The Shadow Mountain

There is a video of a polar explorer I’ve watched many times. His beard is frosted, his blond hair wild and clumped with ice. Enormous goggles cover half of his face. On the tail end of a three-month solo expedition across Antarctica, he discovers a cache of food he’d left for himself on the way out. He doesn’t remember what’s inside. It’s likely he hallucinated out there on the ice; when there is nothing to look at but white earth and white sky, your brain finds ways to fill the void. But the cache is real. He opens it.

He pulls out Cheez Doodles and erupts in full-bodied and unrestrained joy. He is completely overcome—whooping, laughing, giddy. He tosses the bag in the air and keeps digging. More laughter tumbles out of him when he discovers Mentos and colorful candies. Watching him celebrate all alone out there, I marvel at the human spirit. It makes me hungry, too.

I hunger for that kind of joy. And I suspect it can only be found in the liminal space of what the human heart and body can handle.

Perhaps that’s why I became a mother. After years of being afraid of what the future world would look like for a child—the worsening floods and wildfires, the greedy and cruel amassing more power, the wars—I finally conceded to a suspicion that beyond the pain of all that, there is something bigger and worthwhile. Perhaps that is also why I run.

 

At the starting line, we jitter as one. Bodies fold in half and reach for the clouds. Spandex shines and sneakers bounce. We can’t see the volcano from here. But through the trees, up and over the boulders birthed by an eruption that obliterated a thousand feet of earth, Mount St. Helens looms like a mother, waiting for us to circle her with reverence, to feel the pain she holds in the slope of her shoulders.

A tall man with a big smile climbs onto a platform and starts talking into a mic. As a group, we are clumped and scattered like spilled beads. Then slowly, as he talks and the clock ticks closer to the starting time, it’s like a string sewn through us is slowly pulled taut. Now, we are together and still.

He tells us that once we start, there’s no going back. You’re better off pushing through whatever happens out there; you'll have to hike out either way. Then he laughs and tells us that we’re all going to be in a “world of hurt” when we’re done. My heart shimmers at the thought.

 

People said pregnancy in the summertime would be miserable, but I loved it.

At thirty-three weeks, the sun was hot, and I was grateful after a long, wet spring. I sat on the front stoop and marveled at the roundness of my belly; it was hard to believe it would keep growing for another two months. I threw the ball for the dog. He brought it back. I threw it again. Soaking in the heat, the weight, the expansiveness of myself beneath a big blue sky, I couldn’t help but smile. I felt like the sky.

The beauty of the day made it easy to ignore the gentle tightening in my belly. My doctor said not to worry: False labor. But gradually, it became more distinct. Around dinner time, I decided to call the advice nurse. Just to be cautious, like mothers should be. I told her it didn’t hurt. The tightening was not regular or consistent. But, well, yes, there had been the tiniest spot of blood.

There was urgency in her voice when she said I needed to come in right away. How quickly could I get there? I was calm and a little apologetic when I told my husband, Jacob, about the call. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” is what I said and mostly believed. I’d already been sent to the hospital twice for monitoring and then sent home. “But we need to go in again.”

I told him not to bother with the overnight bag. He threw it in the backseat anyway. As I stared out the window at a blur of freeway, he pressed deep into the gas pedal like he was trying to hold on to the Earth.

 

On clear days, Mount St. Helens is visible from my home in Northeast Portland. I’d catch glimpses of its flat white top while walking endless loops around the neighborhood with my daughter strapped to my chest.

About a year and a half after she was born, I started to miss the discipline of a running routine. On our walks, I found myself looking for the mountain through the space between houses and trees. The Volcanic 50 takes place annually in August. It was a run I’d had my eye on for years—thirty-three miles around the base of Mount St. Helens—a distance I knew well, but with elevation and terrain that tipped it outside of my comfort zone. It was perfect.

“Of course you should do it!” said my husband, brimming with support when I brought it up.

So I started training, leaving the baby who was now a toddler at home with her dad on Saturday mornings. He said he didn’t mind, but he worked on Sundays, so this was the only full day we could spend together as a family. Guilt and suspicion would follow me to the trailhead. Was I selfish? Was he mad?

Like a suspected witch banished by the townspeople, I’d enter the woods and the shade of the trees would quiet my worried thoughts. Sometimes, it felt like I didn’t know myself outside of this forest anymore. But there I was all feet and legs, arms and breath. More belly and thighs than the last time I was training for a big run. But no matter. One foot in front of the other. A constant propulsion forward and away.

 

At the hospital, Jacob fell asleep on the couch while I watched some late-night show with the volume down low. The room was dark except for the TV and a small warm light over a tiny bed in the corner of the room. At some point, my eyes grew heavy, and I thought I might sleep, but that’s when the tightening became undeniable contractions. Lying on one side made them yank on my other side, and I tossed and turned until I couldn’t help but groan. Jacob woke up, and I said we should ask the nurse if they could stop labor once it started. It was too soon! Shouldn’t they try to stop this? 

