By Liz Rognes

With her long, perfectly manicured fingers, the checkout girl methodically lifts each item out of my shopping basket. She scans a box of almond milk, a package of pasta, then the container of prenatal vitamins.

I shift my weight from one leg to another. I’m barely showing, but if you look closely, you can already tell. I’m sixteen weeks pregnant with my first baby. This was not something I thought would come easily. My body, now generally a place of health and reliability, has in the past been the site of rampant destruction. My doctor had said subclinical infertility. My slow thyroid and elevated hormone levels worried her. She had said it could take many months, maybe years, to get pregnant. She had said she could refer me to a specialist.

But it happened faster than we had expected. Jason and I were shocked and elated when one home pregnancy test after another appeared with a plus sign, only weeks after the appointment with my doctor. I had worked so hard to prepare myself for disappointment, for the reality of subclinical infertility, that I did not believe the results. I took three, four, five, and then six pregnancy tests over the course of a few days, and all came back with the same unbelievable message.

There will be a baby.

I will be a mother.

I am short with a short torso, and there’s nowhere for this expanding uterus to go but out. I’m proud of this, and I wear my growing belly like a marker of glowing wellness and peace and love and all of that motherhood mythos, but standing there on the other side of the checkout counter, I am swept with insecurity. I do not feel like a mother. I am not glowing.

***

I know little about the woman who scans my groceries, but I know more about her than I know of the other cashiers. Only months ago, before I became pregnant, before I quit coming to the grocery store because of morning sickness, I stood behind the checkout girl, partial stranger, partial familiar face, in the garage of a house I’d never before seen, after bar close, with a slew of skinny, tattooed men circling the cold room and line after line of cocaine appearing on a workbench.

When she finishes unloading and scanning my basket, she asks, “Paper, plastic, or reusable?” She does not make eye contact. I realize that we’re pretending not to know each other.

***

Six months earlier, Jason and I walked into a party after bar close, on the heels of a magnetic, fast-talking British musician who now lived in Spokane.

We had recognized him from his moment of fame; his band had a hit song in the eighties. He was not the kind of person we usually hung around, but something about him was alluring; Jason and I were both inexplicably swept up with him and his exaggerated manner. We joked that his arrogance was endearing. He didn’t give a fuck about what people thought, and we were nothing like him.

When she finishes unloading and scanning my basket, she asks, “Paper, plastic, or reusable?” She does not make eye contact. I realize that we’re pretending not to know each other.

We were bookish, responsible, rule-followers; Jason was a librarian, and I was an English teacher. When I did get pregnant, my own mother joked that our baby would inevitably be a nerd. “Nerd plus nerd equals nerd,” she said, smiling. She meant this lovingly; we were creative, but we went to bed early. The musician, on the other hand, was tall in stature and presence, and he commanded the attention of everyone in the room. We were seduced by his fame. And ever since we had begun talking about trying for a baby, even before my visit to the doctor, I had started to feel a little impulsive, like there was a limit to this moment in my life as I knew it. I felt myself yearning for spontaneity. So when the musician invited us to the bar for a drink that night, we went. When he invited us to the after party, we went. We were somewhat star-struck, and, despite a slew of signs indicating the opposite, were convinced that there could be something positive, or at least productive, about this friendship.

At the bar, his girlfriend leaned into me and she whispered in my ear, “It’s a hard party, if you know what I mean.”

I looked her in the eye.

I knew exactly what she meant.

***

Ten years ago, I signed in to the last of many rehab centers I had been to. I’d hallucinated my way through hospital detox a handful of times, blood pressure exploding in my ears and the sick expulsion of poisons pouring out of my mouth and pores. Then, I was a young twenty-two years old, with the face of a girl of about eighteen. I was small, with big eyes and a quiet demeanor that convinced people I wasn’t trouble. I got away with almost everything—drugs, constant drunkenness, promiscuity, hanging around with a rough crowd, finding myself in rooms with guns and coked out drug dealers—and the outside world likely pinned me for a brooding teenager, not a girl mixed up with the kind of stuff I was doing.

