A Matrilineage of Wolves
by Kat Zagaria
Benevolent wolves stalk Italian culture. They watch from unexpected corners, in the idiom for good luck — “in bocca al lupo” or “in the mouth of the wolf” — and in the origin myth of Rome. The story holds that a wolf, Lupa, nursed abandoned twin orphans Remus and Romulus. Romulus would go on to found Rome, and kill his brother in the process. Success or tragedy — determined by luck — is the fate of those nursed by a wolf. Wolves are both maternal and violent, stand-ins for ancient archetypes of femininity and, separately, birth.
As someone of southern Italian descent, I often wonder what my inheritance from Lupa is.
“Canus lupus” is her Latin name. The latter word lends itself to the autoimmune disease, so called due to its tell-tale facial lesions that resemble a wolf's bite. My mother, Deborah, had lupus. The diagnosis timeline for when the wolf’s teeth took hold of her is unclear. Aside from causing her body to attack itself, Lupa infected her with an intense desire for motherhood. I was not yet conceived when the wolf devoured Deborah’s kidneys. After years of steroids and an eventual successful kidney transplant, she had an ectopic pregnancy and a miscarriage. Finally, she became pregnant with me sometime in the summer of 1989.
But mortality circled her desire for maternity. This pregnancy had a precise cost, exacted by the wolf in what had become her preferred currency: another kidney. Too sick to regain a spot on a transplant list, the ramifications of maternal desire would slowly kill Deborah. She died in 2010 at the age of 56. Her drive for motherhood begat me, and I am another fork in the family tree for the wolf to sniff, examine, and track. When I became pregnant, Lupa had another path to travel still, one on which she could underscore how birth and death are cradled together in her claws.
#
As labor approaches, claw marks appear on my lower abdomen. From there, the phantom wolf drags her paws down my legs. Roses bloom from the gashes, carpeting my skin. From the uterus down, I am red, splotchy petals.
This is PUPPPS: pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy. 39 weeks and 5 days pregnant, I stand in our 19-gallon blue utility bucket, ice water up to my knees for relief. The doctor on the other end of the phone line deems my condition “harmless,” but offers to schedule an induction anyway. Toes numb and birth plan incinerating before my eyes, I acquiesce. PUPPPS’s only cure is delivery.
The cause of PUPPPs is, potentially, an allergy to fetal DNA in the bloodstream. My body feared losing itself as the fetal DNA supplanted my own. They say parenthood forever changes you the moment it happens; my body seems to finally register and panic at this fact, nine months in. PUPPPs is the last gasp of my pre-motherhood self, asserting its presence — a physical manifestation of psychic change.
I arrive at the hospital for my scheduled induction at 4 PM on March 4. My husband is with me. I am hooked up to a monitor that registers my contractions, but I still am not dilated. I am prepped for a Foley balloon.
#
For me, “in bocca al lupo” conjures an image of an unidentifiable torso in a wolf’s mouth, arms and legs akimbo. Perhaps its meaning derives from the luck needed to escape such a situation. Indeed, the proper retort to the saying is “crepi al lupo” — “may the wolf die.” When the idiom is viewed alongside the myth of Lupa, the wolf’s identity as mother and harbinger of death emerges.
In the hospital, I think of what my mother encountered during my birth. The circumstances of that day are murky to me. Deborah once told me she was seeing double. I was taken via cesarean sometime around 24 weeks, adding to my Italian birth lineage. I was 2.2 lbs and grey. A hole in my bowels necessitated reparative surgery when I was three days old. Scars on my body — my stomach from the surgery, IVs on my armpit and chest, a medicine cap that burned the roots off the hair of a portion of my scalp — provide the physical testament to what I cannot remember. Lupa lent Deborah and me the luck we needed to survive the experience.
#
In the present, my husband and I ready ourselves for our daughter’s birth. We play meditative music, light electric candles, and draw a bath. When contractions start, I know something is wrong. There is no gradual crescendo of intensity. The wolf has found me again. She shakes her head back and forth as she clamps my uterus between her jaws.
Labor progress note 21:05
34 y.o. G1P0 at 39w5d here for eIOL in the setting of PUPPP rash.
Subjective:
In to see patient after RN reports screaming heard from halls.
I’m embarrassed. I’ve scared other patients. I try to muffle my howls with pillows.
The scent of hospital sheets reminds me of visiting my mother that time, when she was in a coma. Or maybe it was that other time, when she shattered her knee. Or was it the time she had that cancerous bit of her thyroid removed, or at the end, when her gall bladder failed? It doesn’t matter, really. The sheets always have the same scent.
