Midnight Is a Doorway

It’s midnight, and Cadence is two years old. A hollowness in my chest has tugged me half-awake. I’m out of bed now, ghosting through the living room in slippers, pulled like low tide by the Strawberry Moon. 

I pause beside their crib.

The quilt my mother made them is tucked up under their chin. Cadence snores tiny snores, and I kiss their hair. It smells like Cheerios.

The little night light plugged into the wall is too bright for me. It’s supposed to help us see better, so we can take care of the baby. I guess it does that. I squint at it, then can’t see much when I look away, as though the night has thickened like a fog.

Cadence turns over in their sleep. Somewhere, an owl is hooting in the woods. I turn my back to the glow, then tip-toe across the carpet, and down the stairs.

I told people that giving birth hadn’t changed me. I was proud of that—of being affirmed, and not transformed. Change means losing control.

But maybe I have lost control, or given it away. Traded it for something, during labor. Something I can only find in darkness, when the day-mind is not in charge.

Now I hold Night Office. I didn’t used to. I go out to offer myself to the things that haunt moon shadows. Just in case. In case they remember what my body learned, and then forgot. Something about being open, large, whole. 

Behind the front door, I trade my slippers for boots. Then I turn the handle. I am ajar. It’s been two years, but something is wedged open inside me.

I step through. I pour my moonlit self down the path, and the small shadow that trails behind is swallowed up by the hulking black of trees.

It was midnight, two years ago, and something ached in my abdomen. I was lying down, pulled halfway from a dream of seagulls and sky. Blue light. Feathers.

But the ache built. Not like usual.

The dream began to shred. Wings caught on something. Caught, torn. Pieces spiraling toward the ground.

Pain rose. Ruptured, from my abdomen. Something penetrating my body. Like being cut. Being stabbed.

My face tightened. I was fine. I just needed to relax, like I’d done a hundred times before with cramping calves or aching hips. Deep breath. In for four, out for six. 

But I wasn’t fine. The ache sharpened to an ice pick. I gasped, opened my eyes.

It was dark. Which way was I facing? I flailed until I slapped my nightstand, yanked my phone from its charger, managed to switch on the camera’s flashlight. I knew this place. This was my bedroom. I pointed the beam at each corner: Nobody. Nobody nearby holding a knife.

I rolled to sit up—and the pain gripped tighter. My chest was fast and hot. My head was full of dream stuff, and I couldn’t make sense. Couldn’t make sense of it, of what was happening. What was happening? There were feathers, and light, and now something was stabbing me.

I crawled toward the bathroom, reaching up to flip on an overhead lamp. Somewhere between the carpet and the cold linoleum, I woke up enough to figure it out: This was a contraction. I was in labor, and I was having a contraction.

Sitting on the lid of the toilet, I curled forward, face in hands. Fingers against my forehead, trembling. Palms smelling like sweat. Eventually, the contraction let up.

I fumbled with my phone, got the stopwatch going. My breath stuttered in and out, in and out. I waited. Maybe the contractions wouldn’t find me again if I stayed awake here in the bathroom with the lights on.

I watched the numbers measure out five minutes. Ten. Twenty. I wasn’t shaking anymore. This probably wasn’t labor after all. Just practice.

I went back to bed. I’d been pregnant for a thousand years in the past week alone. I didn’t sleep.

They all talk like it stops between contractions. Like the ache comes in spikes and troughs. It hurts, and then it doesn’t. You get some peace.

It wasn’t like that for me.

My nails dug into the arm of the couch. I wondered if I’d tear the fabric. 

The ache stayed. It fluctuated, but it didn’t end. It gnawed at my patience, between the peaks, like a tooth about to crack.

I trudged through another jagged contraction. Growling. Trying to earn a break. But it doesn’t work that way.

Fuck them for talking like I’d rest.

I remember rocking rhythms. Rocking in arcs from palm to knee, down on all fours on the wooden deck.

Labor was new, but I was learning. I was learning about time. About how it doesn’t work anymore.

I moved my body from side to side, kneading the ground like the paws of a cat. There are rhythms, in labor, but not minutes marching forward toward an end. Breath goes in, and breath goes out. Waves crest, and waves trough, dumping their hormones, pulling you down. Making you drugged, making you shake, making the hours weave and wind with otherwise distant moments. Time turns and sweeps you down a spiral.

I was swept again to the part that coils. The part where a band wraps taut around your middle, and the ache goes hot and deep.

“Let it in,” I told myself, hearing it also from other mes in other layers of time. Hearing an echo. “Let it through.” I softened my face, opened my hands. “Let it go.”

My midwife had taught me this. She’d given me watercolor cards with these words written on them. Another card said, Soft hands, soft face, deep breath. I’d read them often before bed, in the weeks leading up to labor.

I thought of third trimester, in the garden. Curling over my enormous belly, tucking little baskets around the strawberry stems. Their leaves are soft like open hands. They reach their palms through the air, their roots past mulch and through the soil. Everything they need floods into them.

Kneeling on the deck, on the living room rug, on the bottom of the birthing tub, I drew up pain through a tap root. It flooded from my abdomen to my chest and arms, and all the way into my hands. Strawberry leaves in the rain.

