Messy Bitch
I promised myself I'd post this one on the full supermoon (the Beaver Moon!) so here she is
(Note to Readers: I’m going to start using this platform to work out some potential memoir material that will hopefully turn into a book. I’m letting you know this in the interest of transparency and to hold myself accountable. Welcome to my process! Thank you for being part of it!)
I planned to stop breastfeeding on November 1st, but I came back from my one night away from Maya, a night spent in Ojai during which I took a heroic dose of mushrooms, peed my wool pants and threw up in my guide’s daughter’s bed, and my left breast was so swollen that when I squeezed the nipple, milk shot out like the statue of a water nymph in a Sicilian fountain.
“Stevie, come look at this!” I called from bed.
“No thanks,” he said.
“But it’s a show! I want you to see it.”
“Did something happen to you when you were little?” He asked that night after I finished telling him the shameful story of my medicine journey.
I don’t remember everything that happened in ceremony, but what I do remember plays like the greatest hits of a playlist called SHAME:
Singing “baby shark do do do do” at full volume; opening my friend’s little makeup case of magic potions and dumping it out, picking up her Doterra frankincense bottle and saying, “ooh fancy shit”; grabbing my guide’s breasts; kneeling in the middle of the room and making myself pee, the medicine telling me to let go, come, get wet, get messy, become the water, announcing “I’m so wet!”; taking off my wool pants: “look at this body!”; calling my guide’s husband a “fuckboy”; being told to put my eye mask back on, refusing; flailing into other people’s space; and finally, being picked up by my guide’s He-man assistant, and carried out of the ceremony room, the sound of doors opening and closing as my guide led the way, looking back, catching a glimpse of her face in the light of the hallway, feeling like I was in a haunted house or a nightmare, but in kind of a fun way.
And then coming to, not knowing where I was, but knowing the party was over. Trying to focus my eyes on someone’s white Yeti water bottle sitting on a white side table in the cold white room. Tangled hair in my face. The smell of… yep, vomit. A mess of sheets stripped from the mattress. Someone in the room with me. The He-man assistant sitting on a second smaller bed, legs extended and crossed at the ankles, watching me like someone stuck in a cage with a lion, wary and a little scared but trying not to show it.
Leading up to the ceremony, my guide and I had been working with this idea of letting go of the ingenue, the one at the center of the story, and becoming a supporting character.
“The peripheral character has the gift of perspective,” my guide said, sending me a voice memo about Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings, “the heart of the story’s moral and philosophical journey.”
“Sam’s character embodies the virtues of humility, perseverance and the quiet yet profound strength that often goes unnoticed in the face of grand heroism.” Unfortunately, I had embodied none of these qualities in ceremony, except perhaps perseverance in my unwillingness to do anything that was asked of me—not go to the bathroom, not put on my eye mask. It seemed I might think I was done with the young one at the center of my story, but she was not done with me.
The next morning after our breakfast of chia pudding, as we all got ready to go soak in some hot springs, an older woman who had been an anchor point in the chaos of the night before came to sit beside me on the couch.
“You know what I saw in you last night?” She said, putting her hand on my knee and smiling with the unconditional compassion of a mother who’s seen it all. “I saw you being this little girl. Not your little girl, but you Ava as a little girl. Wanting to take up space. And singing Baby Shark. And then I saw you as a sexual woman, wanting to transgress and take up space. You even said, I’m going to take up a lot of space, I’m going to get messy. It felt to me like this part of you just needs acceptance.”
“It’s hard to accept my messy self when I threw up in their daughter’s bed,” I said, starting to cry. “That feels unacceptable.”
“Well, you’re an adult. How about the offer of a new mattress?” The wise woman suggested.
Was I an adult? If that was true—which it didn’t totally resonate in that moment if I’m being honest—but if I wanted it to be true—did I want it to be true?—then I needed to get this tempestuous child out of the drivers seat of my psyche.
I knew this part of myself. In my one-woman show, The Pleasure Project, she was Froot Loop, a precocious little girl with pigtails and a tutu, twerking all over the stage and throwing candy into the audience to Katy Perry’s Firework.
