blue corn.

big drum belly in the desert....mama mattie, 37 weeks, in ojitos canyon

My pregnancy was precarious.   Far from the natural, sweet ripeness I had imagined pregnancy to be, mine was medical, torturous, and dangerous.  I had Hyperemesis Gravidarum, and I vomited upwards of 20 times per day.  I was so nauseous that the normally imperceptible padding of Itty Bitty Kitty’s soft sauntering across the wood floors felt like capsizing waves.  Noise, light, movement, touch, smells…every sense was taut and tight as a trigger.  My throat bled constantly, a thin trickle that tasted rusty, horrible.  I had a mask of broken capillaries around my eyes, and the whites of my eyes were blood red with broken blood vessels from the violence of the vomiting.  I was hospitalized, had home health nursing care, drug cocktails, IVs, and a drug pump installed in my thigh for continuous anti-nausea and anti-vomiting medication.  I tried acupuncture, herbs, cranial sacral and kinesiology treatments, homeopathic remedies and chiropractic adjustments.   I re-cracked a rib in my second trimester; it was an old horseback riding injury that opened up again from the pressure of the baby and the force of the vomiting.  I didn’t know vomiting could get any worse, but it did–I almost passed out from the rib pain each time.  I was dehydrated and malnourished, gray and uneven, bony.  Most definitely not glowing and ripe.

Our families were scared, holding their collective breath; this had not ended well with previous pregnancies, due to Hyperemesis.  After losing our first baby in the second trimester, in a violent hemorrhaging loss, the doctor had advised me against getting pregnant again within 6 months to a year–she said I could die.  She made me promise to wait.  We did, and then had another miscarriage.  When we announced my pregnancy with Maizie, Tadz’s mom had a bracelet made that reads simply, “Hope” on little white beads.

The Hyperemesis loosened its grip on me around 6 months into the pregnancy, though I was still very sick.  As soon as I could be upright, instead of laying next to the toilet in the darkness, I wanted to walk in the desert, in the light, behind our house.  I was still vomiting every day, sometimes 10 times per day or more, still on bedrest, but I felt different.  The first day I tried to walk, I could barely make it to the gate.  I got a little further each day, but I was so weak for so long I would often have to lay down, under a juniper tree’s shade, watching the light shift on Black Mesa, my dogs laying around me in a protective circle until I could make it home again.  Tadz and I had not discussed naming the baby–it seemed to tempt fate.  But on one of these walks, Maizie told me her name.  I was looking at Black Mesa, on the San Ildfonso Pueblo, thinking of clay and earth and sky, feeling my hands and fingers in the cool slip of a pot or a cup or a jar in the making, and I suddenly said out loud, “Maizie.  Maizie Blue.”  I wondered why I said this, because Maisie is a Scottish name spelled with an “s”; it doesn’t have anything to do with clay, or earthen colors, or the desert.  But I imagined it spelled with a “z” and I somehow didn’t see the similarity to maize, the color and the corn, nor did I make the Blue Corn connection.  It was only after Maizie was born and our neighbors, with San Ildefonso Pueblo members, started calling Maizie ”Blue Corn” that I realized what her name meant.  They called her little “Ku’u”, or ”Corn” in the Tewa language.  And they told me of a famous potter from San Ildefonso Pueblo, who died several years ago, named Blue Corn.  Blue Corn Calabasa.  I trembled when they told me, and I remembered the distinct feeling of clay between my fingers, looking at Black Mesa, walking in the desert sun.

blue corn, blessed at a pueblo seed blessing ceremony, for maizie blue

I found this poem recently, scribbled on a piece of paper, as I was going through mementos of my pregnancy and of Maizie’s birth almost one year ago.  I don’t write poetry, and I know it’s not a well written poem, but it means something to me.  I wrote this before I was pregnant with Maizie, after I suffered the great, gaping loss of our first baby.  I felt so emptied and scarred, but when I was ready, I opened myself to pregnancy and to longing for a baby, and I wrote this.  When I dug this poem up, I only vaguely remembered writing it, and when I re-read it, I was struck by the part about “maize flowers in a blue clay jar.”  I feel as if I was writing Maizie to me.  Tadz and I often wonder why we waited so long to have a baby, and then why it was so hard…and one of us always responds, “We were just waiting for Maizie.”  I guess it’s true.  Blue Corn:  a blessing and an offering.  The Eastern rising sun, the beginning of life.  Maize flowers in a blue clay jar.

Pretty Song

I will sing you to me

listen

I’m singing hard and singing long

an antelope in the dust.

I’m a coyote in the river moonlight

curling over the lip of day

a ceremony

howling this song to the rhythm

of a rattle

the tick and flicker of snakes

winding their way home

to the mesa.

Inside, I’m a faded country dress, loose and thin

turquoise laced into buckskin boots

muscles ropey and strong

free

I’m the moonstone’s glitter

velvet and beads

the feather of a redtail hawk

worked loose by time and wind

flying like fire.

I’m a prickly pear cactus bloom

succulent

apricot light and sage green dreams

maize flowers in a blue clay jar

thunder in the afternoon

tangled up in the wind

a gypsy

but I will hold you.

You’re the only one who will really see

this desert song of me

you will know me, the me from the inside

and I you

the you that grows from the inside out

and you’re music

and I’m the song

we roll together

rocking back and forth

the desert tide

such a pretty song

inside.

pregnant mama in the sage

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