lift the plastic test stick from its resting place on the sink. At the exact moment in which I see the blue line—the moment I realize the test is positive, and I’m pregnant—the studio’s smoke alarm goes off, a relentless shrieking that sends me scrambling from the bathroom, throwing open windows and doors, fanning the smoke of my failed fire out of the hearth and off into the cold October air.
Someone at breakfast later that morning mentions a mountain lion that’s said to be roaming the nearby woods. “They only attack from behind,” she says. “You should wear a backwards hat if you go walking in the woods alone.” I assume this is a joke—it seems ludicrous to think a backwards hat could in any way fool a such a stealthy predator.
On Halloween a few days later, I make a spur-of-the-moment decision to dress as “Little Dead Riding Hood” using a red floral scarf, some Zombie makeup I pick up at Walgreens, and the picnic basket in which lunch is delivered to my studio every day. No one else has mentioned dressing up—an unexpected blizzard the day before has largely distracted us from more typical merry-making—and when I walk into the dining hall that night in costume the others are surprised. “You seemed so quiet!” one exclaims, seeming approving of my transformation. Quiet is code for boring, I think. I feel a small sense of triumph, having showed them perhaps there’s more to me than they realized. Perhaps there’s hope for me, yet.
Determined as I have been to use my time wisely during these two weeks—to make serious progress on the novel—after learning of my pregnancy, I haven’t gotten much done at all. Instead, I take long walks in the woods. I daydream; I make lists. I sit at the desk in my studio, ordering myself to focus, then lose track of time watching a family of deer high stepping through the tall grass out the window. I make more lists. I bike to the bookshop in town and, once convinced none of the other artists-in-residence are in the vicinity, buy What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Even on residency grounds I hardly speak to the others, mostly because I’m scared I’ll blurt out my secret and later regret having shared this pregnancy news first with strangers. I see them at dinner, make meaningless small talk, then hurry back to the dorm where I huddle under a quilt, alternating between reading What to Expect and Tillie Olsen’s Silences, finding solace in neither.
In retrospect, I wonder if reading something more focused on the primal—even in a “woo,” New-Agey way—might have given more comfort. Something like Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With Wolves, the wildly successful nineteen-nineties manifesto about connecting with one’s inner Wild Woman. Motherhood has since revealed my animal nature as a fundamental, inescapable part of me—a realization that has taken years to unfold, that is indeed still unfolding.
As I read about my embryo’s stages of development—now the size of a poppy seed, now the size of a pea; now the lungs are forming, now the fingernails—I might have also considered Estes’s description of La Loba, the archetypal Wild Woman, caretaker of all things in danger of being lost to the world. La Loba goes around collecting bones, especially the bones of wolves. Once she has enough for a skeleton, she puts them together, and when the skeleton is complete she sings an ancient, sacred song that brings it to life. While she sings flesh begins to form over the bones, and then fur over the flesh. Eventually the wolf begins to breathe; all the while, La Loba keeps singing. The wolf opens its eyes at last and stands; then it starts to run, and as it runs, it is transformed into a laughing woman. Wild and free, the woman keeps running and laughing until she disappears from view.
After our Halloween dinner, the residents and I walk a shoveled path to an open house in a sculptor’s studio on a far-flung part of the property. After listening to her brief talk we drink and mingle, milling around to inspect the installations in more detail. One is a cross-section of a beehive, with dead bees super-glued to the honeycomb within. She tells me she had shipped live bees to the studio and intended to use them that way, but then a local hive had attacked and killed them all, so she was forced to improvise.
Eventually everyone at the bee artist’s studio gets drunk. They decide to go sledding on a nearby hill, using cafeteria trays, slabs of wood, other found objects. I’m tired and sober, so I decide to walk back to my room. Since there are no lights along the path and no moon in the sky someone lends me his headlamp. Trudging back through the darkness I feel exhilarated, a bit frightened. Alive. I can see only as far as the headlamp’s beam, my view further obscured by my own breath clouding the air. I crunch through the snow, still in zombie makeup from dinner, Little Red’s kerchief still covering my head.