Even when I started accruing consequences, I managed to maintain a certain naïveté. I’d been drinking and drugging like that for only a year or two, and I was simultaneously heavily medicated on antidepressant drugs and a pharmacy of other pills that were supposed to help with my anxiety and bulimia. The cocktail of drugs, combined with the heavy drinking, took a quick, serious toll on my liver. I was confused when I started experiencing withdrawals from alcohol, telling myself that was crazy—I was only twenty-two, after all. That was the kind of thing that happened to old men who’d been drinking for decades, not to promising Midwestern farmer’s daughters who went to fancy women’s colleges like me. I kept the extent of the chemical dependency a secret.

Most of the time, I didn’t care that I was a mess. I didn’t want to take care of myself, and a future of motherhood—the possibility of one day being responsible for someone else—was not even a consideration. My body was a burden that I wanted to escape.

***

At the party, the checkout girl was drunk and high already, and she walked right over to me, announcing to the people around her that I was her grocery store customer. This was not how I wanted to be identified. Normally, in this mostly sober adult life I have crafted in the past decade or so, I think of myself as a woman who no longer takes unnecessary risks, a woman who eats kale and root vegetables, who wears a seatbelt and a sunhat, who cares about whether or not there are laureth sulfates in her shampoo or fluoride in her toothpaste. After years of therapy and hard work crafting a more or less healthy lifestyle, I am no longer the woman who shows up at after parties to do lines of cocaine with strange men on workbenches in cold garages. I have learned how to take care of this body and how to quiet my anxiety. I have learned how to reach out, how to ask for help, how to be accountable and to maintain relationships. I wanted to bring a baby into this place of steadiness, to enter motherhood with the firm footing of ten years away from the chaos of my past. But on that night, I didn’t want to be the careful, healthy woman I had worked so hard to become, I didn’t want to think about motherhood, and I did not want any reminders about who I was, now.

The truth is, I was feeling itchy, and I had been for a while. The musician’s arrogance and gestures, his constant phone calls and quick disappearances were familiar to me, and while I didn’t tell Jason about the old cravings swirling around in the back in of my mind, I intuited that hanging around this fast-talking man with a palpable residue of aging fame could eventually lead to something like this. The musician’s cues represented something I had put away, and the nearness of it was intoxicating. When I walked into the party and saw the woman who nearly always scanned my groceries, I was jolted. She made me think of the natural foods store, of my chosen lifestyle of health and sobriety and intention.

That night, I didn’t want any reminders of what my life was outside of that party.

***

“Sixty-three forty-nine,” the checkout girl says.

I pull out my credit card and run it through the swiper, even though I know it won’t work. The strip has been busted for weeks. I try again. It doesn’t work. After the third try, I have to hand my credit card to her so she can manually enter the numbers. I watch her hold my card, and I can’t help but think about her long, skinny fingers holding onto a different credit card on a different night while organizing the white powder into neat, short lines, before turning to me and saying, one hand by her nostril, head tipped back, leaving the last line for me: “All yours, sweetie.”

***

I’ve been buying groceries at this overpriced natural foods store since I moved to Spokane four years ago. Even while I was a broke grad student and then a broke adjunct instructor at a community college, I would count my quarters, trudge through the snow from a few blocks away, and buy onions and garlic and potatoes to make hearty soup that would last me for a week. The boiling potatoes curled steam across the windows of my tiny, cold second floor apartment.

Buying groceries has nearly always been a knotted task for me. As a kid, I hardly entered a grocery store because my mom would drop my siblings and me off at my grandma’s house across the street in our little farm town while she went in to shop. I had no idea where our food came from, immediately or long-term, even though we lived smack on a farm in the middle of Iowa, with hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans surrounding us. I was sensitive to the cultural messages about femininity and thinness that permeated the strange mix of culture of rural farming and mainstream media of the late eighties and nineties. And as the eldest child in a homogenous culture, I was a perfectionist. I developed an eating disorder in my pre-teen years, and my relationship to food was severely stunted. Grocery stores became terrifying and overwhelming places where the thing that I most feared and most coveted lived. I loved food, and I hated it. As a teenager and then as an early twenty-something, I cycled through bouts of severe restriction and uncontrolled devouring of food. Adding drugs and alcohol to the mix, I was completely unable to find a middle ground or to even recognize that a middle ground could be possible.

