HEARTWOOD by Jenna Devany Waters
I cup my hand into a canopy and shield my eyes as I peer into the trees. We are losing light, and the ever-present mist has ramped up to a spray. If I were feeling generous, I would call this a light rain, but I am not feeling generous. It is dusk in a darkening forest, in a country that is not my own, and my six-year- old daughter is fifty feet above me in a giant strangler fig tree and refusing to climb down.
“Lyra,” my friend Udi cajoles, drawing each vowel out into its own admonishment. “It’s raining, Lyra. You need to come down.” He is ten feet beneath her, inside the latticework of roots that trace the boundaries of the host tree this fig once encircled, his long form stretched up like an exclamation point through the hollow memory of the tree. His soft Israeli accent is thickened with exasperation. “We will try this again another day.”
My daughter is not budging. Udi’s kids scramble over the jutting roots nearby, searching for the howler monkeys braying inside the clouds. My two-year- old fusses against my chest, woken by the rain and the roaring monkeys and the voice of his furious sister.
“I want to climb to the top! I don’t WANT to come down! It’s not raining INSIDE the tree.”
I start to answer, but Udi interrupts. “Enough! You can argue when she is on the ground.” His face is tense. This lowest section of the climb is the hardest. Here the hollow is broad enough to hold four or five people, too wide to reach across the center for support. The knot of roots that form the trunk’s cylindrical ladder loosen their weave, leaving gaps up to four feet across, like giant windows framing the tangle of the forest below. To add to the difficulty, the tree cants, stretching upward at a sly angle that mirrors the downward slope of the ground. It is tricky for an adult to find good purchase among the branches and still maintain the three points of contact that are the basic safety etiquette for free-climbing.
For a child, this means lowering your body until your arms are fully extended before your feet will touch the next rung. Even on a clear day, the smooth grey bark is slick from the ubiquitous mist. If you misstep into the paneless sky, there is nothing to break your fall to the forest floor.
Still, I know my daughter. The only thing more tempting than a challenge is an argument. “I can’t hear you so high in the tree! Come down here and we’ll talk about it.”
Udi scowls, but as I’d hoped, Lyra begins to descend. Udi matches her pace, staying ten feet below. At the center of the largest gap he stops and braces his body against the far side of the tree. From here they will take the last thirty feet in turns, him dropping first, then guiding her feet to the next branch until they’re level.
This sheltering annoys my daughter to no end.
“I don’t need any help!”
The troupe of monkeys break through the cloud cover, their raucous chatter drowning out her complaints. She twists around and her foot slips off the root. Udi yelps.
“Lyra! Pay attention!!”
My son is crying now, pushing away and flinging his head back in an attempt to break free. I lower the baby carrier so he can nurse. The last thing I need is for him to take off through the cloud forest into the quickening dark. I slide my raincoat on backwards, using the hood to shield my son from what has become a robust, steady rain. The monkeys swing through the branches, their own babies quiet and agreeable on their backs, while my daughter descends the last fifteen feet in a verbal avalanche of grievances until, finally, they are down.
We have come to Costa Rica against my better judgment – me, my wife, and our two children – for the joint fortieth birthday celebration of three of our closest friends. It has been years since my wife has spent two full weeks with us. I joke nervously that I will be divorced, certainly, by the time we return. What is harder to speak is my real fear: that we may not come home at all.
For the last few months, while I compulsively refreshed flight cancellation tabs on my laptop and chewed my cuticles into shards, two murder/ suicides have cycloned through the news: a lesbian couple who drove their six children off a cliff into the sea; and a local mom, a friend of a friend, whose husband murdered first her and then their five-year- old daughter before killing himself. They lived one neighborhood away from me; our daughters shared the same friends.
In the aftershock of these deaths, kindergarten pickup morphed into a thicket of trauma, huddles of horrified parents trading whispers while their children darted between their legs, collecting coats and bags and art projects from their cubbies: “Why didn’t she tell me?” and “He seemed like such a good father” and, again and again, “I just had no idea.”