Our nurse only came to the room when the bands around my belly slipped out of place. I hadn’t wanted this kind of monitoring during labor. My plan had been to move around as much as possible, to stretch, dance, work through the pain in different positions. But at thirty-three weeks, this was now a high-risk labor, and I was tethered to straps and screens to monitor my contractions and the baby’s heartbeat.

“You must be moving around,” the nurse said when she entered, as if I was meant to be still while my insides were pulled and pummeled.

I looked at her with hopeful desperation. Maybe this time she would offer me comfort, encouragement, advice. I wanted her to call me honey and put a cold washcloth on my forehead, but she only nodded at my descriptions of the pain, wrote down some notes, and left.

 

Around mile five, the trees spit us out into a boulder field beneath a cloudless sky. The term “boulder field” is deceptive because fields are generally flat, but this terrain is very steep, an uneven staircase in every direction. I bounce from rock to rock, my animal brain somehow sensing the direction my ankles and knees should pivot to stabilize the rest of my body. My arms sway in careful, bent calibration at my sides.

I feel like I’m flying. Nobody ever said flying was easy, but there is true bliss in the effort. My exposed skin is pink from wind, sun, and exertion, like I am brand new to this earth. Every so often, I giggle to myself.

You can’t see the shape of the volcano when you’re on it. But also, it’s everything. It is soft dirt and hard rock, bright wildflowers and silty streams. As I bounce and fly, my eyes are constantly sweeping the surface, and I know that somewhere inside, this volcano is churning, smoking, and waiting for another day when the fury of its power is revealed.

 

The hours of labor were increasingly desperate and removed from reality, like the minute hand was spinning wildly around the clock while the hour hand stood still. When did I get in the tub?

The photo Jacob took of me in the water is the only clear image I can still grasp. In it, my elbow is on the porcelain edge, my hand is on my forehead, and my hair is pulled up in a messy knot, all lit by the orange glow of those battery-operated candles I’d bought at Target less than twenty-four hours earlier. The photo is peaceful, as if everything was going as planned.

 

By the time I reach the finish line, this will be the longest I’ve ever spent on my feet. It’s an unfathomable space for my thoughts, no longer tethered to a nap schedule or the hunger and whims of a tiny person who wants everything and nothing at once. So many hours without watching and worrying, hands ready to catch her from falling into a corner and cracking her head open. Out here, I am the only one who can fall. How indulgent.

Around mile eight my knee started to ache. Now at mile twelve, my back is on fire and distracting me from the knee pain. I’m not even halfway done.

It’s also beautiful. The trail bends away from the mountain for miles, turns grassy and gold, and then I can make out the blast site, the broken top that exploded into the sky nearly fifty years ago. I stare at the gray face, its gaping mouth a geologic scream. My pain is a blip of time, a grain of sand, compared to everything this mountain has been through.

 

When my doula had me practice vocalizing through contractions, I felt silly, a little embarrassed even. Now it was all very real, and low moans flowed out of me like water down the drain. Easy, whooshing, unstoppable.

I started wishing someone would suggest the epidural again, even though I’d insisted I didn’t want one. I’d been unsure of many things during pregnancy—names, wallpaper options, whether or not I should feel guilty about a glass of wine—but the decision to forgo an epidural was a confident one, back when anything at all made sense. I wanted to be fully present, to experience the pain of childbirth so the joy would not be dulled. And now that all seemed a little absurd.

Softly, sadly, I said to Jacob: “Maybe I should just get the epidural? None of this is going how we planned anyways.” He said nothing, only squeezed my hand tighter because that is what I said I wanted from him so long ago when I thought we had a plan. Rage rose in my chest to fill the silence. But I did not ask for the epidural. I only squeezed his hand back and waded into another pool of pain.

A doctor I didn’t know knelt at my feet, behind the tent of my shaking knees, to check my cervix. It was time to go to the operating room. I didn’t need a c-section, but the OR was the closest room to the NICU, and the baby would need to go there because her lungs might not be ready to breathe. I was not ready to breathe. The air in the room was suddenly hot and thick, and then I was rolling forward with nurses on either side, out of the dim room and into a bright hallway where other people existed, on stretchers, behind desks, sitting on plastic chairs. I closed my eyes and prayed, even though I do not pray, to make it to the next room before a contraction crashed into me in front of all these strangers. No one wanted to hear me scream.

 

They are coming to the finish line, Jacob and my daughter. That was the plan, anyway. But also, I didn’t know what time to tell him, and I still have so many miles to go. How many more? Five? Six? I can barely walk, let alone run, at this point. They probably won’t be there. They probably came and left, and that would be totally understandable because she’s a toddler, and she can’t just hang out in the woods, waiting all day for her mom to run around a mountain.

My legs feel like dead wood. My stomach is empty and twisted. My eyes burn with salt. I try to text Jacob to see if he’s still at the finish line, to give him some idea of when I might be there, but there’s no service out here.

I stop. My legs are shaking. I place one hand on a large boulder and lean toward it, hanging my head. Another runner is sitting nearby. He retches for a minute, then keeps going.