***

After the party, we didn’t get home until the sun was beginning to slowly lighten the sky behind our house. In our domestic life together, we had never stayed out until sunrise.

I had been offered the last line of cocaine at the party. I would have done more, but that’s all there was. I kept thinking of it as “only one line,” but after ten years of complete abstinence from hard drugs, one line and the guilt that sank into me nearly immediately afterward was enough to keep me awake. The late spring sun uncovered the valley below our bedroom window pine by pine, and I felt the old shame of addiction begin to crawl through the synapses of my brain.

We invited our dog onto our bed as an apology for leaving him alone all night. My head spun. Jason knew that I had done a line, but he did not see it, nor had he done any cocaine. In fact, he had never done cocaine. He had hardly smoked pot in his life, and I loved this about him. Once, I had been knitting a foot for a stuffed animal, and without the body attached, it kind of had the shape of a pipe. Jason asked why I was knitting a bong, and I burst out laughing, completely in love with him. I found his lack of expertise about drug paraphernalia extremely endearing. This man was the person I wanted to spend my life with. He was funny, smart, and sweet, and he cared deeply for people. A library member had threatened him once; the man had slammed the desk and screamed at Jason until he called the police to remove him. The library had to exclude the man for a year. Instead of being angry that he had been threatened, Jason said, “I just hope he has another safe place to go.” I could see in my partner a man who was sincerely motivated by his heart, who was patient and thoughtful and empathetic; he would be a wonderful father.

I began to cry softly, afraid that my choice to do a line of blow had jeopardized this life I had with him—this beautiful distance from the darkness of drug use, this life of books and mornings and dog walks, this life of music and love and happiness. My past and my present were polar opposites, two cities that could not be any more different or further apart, but that night they had appeared in the same room. Two versions of me had inhabited my body.

I curled into Jason’s arms and listened to him comfort me. He said it would be okay, that one line of coke didn’t mean the end of the world, that we could sleep for a few hours and wake up and go about our day. We could still start trying to get pregnant, like we had planned. Even after the party, he believed I could one day be a good mother. He was soothing and loving, and I was not sure that I believed him.

After the party, we didn’t get home until the sun was beginning to slowly lighten the sky behind our house. In our domestic life together, we had never stayed out until sunrise.

 

We managed to sleep for a few hours, and when Jason’s alarm went off, the sun was beating through our bedroom window and I could hear the sounds of cars climbing the hill, people going places, doing normal things, like this were any other day. Birds chattered loudly. Jason hit snooze and closed his eyes again. The dog, a happy, rowdy Rhodesian Ridgeback mix, yawned and stretched, rolling onto his back, his giant red paws extended into the air, exuding the musky sweet smell of sleeping dog. I felt my love for these two creatures surround me, thick and tangible.

The truth is that for weeks afterward, I would feel the itchiness. I would try to talk Jason in to calling the musician. I would say things like, “I only got to do one line at that party—I should have a real last hoorah.” If we were going to try to get pregnant; this could be my last chance. I would say these things with a smile on my face, as though it were no big deal. I half-joked about buying an eight ball, just for fun, but then I had to define “eight ball” to Jason, and my two worlds knocked heads. My past and the possibility of relapse loomed over us, a storm waiting to break. But it wasn’t what I really wanted; I wanted the stability that we had created, I wanted this partner who loved me, I wanted to become a mother.

***

His alarm went off again—the opening riff to one of his favorite songs, on repeat. He opened his eyes and looked over to see me watching him. He smiled a sleepy greeting. “Good morning, baby,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

I felt awful. My head was pounding, but I knew that I couldn’t just stay in bed. “I’m coming with you,” I said.

