Shadow Face: Jessica Moore on the Dissolving Margins of Motherhood

“Sometimes my life opens its eyes in the dark.”
–Tomas Tranströmer, translated from the Swedish by Patricia Crane
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1. All through the winter, spring, and summer of my twins’ first year, I think about what it means to be so porous as a mother. The state of care and openness I sometimes feel, letting my edges go, sensing beyond myself, can be a sort of bliss. I hold baby S or baby A and close my eyes, lean my mind toward the invisible of them. Their essence. I sit in the backyard and breathe in the bergamot, let a channel open to the heavy, slow bees. Merging can be full of pleasure.

2. The character of Lila, in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, describes a different kind of porousness. Smarginatura, which suggests bleeding outside the frame, is a printer’s technical term that literally means to cut off the margins of a page. Ferrante uses it to gesture to something psychic, multiple; Goldstein translates this as “dissolving margins.” Lila first experiences this “malaise,” “a feeling of disintegration of mental and bodily boundaries,” on New Year’s Eve, standing on a crowded terrace in Naples as fireworks begin to explode. “She had the impression that something absolutely material, which had been present around her and around everyone and everything forever, but imperceptible, was breaking down the outlines of persons and things and revealing itself.” This other kind of porousness—a fragmenting, a rupture, in which she is threatened by “something absolutely material” hovering just below the surface—leaves her unhinged, terrorized.

3. In the second COVID-19 winter, I become swallowed by a suspenseful television series called Behind Her Eyes, which is, in part, about people who practise astral travel. Souls glide from room to room as shimmering lights and can even occupy another person’s body if their soul, too, is out wandering. I watch at arm’s length, drawn like a fluttering thing and simultaneously repelled. I can’t look away. Something familiar stirs.

4. For years, I’ve carried in the back of my mind a scene I once read (Was it Bachelard? Was it Proust?) of a living room gone strange. In it, the narrator, a child, comes down the stairs to find the familiar room transformed. Same chairs in the same positions, same clock ticking on the mantel. Nothing out of place, but the sense that everything is different. It haunts me. I push to recall where I first read it—I recognize that feeling. And I love the simplicity with which this writer (Who?) describes it. Green. Empty. The room exactly the same, yet undeniably other.

One of the swells in my book The Whole Singing Ocean leads to the lines “nothing so horrifying as something different / in the shape of someone you know.” When I wrote this, I was thinking about night terrors and transgression, and looking back, I can see: the prickling sense I knew intimately, the one that led me to write those words, is the fissure that let the green living room in.

5. This prickling sense fits the definition of Freud’s uncanny (unheimlich)—“that class of terrifying that leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” I come across this quote while reading Erin Wunker on mothers and their strangeness, their unknowable core, her own mother disappearing in the wee hours each morning into deep black water and swimming alone across the lake. In the original German, unheimlich opposes heimlich—literally “homey.” (Something interesting happens here with the prefix un—as Sherry Simon points out in her read- ing of Anne Carson’s Economy of the Unlost, “negation has the added advantage of economy.” The word unheimlich works double time, containing and conveying both the root word (heimlich) and its opposite. In Carson’s own words: “Two realities for the price of one.”) There is a loss in English of the direct parallel—uncanny/canny does not capture it—between something eerie and that which is cozy, familiar.

But heimlich also means secret, or hidden—the way the person we know best can hide so many faces.

Something different in the shape of someone you know.

6. At a traffic light on the way to preschool one morning, I tip the rear-view mirror down to see the twins in the back seat, both solemn (rainy day, scuffle getting out the door). Both cried about one thing or another, about my sharpness in the rush. I turn now to smile at A, and she says,

—Mama, sometimes when Mama smiles I feel sad. And sometimes when Mama feels sad, I smile.

It jolts me, this expression of the ways we are impacted by each other. I turn back to the road, catch her eye in the mirror.

—Are you sad now? I ask.

—No. Hey, I can see Mama’s eyes! Her gaze flicks between me and the mirror, and then she says,

—When Mama does that, Mama’s shadow face turns the other way! She corrects herself. Mama’s reflection.

But I’m haunted by this term, shadow face, and by the hidden mysteries of the people closest. What might they see in me that I don’t even know is there?