These conversations left me immobilized, like a moth pinned to the margin of a page. It was my own life staring back from the surface of their grief. Of course she told you! I wanted to scream. I had been telling people about my wife’s rage for years. Why didn’t you listen? What did you fail to hear?
The torrent of questions coalesced into a single voice, rising in me like an echo from deep in a well: If my wife killed us tomorrow, it would be the most natural progression in the world.
You’d think a realization like that would be enough to wake a person up. That a voice that loud would spur me into action. Instead, the worse my marriage became, the more I froze. Two months later, we boarded a plane to Costa Rica. It was the first time we would be alone together in almost ten months.
I buckle my soggy children into Udi’s car as the rain swells into a storm, and climb into the passenger seat to head back to the hotel where my wife has sequestered herself.
“Tomorrow,” my daughter announces, “I am coming back and I am climbing that entire tree.”
I meet her gaze in the passenger-side mirror, and marvel at her confidence in “tomorrow.”
* * *
I was five months pregnant with my daughter when I stopped being able to drive. It was late June in Manhattan, the small cusp of summer when the evening air is still soft and balmy, before the city begins basting in the miasma of human exertion. My wife and I were eating dinner at a neighborhood bar, my first meal out in months; after twenty weeks of nausea, it was bliss to crave food again.
“Let’s walk over the bridge and watch the sunset,” she suggested. The light sparked gold on the river as we walked the few blocks south to the George Washington Bridge. I have crossed bridges on countless occasions – I have spent most of my life living on islands. But this time, as we exited the looped pedestrian ramp and stepped onto the suspension platform, the bridge began to violently shake. I froze, knees half-bent. My wife walked ahead, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the bridge was breaking apart beneath our feet. Eight lanes of traffic roared past us as the steel deck shuddered like it was being attacked by a jackhammer. I clutched the guardrail as the bridge lurched sideways and began sliding toward the Hudson River.
I’d had panic attacks before, but never hallucinations. Tears streamed down my face as I struggled to breathe. The muscles around my stomach clenched like they were lacing themselves into a corset, then began contracting rhythmically, like hands wringing water from soft cheese. Perhaps my body was weaving a safety harness, tethering me to the bridge. Perhaps it was abandoning ship, clutching for the parachute cord and trying to expel the baby. I clung to the railing and forced myself to take small steps backwards, closing my eyes against the dangling bridge, the churning chasm of water.
“This isn’t real,” I whispered like a mantra. “This isn’t real, isn’t real, isn’t real.” In the distance, I could hear my wife laughing.
* * *
Ficus aurea, the golden strangler fig my daughter is so intent on climbing, is no ordinary tree. It begins its life as an epiphyte, or air plant, high in the canopy in the crook of another tree’s branches. Drawing nutrients from the sun, the rain, and the leaf litter scattered on its unwitting host, the fig grows downward, winding serpentine roots around the host’s supportive trunk. As the fig encircles the tree, its roots fuse together, creating an elaborate columnar scrollwork.
For a while, this sheath protects the inner tree, offering stability and increased protection from inclement storms. Over time, however, the embrace becomes constricting. Taproots churn through the soil, siphoning key nutrients away from the host, while eager branches shoot across the canopy, weaving a net of new leaves that capture the sunlight and pitch the host tree into darkness, fatally clenched in the fig’s eponymous “strangle.”
Their relationship is symbiotic, until it is not. They begin as one thing; then, when the balance of power shifts, they become something else. The host, deprived of sustenance and of potential, slowly suffocates, until there is nothing left but negative space to mark its legacy. A memory, in the hollow where there was once a tree.
I knew nothing of strangler figs before this trip to Costa Rica. When I was first pregnant, I thought of hollow trees as sanctuaries, liminal spaces for sheltering life. I told anyone who asked that my birth plan was to have the baby inside a tree. I was only half joking.