***

Jason’s job is pretty straightforward: he manages a library, helping people access information. He goes to the same place every morning, works more or less the same hours every day, and he has reliable income and responsibility. But once in a while he gets assigned something like driving the district library van in a small-town parade on a Saturday. So the morning after I sniffed my first line of blow in ten years off a dirty workbench, I climbed into the passenger seat of a loud, bumpy van with the library logo painted on the sides and rode along to a tiny town on the edge of the Washington Palouse, surrounded by wheat fields and rolling sky to hand out library pencils to the kids who lined the single street.

It was the kind of day that is not supposed to exist when you’re trying to wallow in the shame of your past. Even though it was still spring, it was stunningly summer-like, the sun filling the street and warming the backs of the horses and local equestrians who proudly showcased their riding gear in the parade. People were giddy with the weather and the atmosphere of celebration. There were craft vendors, tractors, a high school marching band, and a man with a microphone from a shoddy P.A. system in the center of the five-block parade route, his voice crackling with static and pride as he announced each float and organization as it went by. “And here’s the library. Everyone loves the library!” he said cheerfully, as we slowly drove past. I waved out the window at rows of grinning children and adults, and library staff in screen-printed T-shirts walked to the curb to hand pencils to excited kids. Everyone cheered.

I smiled, but I was holding back tears of gratitude. This is my life now, I thought. This: libraries and sunshine and happy children, not last night.

***

Once, while I was living in a halfway house, the house manager told us about a dream she had in which she had relapsed. She had been sober for many years, and the dream had disturbed her. But she said that she was grateful for the dream because it reminded her about how horrible her addiction had been. It reminded her the life she had now was her chosen life, the life she truly wanted. I have relapsed before, moments that initiated dramatic falls, landing me deeply in old habits. I worried that this time would not be any different. That one line of cocaine could be a sentence: that I would have no choice but to succumb to the old patterns.

***

My card finally goes through, and the checkout girl prints the receipt. She has bagged my groceries, and she smiles at me. “Have a nice day,” she says.

I lift the bags, one in each hand. We make eye contact. I thank her, and I take the groceries. I leave the store with my food and prenatal vitamins. I walk across the parking lot to my car parked in the crisp late fall air that smells like ponderosa pine and wood smoke and I tell myself that it’s going to be okay. This is my life now, and I am lucky. This body has surprised me; it has been through destruction and healing more times than seems reasonable or possible or fair. I am lucky to live in this chosen city, in this place where my days are filled with meaningful work and love and songs and mornings when I wake tucked into Jason’s arm.

But my body is more than a chosen city—it is many cities, all of them imperfect and strange and beautiful. Its geography is informed by the proximity and relationships between dots on the map, and I need all of these cities to appreciate the span and breadth of terrain. Doing one line of cocaine was a stupid, momentary decision, but it didn’t mean that I had to relinquish the life that I have chosen. Even the ugliest, darkest parts of a city see sunlight, and to live without acknowledging that those dark corners exist isn’t realistic or even fair. That line was not a sentence, but it did offer me a chance to reaffirm my commitment to the life I have now. The health and stability I have worked so hard for is not perfect, and it is not indestructible, but it is a place that, given the choice, I want to live.

I open the trunk to my car and set the bags inside, and then I pause, stunned.

A new landscape is forming in this imperfect, strange, beautiful city: I feel the unmistakable tiny flutter of a baby moving in my belly.

Author’s Note: The months leading up to the birth of my son were some of the most exciting and reflective months of my life. Pregnancy was this surreal occasion, where I was literally carrying pieces of my past and my future within the boundaries of my body. This essay was a way for me to grapple with that bridge between the “two cities” of my past and present/future, and especially to consider the lingering shame that I still carried. But that past, with all of its darkness and healing, is a part of who I am today. I am the mother I am partly because of that past, which has taught me about recovery and empathy. My son is now a healthy, happy, toddling, singing, and chattering 14-month old.

Liz Rognes is a writer, musician, and teacher who lives in Spokane, Washington with her rock ‘n’roll librarian and their son.