Walking through the night woods, I’m aware of my loneliness and at the same time filled with the strange sensation, ridiculous though it might be at such an early stage, that I am not alone—that my life is no longer just mine. In addition to the one growing inside me, there are of surely other lives around me, out here in the wilderness—creatures I can’t see or hear, watching me pass.
I think of the mountain lion and wish briefly that I had a hat with a brim so I could turn it backwards. Maybe my kerchief? Would that fool the stalking beast? I’m being silly, but I rotate my scarf anyway so it’s partially covering my face, telling myself I’m doing so for warmth as well as protection.
I think of Sicily, the place I desperately wanted to capture in the novel I’m workingon. Once there were wolves in Sicily—a species that exists no longer. The Sicilian wolf disappeared in the early twentieth century, a blink in the long scope of the island’s long history—its capital, Palermo, where I lived, was inhabited by Phoenicians some seven thousand years ago. Only one photo of the Sicilian wolf exists—a chained captive in a black and white photo taken in the eighteen hundreds. In the photo you can see the shorter legs and broader muzzle that distinguished it from its relative, the modern gray wolf. It’s hard to imagine wolves roaming present-day Sicily, just as it’s hard to picture the barren, jagged peaks of the island’s interior covered in verdant forests—but they were. The landscape there has been conquered and ravaged, over and over, for hundreds and thousands of years.
The message of Little Red Riding Hood, according to some scholars, is about the regulation of a woman’s sexuality. “Inner and outer nature must be brought under control,” says fairy tale expert Alan Dundes in a collection of essays about the tale. “Otherwise chaos and destruction will reign.” French and German writers of the eighteenth century knew, Dundes says, that Little Red Riding Hood was punished at the story’s end for speaking to the devil, represented by the wolf, thus “laying the grounds for her own seduction and rape.”
The wolf’s devouring of Little Red Riding Hood, writes another scholar in the same volume, “is an obvious sexual act, symbolizing the uncontrollable appetite or chaos of nature.” In the Brothers Grimm version of Little Red Cap, once the hunter has cut open the wolf, releasing still-living Red and her grandmother from its belly and saving them both, he skins the wolf and takes its fur. The grandmother eats the cake with the wine that Little Red Cap brought and is restored to health. And Little Red blames herself for the ordeal, silently promising to “never again stray from the path” to go into the forbidden forest alone.
I feel at a crossroads—on the cusp of adulthood, still full of innocence. The darkness of the woods around me, the mysteries they hold. The crisp, unyielding cold. My own little life, hurtling forward. No matter where we go, Estes says, the shadow that trots behind us is four-footed. I move ahead through the snow-covered trees, back to my studio, to that quiet room where stories are waiting to be finished.
The life growing inside me at the residency, cell by cell, is not to be—I learn this a few weeks after I get home, when I go for my first ultrasound and the technician can’t find a heartbeat. The fetus is deemed inviable. Clueless and bereft, I opt not to undergo the standard dilation & curettage procedure, worried it might make getting pregnant in the future more difficult—because I want this pregnancy, now, too late; I want it terribly. I’m prescribed misoprostol, which the doctor says will help speed up the process. He doesn’t mention anything about side effects. Later that evening, I become violently ill, my blood pressure drops, and I pass out in our upstairs hallway in the middle of the night, hitting my head on the wall and splitting my lip. I’m unconscious long enough for my husband to find me on the ground, see the blood on my mouth. In his panic, he tries to shake me awake, then he runs to the phone to call 911. When I come to, opening my eyes in a flood of endorphins, I see—I can still see, if I want to remember it—the naked grief on his face. “She’s awake!” he shouts into the phone. He takes me to the hospital, where they do an internal exam and confirm that I’m miscarrying, that there is nothing to be done about the fetus, pieces of which my body will continue to expel in the coming days and weeks.
