The Home I Know: Anatomy
Chapter 2
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Chapter 2: Anatomy
For nine months, I grew in the suspended fluid of my mother’s womb. Then, one week past my due date, on July 11th an OB/GYN named Abraham caught me between my mother’s legs and placed me on her skin. Then he kissed her on the lips and said:
“She is the most beautiful baby girl I have ever seen.”
Instantly, I became part of a family. My father’s first name was Timothy Jr., as his father was Timothy Sr. My oldest brother’s name was Timothy III, but he came to be known as “Timmy.” The surname of my grandfather, then my father — which nodded to Mars, the Roman God of War — was passed down to me.
My mother’s name was Elaine. With her second child and first girl, her growing family became a closer reflection of her biggest dream. As she held me to her breast for my first feeding, she called me by name: “Anne Marie.” Anne means “Favored One,” while Marie means “Rebellion.” Seemingly healthy and whole, my parents drove me — the Favored Rebellion to the God of War — home to their property on Bunya St., while my father groaned:
“What am I going to do with a girl?”
~ ~ ~
I quickly took to my mother’s breast and grew to be quite chunky, but soon developed a dangerous pooping peril. I ate plenty, but could barely pass the stool through my tiny body. So my belly bloated as it filled with food-trash and gas. My frequent flatulence smelt so bad that I would often be handed back and forth between family members, so the last carrier could literally take a breather.
After six months of my parents passing me between priests and physicians for healing, as well as a few bouts of starvation and biopsies of my large intestine, doctors finally diagnosed me with Hirschbrung’s Disease: a condition of the large colon where the cells meant to move waste through do not function. Instead, the stool gets stuck and can possibly lead to a blow out, which would make quite the mess at best, or a blow up of the large colon, which would end in death.
So at six months old, surgeons cut open my tiny belly with a slit from my left hip to my navel. They snipped out the section of my large colon that refused to function, attached the operating end to my rectum, and sewed me back up. Before they were done, the physicians noticed the fusion of the lips of my labia, so they sliced the skin from one piece into two. Then they passed me back to my father and shared the news.
“What? I didn’t tell you to fix that!” He screamed angrily. “I had prayed for her labia to be fused!”
The doctors gazed at him confused, then walked away to attend to the other patients of the day. A few weeks after I returned home from the surgery, my father sat with a friend in the living room downstairs when he felt a strange intuitive nudge that he needed to check on me. He found my body shaking violently in the crib, so he immediately rushed me to the hospital. There, the doctor’s hands held me once more, as I calmed after my first brain storm: a grand mal seizure.
Then over and over again, every six months or so for the next five years, my body trembled and my mouth foamed. Sometimes at home, but often in the car, my limbs shook while my chest pushed against the tight straps of the seat. In terror, my mother cried while honking the horn vigorously, then quickly drove me to the nearest emergency room and handed me back to the doctors who labored to figure out what was wrong with me. Eventually, they called it Idiopathic Epilepsy.
The local pediatrician Dr. David took a special interest in my mother and me. As medicine for a six month old seizing was still experimental in the medical community, Dr. David tried to treat me using a number of methods including shots of Valium right into the rear end. He taught my mother how to administer the medicine herself.
My first birthday passed, then a half a year later my mother birthed my second brother, Josiah. Eventually, in order to help my mother manage my siblings, my disease, and me, my father hired a live-in German nanny. Quickly at just 18, Gertrude became another member of our family. She, tall and blond with sun-kissed skin, arrived when I was just two and a half or so. Her stuff filled the guest room downstairs, and her daytimes with childcare. But in the evenings, she was free to party. So she did. With wildness and whimsy, she returned late into the nights and on the weekends after spending time with dates and friends. Daily, I watched her shyly and curiously from behind the knees of my mother.
Gertrude, too, kept watch over me in case I began to seize. After I learned to speak and became more aware of my body, I could anticipate what was happening.
“Mommy?…Gertrude?” I began, “I don’t feel good. I need to lay down.”
This was their cue. Gertrude gathered my brothers, while my mother ran to the medicine cabinet, grabbed the Valium out of the cupboard, pulled the fluid into the syringe, asked me to lay on my belly, pulled down my pants, then poked the needle into my rear end. But often, her shaking hand, weary mind, and hurting heart restricted her from using enough force to actually puncture the skin.