7. When I was a child, someone—my mother, I suppose—explained that alcohol alters people. She must have said this because I noticed people acting louder or alien at a party at our house. In any case, the way I understood it was that drinking made you a different person, as though, yes, a spirit were a thing in a bottle you could drink down or pour out. I remember scrutinizing my mother’s flushed and laughing face when she put me to bed at that party, waiting for the unfamiliar being to betray itself in some unsettling gesture or flicker of the eyes. Watching for that other person I knew she had become, light from the kitchen leaning in.

8. At the aquarium, in the relentlessness of March-break crowds, the blue dark and the rush of voices, the corridors down which S keeps nearly disappearing, corridors down which A clings staunchly to my hand, I miss nearly everything, attention shattered. I finally lure S in close with a snack, and when I turn to the nearest exhibit, I see the sea dragon. Feathery and slight, violet and brown. Fluted fins on its back sway in unseen currents; its whole body sways, drifting in ribbons of seaweed near the aquarium floor. How soothed I feel, watching. For brief seconds, with both children pressed against my legs, I tune out the harried, half-dark world and lean my forehead against the glass. The sea dragon, the plaque tells me, uses mainly passive locomotion, mostly is moved by currents around it.

9. There are times when, in the fray of S and A, in the stream of them, both talking while they clamber over me, pulling in different directions, saying Mama, Mama, louder and louder, I wonder who (and if?) I am. If I exist beyond the desires of my children. Is the sea dragon without desire? Is such submission to be aspired to? Or is the comfort I felt with my head pressed to the glass only the false comfort of surrendering what’s true, what’s mine? (The wedge-shaped core of darkness within, as described by Virginia Woolf ’s matriarch in To the Lighthouse: my deep treasure.) In the same way my organs were shouldered aside during pregnancy—dislocated, rearranged—so do I feel in this constant current of my two small people. I have to fight to hold on to my own will, my own self.

Fragmented. Sidelined. And is there fear here? Is there, perhaps, a long-toothed thing lurking nearby? A devouring thing—dark, eating, edgeless.

10. “Ah, . . . to no longer hear the demands of their flesh as commands more pressing, more powerful than those which came from mine,” writes Goldstein in her translation of Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter.

11. Long before the twins, I went to Golden Lake with a beautiful, golden man. We had met on a farm in the heat of July, kneeling among the brassicas. We inched closer as the harvesting days went on. Grew sharp as blades in our desire, walked an edge of my making: I set limits, I’m not totally sure I could explain why, except it was a time in my life when I was trying in concrete ways to keep certain parts of myself to myself.

The golden man knew a herbalist near Golden Lake. When we’d arrived that afternoon, rumpled, hot, I’d been unsure of the dog and the dog had been unsure of me, nosing my hand and skittering back, deep black and watchful. The herbalist led us to the barn where we would sleep. Leaves of sweet gale, laid out to dry, covered the floor of the loft. Sweet gale is said to help with lucid dreaming. Before we went to sleep that night, under the mosquito net, we blurred our edges, made a pact to try to meet in dreams.

12. One of the characters in the television series with traveling souls is the child of a single mother. He doesn’t know what she’s up to, learning to leave her body. He’s only eight. Sometimes while I’m watching, a flicker begins in my belly and my legs twitch as though the ground beneath me is not to be trusted. Nothing is sure. The series builds to a bottoming-out reveal: the person we understood to be the main character throughout was, in fact, someone else. And now, although the single mother’s body, face, and eyes are still here, she herself is gone. Her child is in the care of something different.

13. The knife made me porous in a perilous way, and they pumped poisons into my veins to protect me. I was made dangerously permeable so my babies could be born.

Just before I went into the room with the knife, when they’d tried and failed three times to place the epidural, I experienced a moment beyond myself. I was offered a gas to breathe, and I took it. I inhaled and rose up, up, feeling something eagle-like lifting me, something strong and airborne, and it wasn’t that I couldn’t feel the long needle piercing that most tender column of nerves, it wasn’t that I didn’t know pain—it was only that, up there, I didn’t care. I was winged, I was elsewhere.

14. The golden man and I kissed and kissed, turning liquid. Another kind of dissolving, another counterpoint to smarginatura, molten and willed. His fingers left long bruises on my thighs. We came to the edge. After, when he was asleep, I lay listening to the outside singing, the wild orchestra of summer. I wandered in that state between waking and sleeping until I crossed over and then, sometime later, surfaced sharply into the blackest of black. I couldn’t even see the mosquito net. I’d been having the clearest sensation—ebullient!—of being cradled in the vast dear space between stars and then, all at once, flipped upside down. It was so surprising I let out a sound—ha!

