Baby, Golf Ball, Lobster Tail: Learning to Live in My Body

Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women, nonbinary and gender-diverse writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.

When I awoke from anesthesia, the spine surgeon reported that the disc had been so large and so sprawling that it was as if he had delivered a baby from my back. I asked if it was the biggest herniated disc he’d ever seen — it was — and what common object I might compare it to when relaying the story to my friends.

“A golf ball,” he said. “Or a lobster tail. It just kept coming.”

Groggy but curious, I did a slow shimmy into a seated position. The doctor beseeched me to take it easy. No bending, no lifting. He was a good guy and clearly a great surgeon, but as he bid me adieu, I thought of his similes — baby, golf ball, lobster tail — and wondered whether he’d missed his calling as a poet.

Long before the surgery, I was the finest first baseman on the fifth-grade softball team. There, against the chain link fence, I could watch the parents’ awed expressions as I caught balls only angels could reach. Sometimes I think I got good at softball just to stick it to my pediatrician. She never liked me eating lollipops at the end of my visits; I never liked her dragging the metal bars of the scale up, up, up until she’d have to start over and add the big bar, the kahuna. The nicest thing she ever told me was that I had 20/20 vision.

Our softball team was called the Super Cows. We were half athletes, half misfits, a mélange put together by my father, who ardently believed the clumsiest kids from Bible study should, at the height of a game, give pitching a whirl. It was like watching a newly birthed calf take the field. Meanwhile, those of us with hand-eye coordination worked overtime to compensate — sprinting, lunging, caking ourselves in orange dirt. We’d been winning and we wanted to keep winning. 

What I remember most from those games was the teeter-totter of fortune and plague, how I’d make desperate eye contact with my father across the field, begging him to keep me on first base. Later, I would discover the fun of being just OK, of dugout Hubba Bubba and horsing around in the outfield. But at 10, I still wanted to be the best. Screw the prayerful dingdongs. I had earned my spot and was not about to surrender it.

Altruism forgotten, Dad always kept me in.  

The fierce first baseman and the woman in the hospital bed are both technically me, as was the marathon runner and the casual COVID bike rider and the woman who left no zipline unzipped. Somewhere along the line, though, I stopped feeling my best. 

Was it the day my favorite jeans began to wheeze at my waist? Or the summers I told myself I’d sign up for a softball league but didn’t? Maybe it all comes back to the pediatrician. To the heavy metal bars going clank, clank, clank. Even in my 30s, pregnant, I averted my eyes and stepped backward onto the scale. Sometimes I’d joke to the OB nurse that my weight was “none of my business.” No time to describe the waiting room with its angry wooden bead mazes and its haunted black aquarium. Nor was there time, in our short walk to the exam room, to recall the pediatrician explaining to me exactly what 98th percentile meant. The message was clear: You are bad. But what about the softball field, or the classroom, or church, or my cozy twin bed being tucked in at night, where the message was you are good?

I don’t think you are bad ever really left my system. In fact, I think it took up residence in my back. Every time I tried to jog — or Rollerblade, or dance, or play, or do anything that little first baseman would have enjoyed — my back seized up again. It was begging me to pay attention. To be kinder, to forgive. It wasn’t until a few months ago, when I fell while holding my baby, that I finally did. 

To put it medically, my disc herniated. It compressed the spinal nerves and rendered my foot, calf and flank numb. But I think I like the surgeon’s approach better. Once I noticed the great big thing causing me pain, it just kept coming.

My dad didn’t keep me in the game because I was the best; he kept me in because he loved me. Now, as an adult, it’s my job to love me. And so I continue to pull at the lobster tail. I buy clothes that fit. I move slowly, excited for the day my incision has healed and I can pick up a softball again. Maybe I’ll even coach my daughter’s team someday. She will catch balls only angels can reach, she will eat what’s good, and so help me God, she will never have anything painful to dislodge.