Top Surgery Triptych

by Krys Malcolm Belc

1.

According to the CDC, around their second birthday a child should begin to look to their parent’s face in a new situation, in order to learn how to react. Their helpful website about early childhood development suggests, Encourage your child’s curiosity and help her learn and explore new things. Each night the sky is clear I act out, showmanlike, my wonder at the moon. My jaw goes slack and opens. My eyes, usually narrowed into wrinkly, suspicious squints, pop. I say words: wow, so big, it’s bright, the moon. Up in the sky, we say together, an incantation. Some nights it’s like somebody else is saying these things, a man who loves the moon, all that it holds, that tension between wonder at the glow and its dailiness and dependability. My daughter is two. I try to be like the moon for her: daily and dependable. We look up, her mouth opening too, that face of wonder existing, only because of me, doubly: because I made her face and because I modeled the face to make. The moon is thin, then it is fat, then thin, then fat again. This is one of the surest ways I know time is really passing. When I am saying crescent moon, making a little hook with my finger to mimic the shape, pressing her tiny finger into that same shape, I realize I am doing all of this because I know the moon is interesting to other people. My daughter has become someone who loves the moon, who points to it on every page of every picture book in which there is a night. I only studied acting because I was a teenager, desperately in love with her mother, with whatever version of her mother existed nearly twenty years ago, and I wanted to understand what it was that the beautiful, tall, magnetic theater major did with all of her time. If she had loved volleyball I would have learned to play it, if she had been a painter I would have signed up for Foundational Drawing, the prerequisite for all the other art courses on campus. But she wrote plays and she acted in them, so instead of on a volleyball court or at a drafting table, I found myself in a classroom with all the desks shoved against the wall, learning to loosen my body and face enough to be ready to take on any shape the situation demanded. We wore sweatpants. We sang in a group, to warm up, not words, just sound with and without meaning behind it. I liked a class that was for academic credit but which began with vigorous stretching. There was something, in that acting class, about the way I lost sense of my body in the best way when I was saying somebody else’s words. When I gesture towards the full moon, I hold my daughter in one hand and raise the other into the cold, black Minnesota sky.

2.

If you didn’t know me well, you’d think I was not a very expressive person. It’s not, like, a resting bitch face kind of a situation, more like a guarded affect, a propensity towards narrowed eyes and a not-smile, not-frown, a shell of quiet and neutral concentration. Most of all I’d say it’s the way I cross my arms, hiding the chest, I wish it was in a hug sort of a way, but saying it is would be misspeaking. There’s no warmth between me and strangers, no looseness. But I’m the kind of person who won’t shut the hell up once you get me going, especially if I have a cup of coffee or a beer in my hands. It’s the getting going that’s the hardest thing to do. There’s a softening there, I hope, once you get to know me, I want to be warm but I often worry I’m not. I’m afraid it is only with my children that I can be my laxest self. I don’t wear a binder when only they’re around and if they were the only four people on earth with me, I’d never change my body. Admittedly, I have been crass in the way I cut off  friends who ask me when they should have a baby. It was so long ago when I decided to, it was barely a few years after I took the college acting class, and deciding to go for it didn’t feel like a big deal, if I was going to do a lot of things, I thought, I had to start somewhere. There’s no good time, I say automatically, with the feigned confidence of someone who doesn’t understand why one would put off  the inevitable. Why not tick the box? Why not change a tire with a slow leak? For nearly twenty years not a week has passed when I didn’t think, should I or shouldn’t I get surgery? I have had it in dreams when I was asleep and when I was awake. It has taken up so many other thoughts’ time. It has pushed everything else I could do with my life up against a wall. It has taken so much from me even though it hasn’t yet taken a thing. My back, my shoulders, my body feel like they’ve been on this spinning rock a thousand years. But when I don’t have to perform for the world, I don’t, I walk around without a shirt on and feel absolutely content with myself, and I worry that means I don’t really want to change. When the doctor asks how I feel about my upcoming surgery, I make my moon face. Oh, great! I say, giving voice to somebody else’s words.
 

3.

My daughter wasn’t very good at breastfeeding, unlike her brother. The mechanics and the muscle of it didn’t click, and so it wasn’t hard to give up, once she passed her first birthday. It’s easier to end something that doesn’t work very well. It was freeing to stop asking my body to give better, to give more. Sometimes after we say goodbye to the moon, I get in the bath with my daughter. She says the words: my hair, your hair, my belly, your belly. A bath with a toddler is sometimes a bit of a slog, the tepid water, the cramped quarters, but she loves it, and so I do it, and I never regret it when I say yes. She likes to pour water over my soapy head, and she’s finally getting accurate enough not to flood the place. It’s real now, real washing, real help. My daughter likes to press each of my nipples like it’s an elevator button. She doesn’t yet recognize that they’re the same things she has, and they’re almost not, they’re almost nothing, I don’t tell her I’m getting them cut off  soon. She won’t remember them, anyway, won’t remember any sentence I ever say to her at this age. It’s not just that her brain is so plastic she’s always learning something new, it’s that she’s always seeing and hearing things she’s certain to forget. What is imprinting, I know, is the energy she feels coming off  me, and I communicate it as honestly as I can, and honestly, what I want most of all for her is to know that sometimes the feelings are certain and come first, and the action follows. But other times, the action has to lead the feeling. What I’m discovering is that I like the moon, and now I feel something like a gallop inside me when I see it. I don’t like surprises, never have. I don’t like anything I don’t know how to react to. So why did I enjoy, most of all, the day I had to act out breaching a room to discover I’d entered into the thick of my own surprise party? So what if it’s not real, I remember thinking, I feel it just the same.

KRYS MALCOLM BELC is the author of The Natural Mother: A Memoir of Nonbinary Parenthood (Counterpoint) and the flash nonfiction chapbook In Transit (The Cupboard Pamphlet). He’s had recent essays in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and beestung magazine. Krys is the memoir editor of Split Lip Magazine and lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota, where he is the Edelstein-Keller Writer-in-Residence at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.