15. —Is Mama ever scared Mama will turn into a green dragon?

A and I are walking hand in hand back from the lake. My eyes grow wide.

—No, I say.

I’m scared all the time that I will disintegrate, become lost in the streaming debris of all that’s asked of me, every day, but I have not been afraid that something else—something monstrous—will appear in my place.

—Are you sometimes scared of that? I ask, and she says,

—Yes.

—When are you scared of that?

—When Mama’s eyes are green.

My eyes are always green.

16. For Lila, there is a way in which we as human beings are “insufficient,” and the entity that waits beneath the surface is the most real of all. “It was—she told me—as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light.” Here is the image that has remained with me: a shadowed shape moving closer from a far horizon. In my mind, there is a woman alone watching it, and she is standing at the edge of her desire.

17. We stave off TV for as long as we can, but when the twins are three and we are desperate to sleep in, at least some of the time, we download a season of the original Scooby-Doo. With bleary eyes, we set up the computer for them at 5:30 a.m., then stumble back to bed. The mystery gang of five cartoon characters solves a case each episode, laugh track hahahaing in the background, and through the show’s formulaic denouement, the phantom, ghoul, or monster is always revealed to be a minor character. Every time, one of the members of the gang reaches out a hand from offscreen and lifts the mask, and every time, the villain is someone they know.

—Can we watch a Scoob? whispers S before first light.

They race to the couch and huddle together. A sits still, attentive, hands held close to her body as the spooky tale begins, but S is soon bouncing up and down, the sensations inside him too big to contain.

18. Waking into the blackest of black is like not really waking at all. It’s like being in the depths of yourself, floating somewhere behind your eyes. That night in the barn, when I woke to the sound of my own voice, I used touch instead of sight. My hands found the edge of the net and then the floor with its carpet of drying leaves. My feet nudged the leaves aside until they felt the trap door, where I lowered myself down the ladder. Like moving through water, ink. Outside the open barn door, my toes touched the grass, the lush silver-green feel of it. Shapes, barely there, of outbuildings, trees. I crouched and peed, and from the dark came a shape, blacker than night, bearing down upon me. (Was this what Lila felt?)

A thin lick of fear spread up the centre of my chest but there was no time to react or evade the dark thing coming. The black dog traced a circle around me, sniffing the ground I had marked.

19. When I learned that entities could attach onto people during surgeries, coming in through the knife opening, I was afraid. I looked back over the two years since the twins were born and saw all the ways we were cursed. In those ragged hours, I wasn’t seeing the countless gifts, the care, the meals and myriad arms. Instead, my night-mind whirred with wronging: the eviction, the hospital’s indifference, the fights with friends, some of whom I lost for good. I was seeing the anger, new and swift, a fierce mass that loped through me without warning, blotting out the moon.

20. In a search for reflections on Woolf’s portrayal of motherhood in To the Lighthouse, I stumble across the piece that holds the un/familiar room. Anne Carson. Of course it is Anne Carson! In her essay, “Every Exit Is an Entrance,” she describes her earliest memory, which is of a dream she had when she was about three years old. She comes down the stairs to find the living room looking exactly as it always had, “and yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad.”

What she describes is so known to me, so within myself, that either she is drawing upon something larger than her, collective and spreading, or else I have absorbed the words and sensations of someone else into my own being. The green living room is alive in me too.

“There is in her work a persistent consciousness of intruding realities,” writes Simon. “We are directed to the place where the shadow’s edge joins the black of night, reminded always that surfaces have seams, an underlife.”

21. In the morning, I told the golden man about the feeling of being flipped upside down, and the sense I’d had that there was a trick to it, that I had been on the verge of getting beyond myself.

I had a feeling he would have something to say, he who proclaimed to be a bodhisattva. (Are you allowed to call yourself that? I wondered. And here I thought he was just a boy from Burlington.) He said astral travel usually involves a reversal: at the moment of exiting the body, people nearly always report a sensation of being turned upside down.

—You almost got there, he said.

22. Lying between the twins at bedtime, I feel S’s body begin to release into that other space, his eyelids already too heavy to keep open. But A is awake with the story I just finished telling—an Irish changeling tale—and now fairies who would steal a human baby and leave one of their own in its place are running through our minds. Parts of my childhood are woven of images from a song, the one made of a Yeats poem about a child spirited away, “Where the wandering water gushes / From the hills above Glen-Car . . . Come away, o human child! / To the waters and the wild,” and I sing it now to my own two human children before they cross over into dreams.