Moans filled my chest like thunder. Saturated, I felt my awareness sink beneath the ground, leaving the day-lit world. Past the soil, through cracks in the bedrock. Arriving on the muddy floor of the labor cave. Of the stone room with the subterranean pool, where every birthing person before and after me kneels—on dirt, in water, on piles of woven homespun—kneels, and rocks, and opens their hands to the pain.

Our midwives guard us in our cave. Walking around and around the walls, they rattle their dried gourds. They tap-and-scrape the pestle against the bowl. Clouds of steam billow from the pots of boiled cloth, as we rock.

Each contraction cinched tighter, a charley horse gripping me from sternum to knee. But down inside the earth, I was unwinding. 

I was coming apart with every moan. My body was a long-stuck door, pried open. Torn open, finally. My low back screamed. The hinges ripped away. I was shoved wide by the bulk of eternity.

My hair, spiked with sweat, stuck up where I’d grabbed it. The sandstone of the cave was caked in muddy handprints, the layers of our stories told in fluids on the floor.

The thing that opened me was from Before. Very old, and very big. It hurts for such an old big thing to go through you. At least when you are small, and made of flesh. There’s no fighting that. Slap at the waves all you want, you can’t turn back a flood.

But you can let the waves knock you down. You can let them pull you under, and cut you open on the rocks. You can run out of control, and I was done with running. 

I moaned face-down into my discarded shirt. Broken open, 

there was room in me now for the sea.

Riding the spiral, you learn the same thing many times. Once you go down, you might not stay that way. Face tight, breath fast, I was close to the surface again. I was trying to make progress happen.

My nails dug into the rim of the inflatable pool. I wondered if I’d tear the plastic. A squishy sac protruded from my crotch, and I needed it to come out. Each time I shoved, the sac stuck out a bit. After each contraction, it went back inside. It was clinging like a dandelion root. Obstinate.

I shoved against the ache. Shoved harder. I growled. I told myself I could do it if I just stayed focused. Worked hard enough. Soon it would have to shift. Or break.

I heard a whimper at the end of one of my growls. The squishy sac retreated. “I can’t keep doing this,” I thought. “It’s too much.”

A droplet of water dripped from my hand with a “plink” into the pool. Little circles opened from the center. The spiral turned, and my turn was over. Only Cadence knew where we’d go next.

I breathed in. I breathed out.

What do you need? I asked.

A bloom of warmth opened like a delta from my core. My hands let go of the lining of the tub. I fell back down through roots into the cave.

“Take your time,” I murmured. “I’m here. I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

Another wave rushed toward me, and I didn’t fight this time. I was a doorway again, held open, and the ocean flowed through unimpeded.

I kept talking to Cadence, off and on. Aloud or in my head, I don’t remember. “This world is worth it,” I told them. “It hurts out here, but there are strawberries, and rain. You have to live to see them.”

And then, on some turning of the spiral—

A pop. A little bubble burst in my vagina. I could even hear it, the membrane breaking.

And with every push after that, Cadence descended.

Cadence’s head was out. “Show me,” I said, asking for the mirror to see them. “Show me.” The pushing had stopped, and I expected stillness for at least a few breaths.

But then: movement. Inside me, but not mine.

They were turning. Their body, turning, still half inside. They rotated to face the right direction. An alien sensation. A twisting in a space I thought was mine.

Their head looked like a hairy tennis ball.

With the next wave, the pushing happened on its own. It came like the sea through a broken dam, and Cadence slithered out into the water.

My midwife scooped them up, pressing them against my chest. They made a spasming clatter of cries, fighting to clear their lungs—and somehow, they were human. 

They had four rigid limbs, and a round head attached to a torso. What had I expected? Some kind of enormous octopus, I think. Not an entire tiny person.

“Hi!” I said, rubbing my hand against their back. “Hello!”

One week after birth, Cadence napped on my husband in the other room. My stomach was a sack of Jello. It sloshed and wobbled each time I turned over. I worried my organs may somehow spill out in a pile onto the sofa.

It was late afternoon, and sunlight dripped from the window, pooled on the hardwood floor. Oak leaves flickered, backlit, outlined in little halos.

I was a house with the roof blown off. Watching the clouds, waiting for rain. Not much shelter for anyone.

My head flattened a pillow against the couch arm, and my throat was getting tight. The grief hasn’t chosen a focus for today, but tears welled anyway, rolling like fog from the mouth of a cave.

The valley filled with it—sticky and dense, blocking out the sun for hours at a time. “Have I ruined my marriage?” I cried one day. “Will I plant another garden?” I sobbed the next. “Will I ever feel normal again?” I curled up, inconsolable. A wound gaped inside where the placenta was simply gone, and I could not carry my life like I had before.

Three weeks after birth, grief still rolled in, but the fog was not as thick, lifting in less than an hour. That day, I cried because life would go on. The days would stack like folded shirts, and things would be normal soon.

My nails dug into the skin of my thighs. I tore at them, as if it could keep the rupture open.

But houses must have roofs. Nobody can hold onto clouds forever.