A decade earlier, at an Emergency Room in Boston I endured a similar exam, though that one was done in hopes of one day identifying the man or men who’d assaulted me—more humiliating but ultimately just as useless. Nothing to be done. This time, I’m treated for low blood pressure and a mild concussion and given two stitches in my lip. At that years-ago visit in Boston, I was told to be more careful by a clinician who wouldn’t meet my eyes and sent on my way, and for the first time in my life I wanted to die, I felt like nothing could be done to help me.
A year after this miscarriage, I’ll return to Duke’s ER and give birth to my son, who will emerge with such unexpected force and swiftness that we almost won’t make it to a birthing room. Some years after that, at the same hospital, same Emergency Department, I’ll start to unravel, my body for some reason finally starting to grapple with things it endured long before and forcing me along for the journey.
I’ll blame my miscarriage on the caffeinated coffee I kept drinking at the residency, despite knowing I was pregnant. I’ll blame it on the weird chemicals that seeped into my skin via the cheap zombie makeup I wore on Halloween. I’ll blame my own ambivalence—my underlying fear of motherhood—as having somehow cursed the pregnancy, and also my body, some internal defect I figured would be revealed soon enough. All through my subsequent pregnancy, I’d harbor the guilt and shame I’d felt in that Emergency Room, residual or not—that sense of fear and failure that in some ways also poisoned the novel I had been determined to bring to completion.
Looking back for warning signs I missed—as though in doing so I could in any way change what happened—I remember the fire alarm going off in my studio when I first saw the positive test, the unmistakable shriek of warning, but also the rainbow over the woods that same morning. The rainbow throws me; I’ve always known it to be a symbol of hope and comfort. Perhaps some things can only be understood from a distance; perhaps it was meant to reassure me, not about that particular pregnancy, but more broadly that whatever happened, I would be all right. The most likely explanation is of course that I happened to glimpse a natural phenomenon caused by the refraction and dispersion of light in water that had nothing to do with me at all.
A rainbow, I’ll learn, is not an object. It can’t be approached. Even if an observer sees someone who appears to be standing at or in the end of a rainbow, the rainbow individual only sees another rainbow, further off. In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge connects the realm of men to Asgard, world of the gods. In the book of Genesis, a rainbow is part of God’s pact with Noah. After my son is born, we’ll be given a Noah’s Ark board book, which describes the destruction of the world in a cheerful, singsong rhyme that we end up reading to him at bedtime: I’ll keep you safe, God tells his friend/ My world’s gone wrong, so I’ll start again. The book is all of eight pages, and consists mostly of pictures of brightly colored animals marching in pairs. On the last page, God promises Noah that He will never destroy Earth with a flood again.
This of course strikes me a bullshit promise: we are headed, it seems, for a new era of destruction—ocean temperatures rising, whole ecosystems on the verge of collapse. Sustainable fisheries will be tapped out by the year 2050, my husband says; our son will be in his late thirties then. The prospect of this—of the sea ceasing on some level to sustain life—is so horrifying we have to change the subject, make light of it somehow. People like my husband who work for environmental organizations have a statistically higher rate of drug and alcohol abuse, he tells me. We joke that he allows himself one day of despair per week.
The Ark sailed on under stormy skies/ but Noah had faith that the sun would rise.
Strange story to tell a child, about a vengeful God who destroyed everything He’d created. Meant to be cautionary, I suppose—like the boy who cried wolf, like Little Red Riding Hood. Don’t be wicked; obey, or disaster will befall you. The final image of our board book is meant to inspire hope: the ark run aground on a mountaintop, sky clearing in the distance, the world rinsed clean. Holding my sleeping baby, I wonder, as I always have, about the aftermath—that however rough their journey has been, the next steps for Noah and his family will surely be hardest: starting over with nothing, all the long years still ahead of them. The real work of living, just beginning.
Little altar on my writing desk.