When I imagined meeting my daughter, we were always in a forest: a sheltering canopy, carpet of soft pine, an ancient tree split by a deep hollow, moss blanketing its basin. It was night, limned by the moon; an owl hooted softly from its charcoaled perch. Sometimes there was a hammock knit from green vines, swaddling us both as she nursed. That I couldn’t actually have this birth, I understood. But the worse my anxiety became, the more I dreamed of it.
Nearly all species of mammal retreat to give birth – under a porch, in the corner of a barn, inside a den. They hide not only to protect their newborn babies, but to protect themselves, to secure privacy and solitude during the painful work of birth.
It was an ancestral instinct, my yen for reclusion. I didn’t know yet that I too needed protection.
I made it off the bridge that June without collapse: the bridge’s, or my own. But the world I walked back into was warped, as if I’d crossed through a portal. The pedestrian threads of daily life – the hum of an air conditioner, the rattle of a ceiling fan, the too-loud slam of a hastily shut door – would cause a spike of adrenaline that metastasized into terror. I stopped sleeping; began getting up in the middle of the night to put my head inside the freezer, hoping the cold air would help me breathe.
Bridges were off limits. So was driving. Climbing behind the wheel, I felt my lungs flood with a backwash of terror. Embankments hurtled upward, pitching themselves toward me, everything too bright, too loud, wrong-sized, like the contorted landscape of an Expressionist painting.
Friends assured me this was normal, that women developed all kinds of irrational fears while pregnant. They told stories about their fears of heights, fears of flying, fears of being in the dark. It would go away, they promised, after the baby was born.
When I mentioned the panic attack at my next prenatal appointment, the midwife scoffed. She was a giant of a woman, six feet tall before adding on her towering heels. Her hands stabbed my uterus like chisels on a block of ice.
“Hormones make you crazy,” she informed me. “Just avoid bridges.” That we lived on a two-mile- wide island seemed not to occur to her.
“If that woman is on call when I’m admitted, I am having this baby in a closet,” I told friends afterward. They laughed, but this time I was not joking at all.
At home I looked up room rates at the hotel across from the hospital. I could give birth there, and then walk across the parking lot for aftercare. I considered the likelihood of finding surgical instruments in a storage closet; then, the logistics of severing the umbilical cord with my teeth. It was doable, I thought, if necessary. This seemed much safer, somehow, than turning myself over to dismissive medical staff and a room full of beeping machines that would surely cause a catastrophic collapse. A parking lot, I reasoned, would not fall down around me.
A friend listened to my panic, then gently pointed me toward a homebirth midwife who had space for new clients. My wife was skeptical, but agreed to drive me upstate to meet her, “just to see.” The office was in a cottage with a wood-paneled sunroom, separated by lush gardens from the nearby house. Fertility statues and Buddha figurines rested between piles of books on tall built‑in shelves. The midwife offered us tea and showed us how to use her composting toilet. We sat cross-legged on bohemian floor pillows as I told her about the panic attacks, the hallucinations, about no longer being able to drive.
She shrugged mildly. “You’re here now. So there’s nothing else to worry about.” Outside, swallowtails and cabbage butterflies flitted through the garden. Near the driveway stood a hollow tree, broad enough to crawl inside of. It was a good omen; even my wife agreed. We said yes.
At the prompting of our new midwife, I made a “vision board” for the birth. With carefully sharpened pencils, I drew my dream tree, broad and ancient, its branches spreading overhead as its roots tumbled in knotty braids into the ground. Into the trunk I cut a door, folded on one edge like a hinge, and behind the door I taped a second picture: me, standing naked, hands wrapped around the orb of my belly. Whenever the panic began, I would close my eyes and imagine myself inside it: the cool bark supporting my shoulders, the loamy smell of just-turned dirt, the deep humming of the wind like the steady breath of the forest.
