Babies Made from Clay

The year after my mom died, I found solace in sculpting babies made from clay.

That’s what my classmates called the naked, palm-sized figures I made by the dozen in our high school ceramics studio, with its bright windowed walls that overlooked the San Francisco bay.

I would begin with a lump of clay on a worn wooden board. With my hands and a tool that had a hooked metal end, I would separate, mold, and carve until I had a row of curled up bodies. Though these bodies varied in color, size, and rotation, their curled position — heads bowed, knees hugged to chest — was constant. To me, these figures were rough drafts of a self-portrait, an attempt to express an emotional state that I was unable to convey in any other way.

For twelve years I watched my mom’s body be mutilated by the hands of an invisible enemy. First it came for one breast, replacing the nipple with a long, fingerlike scar so that next to the other it looked like a distorted winking eye. When it came back for the other one, years later, it never fully went away. Her hair came out in fingerfuls until she shaved it bald. She became pale, hunched, and thin, and spent more and more time in bed.

One night when I was a junior in high school I woke up to a light touch on my shoulder. A figure dressed in white stood over my twin-sized bed, a white knit cap on her head. “Move over.” My mom crawled into bed beside me as I scooted against the wall. I fell asleep cradling her.

In her final months, the enemy moved to her brain and began to carve away at her mind. She became confused and lost her ability to move on her own. Along with my sister, grandma, and dad, I became both hospice nurse and parent to a 53-year-old child. I helped her get dressed, forcing her arms through limp shirt sleeves while trying to hold back tears, and drove her to appointments.

The hardest part was tending to the wound on her chest, open and seeping. It was the result of a breast implantation gone awry, (trying to make lemonade from rotten lemons, my mom had selected a C-cup to replace her small As). Following doctor’s orders, I removed the bandage every day, wiped it clean, applied disinfectant, then re-bandaged it.

When my mom died, on a Sunday in early July before my senior year, I breathed a sigh of relief. In order to carry on for so long without breaking down, I had gone out-of-body.

I entered my last year of high school in a daze. I went through the motions of test-taking, socializing, and applying to colleges. It all felt so meaningless, so far away. The only place I was present was the ceramics studio. Through the therapeutic repetition of making figure after figure, I began to build a bridge between my body and my mind. The babies I made from clay were links in a chain that helped me return to my body.

I am still in the process of returning, unsure if it is safe. I am now 26, about to enter a new year. The past year has been another trauma-filled one.

I didn’t feel the effects of the pandemic immediately — I enjoyed working from home. But after weeks of being confined to a studio apartment working in a tech support role, unable to go outside without wearing a mask that had associations that made my stomach curl in fear, I hit a breaking point.

I stopped sleeping and my skin became red and inflamed. I found myself curled up, fetus-like, under the covers to avoid the light. The slightest stimulation made me start: sudden noises, the touch of a kitten’s paw against my flesh. Memories I had shut out for so long came flooding back. Every Slack notification that popped up on my screen made me see the red wound again, glaring up at me from my mom’s chest.

When I look at my naked body in the mirror, my chest is dappled red. There are patches across my stomach, and on my back, neck, arms, and face. It itches, so I scratch, and the itch spreads until I have scratched my body raw and my fingertips smell metallic.

This year, as I’ve watched my skin flake and felt my body tremble, I’ve become increasingly aware of, and afraid, of my body’s inevitable death. I want to hide from it, to curl up into a ball and pretend it’s not there.

But it’s when I’m in this state that I’ve become aware of something inside of me: a fire, a flame. Something that transcends my physical form. The spirit of my mom is inside of me, and it will help me unfold. My body, which has spent so much of the past year curled into a ball, will open up again.