The knowledge of labor rises from the past when needed, but it is elusive. It wraps itself in bubbles of time like burrowing owls in their dens. But I hear it at night, and in moments when I forget to be awake, hooting from somewhere underground. I go back, my ear to the earth, tracing each round of the spiral. I listen for echoes of its harmony that I may still have lost.

One echo comes back like this: 

Labor was better in the tub. The water was the same temperature as my skin, so I barely felt it—just weightlessness, and quiet. My body reclined against the cushioned plastic, arms draped along the rim, belly floating. My mind drifted in that cavernous lake far beneath the surface of the earth.

No one spoke. We were all suspended.

I wanted to hold this pause. To stretch it out, and tuck it up around me like a blanket.

Then I heard my midwife’s voice, gentle but firm: “Hey,” she said. “The contractions are getting farther apart. They were five minutes, and now they’re eight. It happens. People get comfortable in the water, and labor can slow, or stop. I think we should try to get things moving again.”

“Okay,” I said. “What can I do?”

She suggested a walk—out of the tub, out in the sun, around the driveway. I thought of the long crawl on hands and knees that got me here from the couch in the next room over, and the contraction that pinned me to the floor halfway through. Then I thought of dancing early on, the way I felt my body being moved, how certain motions made contractions build.

“I... I think I want to try stimulating them myself,” I murmured. “I think I might be able to do it here, in the water.”

“Okay,” she said. “You can give it a try.”

I closed my eyes. Soft hands. Soft face. Deep breath. I turned my attention to the sunless cave inside, where my body’s impulses echoed through the silence. I couldn’t control those instincts, but if I stopped holding onto the comfort, maybe I could let myself be moved.

Something pulled at the muscles in my pelvis, the way that lungs pull when the breath is held just a beat too long. I caught that pull like the fin of some giant fish much too large to fit inside this tub. I let it tug me, shifting forward, and found my body lifting up, rocking me back into gravity.

Heaviness returned. I felt my belly hanging again, rivulets trailing down across my skin, pressure on my pelvis. I began to lunge—one foot forward, the other back—circling my hips, winding tension in a coil through my core. Listening to the surges, but also to the dripping droplets in between.

The vice gripped. I sat back into the water—and that creature I was riding dove straight down. Black water over my head, pulling us way below the surface of any lake inside of any cave.

I rocked, tilted, rolled—figure eights on every plane, following an ancient rhythm through the dark.

We plunged through the water, through the layered zones of the ocean, and right to the floor of the abyss—then off a cliff and on down a trench: Blind and crushing, where the sea is hot, and the earth consumes itself in silence along a seam.

We all come here, at some point. It’s where we started, where Cadence had been this whole time, nestled up among archaea in the plumes. As a lightless mind at the seam of the earth, unconstrained by clarity or time, you can feel in your chest the rhythm of the world’s churning. 

And in this rhythm, I remembered: I was not a door. I was not fixed to any path. I knew, in the place beneath it all, that I was the ocean. That I had always been the flood.

“How’s my timing?” I murmured from the depths, and from the waves.

“Perfect,” my midwife told me. “You’re right on time.”

I’m walking, outside now and down through the tree shadows. I feel the path ahead of me more than I see it.

The moon never climbs very high in June. All night, it looms behind the Ponderosa tops, the glow witnessing through a pine needle veil.

I took First Communion at age seven, walking the aisle in a veil like a bride. “The Age of Reason”, my teachers called it, though it took me two more years to become an atheist.

At age two, Cadence is not yet reasonable. They cry because they want to leave the playground, but also to stay. They sprint before they’re steady, tumbling toward life like a kayak launched down the rapids. Sometimes after nightmares, they don’t seem to know that they were dreaming.

An owl hoots. I stop walking. I listen.

Tonight, I am a reasonable adult on my knees, clutching decomposing leaves with dust on my pajamas, and I’m praying to the trees to take me back.

(Back where? I forget, as usual. I am learning that all I can do is listen, and hope the night knows something that I don’t.)

In the day, I feel like a fern re-planted in a desert. Reaching for shadows that are gone. I hate that a day starts, goes on, and ends. I hate the way that things make sense, the way they’re solid and separate. This is real, and that is not, the dreaming sliced away by a laser.

Even now, as I glance behind me at the house, at the tiny nightlight through the window, I hate that I am separate from myself.

To be a person, you have to keep the ocean out. Make yourself coherent. It helps to sleep with a roof above your head.

I touch my forehead to the ground, my body curled like a baby in the womb, because midnight is a doorway. I wait here, pressed against the coolness of its silence—just in case the door decides to open.

Take your time, I whisper. I’m here. I’ll be here when you’re ready.

I lift my head, and breathe. I draw circles with my finger in the dirt.

The canopy in this black oak forest paints silhouettes, against the stars, of giant hands open to the sky. Their bodies sink thick tap roots down beneath the bedrock, into lakes that never touch the light.

The breeze picks up, and as I hear the rocking treetops, ancestral in their rhythm, the door dissolves—for a moment. 

And for that moment, stretching deep through time, I leave the path, and flood myself away into the night.