“It’s okay, mommy,” I soothed her. “You won’t hurt me.”
She tried again and found success the second time. Sometimes the medicine settled my system enough to avoid the seizure, while other times she and I continued our usual ritual by driving to the nearest hospital, passing my body back to the physicians, and asking the priests for prayers. Word of my illness spread around our Catholic congregation. So every time I seized and threw my family into another state of emergency, the church community left food on the doorstep, mailed cards wishing me well, or called to offer babysitting help for my older and eventually younger brothers.
At home, everyone’s eyes always followed me, watching for the next episode. There were no locks on the doors inside the house, even the bathrooms. I couldn’t wear underwear to bed because I had frequent vaginal infections. Someone was always with me, someone was always watching, someone could barge into a room whenever they wanted all for the purpose of safety. Then, a particularly extreme grand mal seizure took hold of my brain and shook my body for hours. My mother, understandably worn from the work to sustain my life, rushed me to the hospital and prayed to the Mother of Jesus for help.
“Mary, please, heal her here or take her from me. I can’t do this anymore.”
I recovered and finally the seizures stopped. By five, I was still alive due to the creative exploration of doctors, prayers at the pulpit, the generosity of a congregation, and the fortification of family. The only memories I retained from these early years of my life marked my body.
During group showers when we were all still young, my father, mother, brothers, and I piled into my parent’s large bathroom, stripped to our birthday suits, and showered as efficiently as a young family could. I stared at their bodies then back at mine and could see the subtleties. When I asked my mother questions about the permanent lines that stretched within the insides of my arms and ankle, my bruised front tooth, and the scar between my navel and my left hip, she answered with my own forgotten stories: the surgery, the seizures, and the breathing and feeding tubes.
“You are a miracle,” she said. “God saved you for a reason. He has great plans for you.”
But there were other differences between our bodies too. Although my brothers’ shapes and mine matched mostly from the waist up, for some reason I had to keep my top covered when not showering, while they could go nipple-free around the house or by the beach and pool. Also, my brothers had these body parts called penises. With them, they could do so many cool things: stand up while they peed, or pee in public behind a tree, or bend over without being scolded, or wear shorts and pants constantly to climb trees without worrying about revealing their undies. Their skin sticks seemed to offer them freedoms that my private part did not.
“Mommy,” I asked. Why don’t I have a penis?”
“You do, Annie,” she explained. “It’s just up inside of you.”
My body grew. Eventually, an animated film taught my sixth grade peers and me about basic sexual anatomy and body odor. I learned the anatomically correct language of my sex organs: labia, vulva, vagina, uterus, fallopian tubes, ovaries. In conversations with cousins and friends, we explored themes of menstruation and baby-making. But none of these lessons taught in locker rooms or at the lunch table, through cartoons or car rides, adequately prepared me for the realities of teenage life.
“Mom, something brown is in my underwear,” I walked into her bedroom concerned at 14.
“Oh, that’s your period, Annie,” she began to cry.
“Why are you crying?” I asked her confused.
“My baby’s growing up,” she wept. “You can have babies now.”
My body continued to change, to reshape itself as my breasts barely swelled and suddenly I became very aware that I had hip bones. My once flawless skin now erupted in acne, which I couldn’t help but pick at incessantly. The consistency of my mental state now pendulated depending on the time of the month. Worried thoughts about my appearance and other people’s perceptions of me became obsessions. My mood dropped drastically week to week, often manifesting in deep shame and self-blame. The simplicity of managing my prepubescent body changed, as I now carried pads with me all day. Swimming in the pool became complicated, as I needed to insert something inside of me to keep from bleeding through my swimsuit.
My mother stood on the other side of the bathroom door, while I played with the tampon by practicing pushing the stringed-cotton-cylinder out of the cardboard casing. It was time to enter myself for the very first time, and I felt flooded with fear.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” I heard my mother say. “You just stick it up there.”
So I pressed the casing to where I understood my vagina to be and pushed. Pain shot through my body, as the cotton separated from the cardboard. Tears fell from my eyes when, for the first time, I was all too aware of that feeling that something was up inside of me and stayed there.
