Fever

By the time I see the thin box on my way to the grocery store, the cardboard is sloppy with rainwater. I tear it apart while the engine warms and my daughter coos in the backseat. So new, the spine cracks. It smells a little bit like glue.

At home with Lit, I touch a match to the eye of the stove. In a moment, chicken will warm, liquid fat swelling out of the flesh. Standing over the stove, I bend open the book’s spine, and this time, it whines.

I keep reading while my toddler marches in circles around me. I read it while gravy thickens and corn muffins rise. The story lilts and booms through Mary Karr’s young adulthood and her first years as a mother as she recovers from addiction by recovering from her past.

In the middle of preparing dinner, I read, “In the next room, my son, stout but saggy-kneed, clings to the crib bars like a prisoner. Menthol steam from the vaporizer has made a ghost of him. His ringlets are plastered to his head, and coughs rack his small frame. The animal suffering that’s rattling him throws ice water on me, and I enjoy a surge of unalloyed love for him, followed by panic, followed by guilt.”

Exactly that is motherhood. Pots are boiling and spitting. The oven fan purrs; the burners warble under it. I sit on the floor and read the next few pages out loud, letting the vowels expand through the room like the herbed heat from the stove.

I bring Lit into my bed and read through one eye when the other is too tired to stay open. I wake up in the morning with the book in my hand. Day and night for this fraction of my life, I carry it with me.

At the end, I sit at my computer station – a swivel chair pulled up to a deep freezer. I close Lit. The glue smell dissolves into the kitchen air. My daughter is napping a few rooms away, and the kitchen is unusually quiet, a soft appliance hum. I flip through, reading “Without Warren’s hands cupping my own face, I’m almost faceless. I need his body in bed and his books on my shelves anchoring me to the planet.”

I know that feeling. I felt it when my daughter first nursed, that my identity had shifted, that I existed through the touch of her skin.

The first time my new daughter caught a cold, I spoke to an older, more experienced mom about home remedies to ease my baby’s cough and congestion. She told me to feed my daughter warming foods – chicken broth and garlic – rather than treat the symptoms. The symptoms, although uncomfortable, are the body’s way of expelling the offending organism, she said. Do not cure a cold, but let the cold cure you.

She told me that the body invites illness when it is overcome with toxicity. The virus pushes out the toxin, and the body and spirit are cleansed and refreshed.

But these days, she told me, We fight the cold as if to capture to the damage the virus wants to purge from us. We are addicted to damage, to our pasts. We have to let it go.

Mary Karr writes, “As I slow down inside, the world’s metronome seems to speed up, for without keen, self-centered focus on your own inward suffering, clock hands spin. Days get windstormed off the calendar. Rather than thinking about spiritual practices, arguing them out in my head, I almost automatically try them. That, I suppose, is surrender.”

Lit exposes the single device running through you and me and Mary Karr: that recovery is surrender.

As a virus wormed through my daughter’s body, as she survived, seeming to have grown up exponentially after the fever broke, I realized that the occasional purging of the body and spirit is necessary. By releasing the illusion of control, I allowed myself and my daughter to grow. In Lit, Mary Karr surrenders to her faith.

I’ve surrendered to the body, its incorruptible desire to thrive. I’ve surrendered to the fever: those things that run through us, taking something with them and leaving something new behind.

Lit is a recovery narrative. It contains lessons and truths and a pure, concise story. The story exists in the realm between life and death, poetry and prose. Open it, and in a few words, it’s inside of you. It swells, warming you from the inside out.

“Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air, a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody’s head off.”

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Asha Baisden penned this wonderful essay. Read her wonderful blog at: http://meta-mom.com. She recently lost her cell phone. Her daughter Loki hid it.