Bellowing into the pillow only makes me cry harder. While sobbing, I feel the wolf’s hot breath condense on the hairs on the back of my neck.
The pain is so extreme that I began to vomit and slip in and out of consciousness. When a contraction comes, it grips me from the inside. It throws me clear across the room. There is nothing but darkness during it. Only the present and its blinding, all-consuming pain register.
The wolf has me somewhere between death and motherhood.
The care team decides to redo the epidural.
Receiving an epidural requires sitting perfectly still. To remain still while experiencing the worst pain of one’s life, as a needle is placed between vertebrae, is an exquisite form of torture. This time did not work, so they did it a third.
I had anticipated moving through labor, giving birth on all fours. Instead, I sit still on the edge of a bed, in anything but tranquility; frozen for a precisely placed pierce of relief that never arrives.
Failed epidural drugs swim in me, searching for their desired target. Instead of finding relief, I bob above and below the waters of consciousness.
#
Repetition is not new to me. Lupus patients experience cycles of flares, during which symptoms can ebb and flow in intensity. Despite the cellular battles that were waged inside my mother during her hospital stays, I always found her and her room to be calm. Even when she was in an intensive care unit in a coma, things seemed quiet to me as a slightly oblivious and in-denial nine-year-old. I snuggled under the weight of her limp arm and fell asleep next to her. When she awoke, there was no fanfare: a nurse stated, “Oh, you’re awake;” to which my mother replied, “Of course I am.” Deborah’s inner bodily chaos starkly contrasted with her calm outer countenance. While a wolf raged inside her, attacking her organs, her gaze radiated cool, feral detachment.
My first actual hospital visit is here, and it is anything but calm. I feel Lupa’s insistent pressure, testing what damage she can cause. My care team is in constant motion. And yet, I am silent when, eleven hours into my labor, the obstetrician on duty asks the nurse if my screams “result from pain or are an expulsion of maternal energy.” I lie in the bed, staring at the ceiling. Between contractions and debilitated, I am too exhausted to tell her how offensive I find the question.
A fog rolls in around me as the wolf approaches my daughter. A mix of uterine blood and roses drip from her black lips. The precarity of potential infinity catches my breath, squeezes my baby’s heart.
Op Note at 01020
Operative Report- Cesarean Section
Pre-op Diagnosis:
-34 y.o. G1P0 with Intrauterine Pregnancy @ 39w6d
- Non-reassuring fetal heart rate remote from delivery
Doctors reach in and extract my daughter before the canine’s jaws can close.
After the caesarean, I wake up and, with a wince, look at the site. Why is it horizontal? My mother’s caesarean scar was vertical. I remember touching it. This is where you came out of me.
The uterus harkens to eternity. A uterus can beget a uterus, which can create another, and another, in an endless branching chain that portends the carriage of a lineage whose sheer breadth evades comprehension.
#
I pore over medical records, hoping to trigger some dormant memory, some aspect I can point to as the decisive thing I would do differently if the wolf attacks again. Then, there it is, in the caesarean procedure notes, buried in a clinical description of the seven layers of my tissue that were cut to access my daughter.
A single figure eight suture was placed at the right lateral aspect of the hysterotomy.
I gasp.
#
A figure 8 stitch, I learn, is commonly used in cesareans to staunch bleeding. The thread enters from the top-left point, exits at the bottom-right point, enters again at the bottom-left point, and then exits at the top-right point. The pattern creates a loop under the scar and ties it off with a square knot, forming a supportive pouch upon which the chasm can heal.
I haven't been able to look at or touch my scar since those immediate postpartum days. Trauma bubbles underneath. I avoid disturbing the shadowy aura it emanates. Once its atmosphere stirs, it will engulf my psyche.
But now, I must see it, because the figure 8, on its side, is a lemniscate; the mathematical symbol for infinity. Maybe I can catch a glimpse of its expanse.
#
Late at night, I hold my stomach up to look at the pigmented line beneath. Grazing it with my fingertips, a wave of nausea rises, crests, and crashes over me. I close my eyes, swallow it down, and exhale. I open my eyes and look again. All I see is a line, the last faint red remnant of where blood, baby, and blooms spilled forth. A figure eight slipped inside me; it forms the eighth layer of tissue.
I am sure my body knows the numeral that healed it, its tendrils tugging at my organs. My tissue congeals around it, invisibly scaring my insides with the trace of its likeness. I hope its criss-crossing path confuses the wolf, condemning her to run endlessly. I hope.