I will finish this race. There is no other option. I pull an arm across my body, then the other, trying to wrench apart the pain in my back.

I want so badly to be done. So badly want to see their faces. I start moving forward again, one foot in front of the other.

And then I am back in the forest. Which means, I think, that I’m almost there. We started in the forest, and we will end there, too.

 

The contractions came in waves, like everyone says. But I hadn’t realized the “wave” metaphor was meant to imply drowning. Do you remember the feeling of swimming in the ocean when you were little, when the waves got too big? How they crashed over your head and sent you tumbling again and again, too quickly to catch your breath? Now the waves were crashing inside of me, heavy knives floating in the water that churned through my back and my gut and my veins.

The lights of the operating room were screaming bright. More doctors arrived and they all seemed urgently busy with something involving me. It was then that I knew I had to leave. I needed to go somewhere far from the light and from all the eyes peering over their surgical masks, away from all the sterile white and glinting metal. So I closed my eyes and descended—down, down, down—to a place that was very dark, where suddenly, I was not afraid. In this place, there was logic and peace, and I could hear myself think. She is almost here.

It was time to push, and I was so relieved to hear another voice in that dark place. It wasn’t Jacob. It wasn’t the doctor. It wasn’t me—but also, it kind of was me. The voice was steady and strong, and it pulled forth some energy I didn’t know I still had. You’re just fine, it said. You have more left to give. And I knew the voice was right.

I pushed and growled and cried, but everything was muffled and softer down in the dark place where the voice and I knew we had everything under control. I gasped, pushed, howled, pushed again—and even though it hurt in a way that felt like dying, it also felt okay.

And just as the seams between the two worlds began to falter, as light bled into dark, I cried out once more and then I came up up up, and the screaming wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from her. The knives were gone and the water was warm and receding and the doctor laid her on my stomach and she looked up at me blinking and stoic because she’d just come out of the dark place, too.

She was okay. In that moment, we were both okay.

 

People want to hear about the mountain you climbed while giving birth, up and over the pain and fear, to arrive on stable ground.

I want to give them that. A mountain is big and knowable, and it feels good when people know your story. But I did not go up and over anything. I cracked open, and the Earth cracked open, and I retreated down into a quiet conviction I didn’t know existed until I met another version of myself there. Hello.

In the months that followed her birth, I would go to that place sometimes. But the voice was harder to find. It was harder to descend away from the light because she was in the lit place, and a part of me never wanted to leave her. A part of me never did.

In the lit place, she was confined to a little clear crib in an all-white room, getting fed by a tube that was surgically placed in her belly because her esophagus wasn’t attached to her stomach. Another tube, alarmingly fat and red, was placed down her throat to suction the saliva she couldn’t swallow. The nurses would help us hold her, and often the tube would slip out of place and she’d writhe in discomfort. Six weeks after she was born, she was big enough for surgery. It went well, but days later there was a terrible complication that wasn’t caught for hours while her chest cavity filled with fluid. As we begged the doctors to administer more tests—something wasn't right—her face twisted into silent, geologic screams, and I wanted to die. This pain was pointless, and there was nothing I could do to make it stop.

 

Finally I can see the end, where the fading rays of sun break through the trees. People are there, waiting for me. Strangers in their shorts and salt-stained hats, blood on their knees, dried rivers of dirt running down their shins. They’re all clapping and cheering.

Where are they? Her straw-gold hair, his salt and pepper, his thick glasses and soft smile, their matching eyes. I scan heads quickly as the finish line approaches. And then, just as I cross it, I see them. He meets me as my legs slow to a trembling stop. Then he’s holding me as the last bit of strength falls through my feet and into the Earth. She’s in the carrier on his back, smiling and waving. “Mommy!”

 

Sometimes, I wonder how to get back to the deep sense of assuredness I found on the day of her birth. When I’m washing dishes for the umpteenth time and she’s pulling on my pants, wanting to play. When I’m sitting on the floor of her room stacking blocks—she loves to knock them over, again and again. This time is precious, yes, but I’m tired of stacking blocks so she can knock them over and stacking them up so she can knock them over. I’m tired of pulling more cold laundry out of the dryer with wrinkles that won’t fall out unless I tumble them for a third time on high; my god, the electric bill is outrageous. I haven’t run in days.

And then she says, “Come, Mommy!” curling her chubby fingers at me. I go to her, and she puts her soft little hand in mine; she wants to run in circles around the living room, and there it is. My heart shimmers and rises in my chest the tiniest bit. She giggles and squeals, and then I can hear that faraway voice telling me it’s all going to be okay—everything is just fine. I run with her around the coffee table, around and around and around and around and around and around. Then we sit on the ground breathless as the world spins around us; I stare at her perfect little face, and marvel at her big bright smile and her eyes, the color of sun breaking through the trees. Together we laugh and laugh. After a minute she says “eat?” and I pick myself up to go find her a snack.

Tags

Pain, labor, parenthood, joy, running