The question remained: how to deal with this little Lolita? Denying her was useless, banishment impossible. But could I accept her?
(Froot Loop)
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate,” said Jung. Could the way to stop her from running the show be to allow for her, love her, take responsibility for her, and tell her gently that she could stay but she would no longer be driving my car without a license.
My mantra for the day became:
Can I accept my messiness?
I went outside and stood by the pool to call Stevie, needing to see the face of someone who loved me in all my foibles.
“I’m a messy bitch,” I said, after telling him what I’d done.
“Yes, you are,” he said.
“I don’t think they’ll have me back.”
“No,” he said. “But we will.” He switched to FaceTime so Maya could say hi. It was the first night I’d spent away from her since she was born.
“Nice to meet you Mommy,” she said when she saw me, my wise little girl.
The terrain of the hot springs was totally different since the last time I’d been there, in December 2021 after doing Bufo Alvarius, the toad medicine, with the same guides. Bufo I credited with changing my entire life and jumping me into the timeline I was now in, in which I was Stevie’s partner and Maya’s mom. The pools were as I remembered them, but the surroundings had been transformed by the recent storms that flooded the river and washed away what had previously burned in the Thomas Fire, which coincidentally started on my birthday, December 4, 2017. The landscape was now almost barren. Nature reminding us of the impermanence of things, that everything was constantly changing even if we didn’t always recognize it from the inside. Our group of seven stripped in silence and, as I lowered myself into the hottest of the pools, I felt all the built up shame of the night before melting into the healing waters. My guide’s husband pointed out a large rock anchoring the pool that was dotted with hundreds of tiny notches.
“The Chumash gave birth in this pool,” he said. “They made a notch each time a baby was born.” I imagined what it must’ve been like to birth in this ancient 108 degree sulphuric water. I dipped my hands into the silky black mud and scooped up big handfuls, greedily and gratefully rubbing it all over my body. Can I accept my messiness? Can I accept my messiness? I repeated my mantra silently as I rubbed mud over my breasts, a ritual reclaiming them for myself. My boochies. My plan had been to use this night away to finally mark the end of breastfeeding.
Taking a break from the heat, I walked along a rock trail to the flowing shallow river, where I lowered myself into the bracing water and crawled like an alligator until my body was completely submerged. Lying still, I became aware of a vaguely annoying sensation and realized the school of tiny fish that had been displaced by my entry into the river had reconvened around me and were now nibbling at my dead skin.
“Thank you fish,” I said, overwhelmed by this unsolicited ritual of cleansing. I watched my hands under the water and noticed for the first time my fingers were buried in a soft camel-colored mossy blanket that coated the entire riverbed. I looked closer and saw tiny bubbles emerge from within the moss. I rolled over onto my back and closed my eyes, listening to the vast silence of the underwater world. I breathed deeply and felt the emptiness of the void, the nothing that is everything. I pictured the fish munching the vomit out of my hair and thanked them again.
When my teeth started chattering, I rose naked from the river, feeling like early woman as I took my first step onto dry land. As I looked down the river at the empty valley below, untouched by any visible human presence, I felt overcome by the beauty of it all.
A few nights after ceremony, I had a nightmare that had me sitting up in bed talking out loud to an entity hovering by the lamp beside my bed. I felt haunted for days.
“Have you heard of Lilith?” Stevie asked the next day over lunch. His therapist had brought her up in their weekly meeting, distraught as she was over the election results and musing as to why so many women chose to vote with their husbands and against their own interests. I’d heard of Lilith, but I didn’t know much about her.
Stevie explained that she was Adam’s first wife before Eve. She was his equal, made from the same soil as him. I looked her up and read that Lilith refused to be subservient and fled Eden to mate with the Angel of Death, giving birth to hundreds of demon babies per day. She was the dark feminine, a shadowy mother. I was comforted by the thought that it could be Lilith, or one of her hundreds of demon babies, who was haunting me.