—One day can we go to Glen-Car? asks A, her head resting on my shoulder, her hand holding my hand firmly against her belly, as though asking me to pin her here.

23. I’m always waiting for something completely unthought of to tumble out of me, for these words I’ve written to transmute and expand, become other—leaving a changeling child in their place. Greater than anything I could have conceived of. Greater than me.

24. The winter I was pregnant, I had somehow separated from myself, fragmented, as though I were standing somewhere behind my life. A new kind of darkness formed. Not because I was pregnant, but its threat made more urgent by the imminence of two people I already wanted to protect. Something in me was stuck, the wedge-shaped core webbed over, untended, and rather than a fortress or a retreat, I found myself in a state of over-porousness. I had no edges; everything hurt. But also, porousness was the only thing that gave any comfort. I would drag myself from bed late in the mornings and walk to the boardwalk where I melted into that one cradling tree (branches like a hand strong enough to hold me) for the temporary relief of being nothing, cold waves against the breakwater, gulls screaming overhead.

How I wanted to rush rush rush to fix my sadness. How can you shield someone who’s inside you from what’s inside you?

25. And then, in the midst of all that darkness, a moment like a lamp—

26. In March of that edgeless winter, something came to wake me in the depths of night. Before I’d even opened my eyes, I felt it. In the centre of my chest. A warmth, a light.

I’d heard of the old hag who comes to sit on your chest in the night and suffocate you. I’d even felt her once, in a winter long before. But this, the hag’s opposite, never. Joy radiating out from me and sending bright warm rays into the darkness before I remembered the grey. Joy like a hand shaking me, saying, Look, look! Wake up! There’s this too.

27. In thinking of Lila’s “dissolving margins,” I’m reminded of Luce Irigaray and her writings on women and leakiness. I remember the relief, the giddiness I felt at nineteen, sitting on the steps outside the university lecture hall on a windswept day reading the words “deux lèvres qui se touchent” (“two lips caressing each other”—the labia) and her thoughts on fluidity and leaking—literally, in the form of breast milk, menstrual and amniotic fluid—after the long, dry, masculine desert of a first-year survey course of Western philosophy. Irigaray, it seemed to me, poked gleefully at the notion that women cannot be trusted because they are constantly spilling over, open to the world. Porous.

Are we, as mothers I mean, meant to have no boundaries?

28. When I go looking for what precisely Irigaray wrote about women and leakiness, I find an article with this sentence: “The feminine cannot be known as feminine (as sexuate difference) within a phallogocentric logic because this logic is predicated on rigid and static forms, solid truth and knowable entities [my emphasis].” A shiver goes through me. Because, in addition to whatever shifting, fluid truth was mine already, the alteration that comes with motherhood is unutterable.

29. Who is this new woman? What does she share with the one who came before? I know we’re not meant to be finite or fixed. In Tomas Tranströmer’s poem “Romanska bågar” (Romanesque arches), the vaults of a church offer an eloquent metaphor for the endless chambers contained within each human being. “Valv gapande bakom valv” (“Vault opening behind vault”—Robert Bly’s translation, or “Vault gaping behind vault”—Robin Fulton’s translation): Tranströmer and his translators saw the massive, the manifold of us.

I myself wrote, “I am changed, I am multiple,” after becoming a mother. There’s something slippery to it, though, a slippage of surety, of something to hold on to.

30. I know A was seeing something true when she said, “Mama’s shadow face.” And I believe Lila is right, and Sherry Simon in her reading of Anne Carson as well: there is an underlife, a shadow pressing behind every person and room, an other in the shape of whom and what we know.

“Now that we were mothers,” writes Deborah Levy with almost quizzical incredulity,

we were all shadows of our former selves, chased by the women we used to be before we had children. We didn’t really know what to do with her, this fierce, independent young woman who followed us about, shouting and pointing the finger while we wheeled our buggies in the English rain . . . We did not have the language to explain that we were not women who had merely “acquired” some children—we had metamorphosed . . . into someone we did not entirely understand.

31. I hold both the shadow and the lamp. Who—or what—else might live inside me, now?

For a time I contained three hearts.

32. Sometimes my life opens its eyes in the dark.

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This essay was originally published in Brick, A Literary Journal issue 112.