* * *
The trunk of a tree comprises two main parts: the heartwood and the sapwood. A young tree contains only sapwood. As it matures, its central cells begin to die, and the core transforms from sapwood into heartwood: pillar, memory, repository. New sapwood grows outward in concentric rings, the conduit for all food, water and communication throughout the tree.
The formation of a hollow is a protective response to an injury in the sapwood. Living cells wall off the wounded area, compartmentalizing the damage and preventing infection from traveling through the tree. Cordoned from the surface, fungi and bacteria move into the exposed heartwood instead, eroding the core, and opening up a hollow.
The starting point for all living hollows is a wound.
* * *
Labor arrived gently at the quarter moon, a string of evenly spaced contractions spread out across the afternoon and evening. I made chicken stock, cleaned my kitchen, texted my doula to check in. I was advised to relax, try to rest, reminded that first births are often long. I slept lightly for a few hours, then woke to a long, jagged pain carving through me like the blade of an adze. Minutes later – another.
I moved to the living room to let my wife sleep, curling onto my knees to time each sweeping pain. The contractions slid together until they were oscillating, sixty seconds of steel trailed by sixty seconds of breath. The doula arrived, and then the midwife. Hours passed. I paced, stretched, struggled to bake a batch of brownies. I had been sure I would labor in silence, but in fact, I chanted, humming “ohm” through each wave of pain. When the breath was right, a column of energy pulsed through me, power radiating down my limbs. I was a tower of chakras; light made flesh.
I had dreamed of a tree as my secret hiding space, protected and obscured. But as my daughter turned within me, descending like a corkscrew, I imagined her moving down through a hollow. In fact, the tree was me. The sacred space was her.
After her birth, I learned to tell the story that people knew how to hear: 30 hours of labor, 5 hours of pushing, episiotomy. Asynclitic OP presentation. Two hours of stitching. Elation! Fatigue! Baby!
I didn’t talk about the weight of the midwife’s hands as she curled her fingers into forceps to pull my daughter from me; the blue-bright shock of the scissors or the bubbling pop of sundered flesh; the palpable fear, thick as ghosts, as she rubbed the tiny purple limbs and begged for breath. I didn’t talk about the shame corrugating my memories, how it stretched and coiled like a living thing while the midwife yelled at me for not pushing right, not progressing fast enough; about the hundred sleepless nights spent counting the seconds between my daughter’s breaths; about the fear that circumnutated, or the fog that stalked the hush before dawn.
Although I had read a dozen books, spent eight weeks in childbirth classes, and attended nine months of prenatal appointments, nowhere did I learn that 10% of birthing people will develop postpartum anxiety, or that more than a quarter of those cases will begin during, not after, pregnancy. I didn’t know that factors for increased risk include prior personal or family history of an anxiety disorder, a thyroid imbalance, lack of childcare support networks, financial stress, and an unsupportive or unresponsive partner; or that the presence of anxiety or depression during pregnancy is the single strongest predictor of risk for developing a disorder during postpartum.
I had every one of these preexisting risks. But I didn’t know any of that, then. What I knew was that when a door slammed, the walls crumbled like sand; when the ceiling fan was turned high enough to hear the click of the blades, the windows shook free of their 100‑year frames and shattered, bringing the roof down in a smother of brick and plaster dust.
What I knew was that when I asked for help, my wife got angry. When I told her it wasn’t safe to co‑sleep when she was drunk or high, she yelled at me for letting our daughter in the bed in the first place. When I asked her to hold the baby so I could shower in peace, she sat on the couch with her phone while our daughter screamed frantically in the next room. “She’s going to cry whether I hold her not. What does it matter?”
“I’m not an angry person,” she would remind me. It was my fault for spoiling the baby in the first place. Later: “I’m only treating you the way you deserve.”
The novelist Samantha Hunt has described PPA as “postpartum madness,” as existing “under the influence of an expanded reality.” It is marked by intense, irrational fears; debilitating worry; unpredictable panic attacks; and manifestations of anxiety so extreme they interfere with the ability to function. Although postpartum anxiety is twice as common as postpartum depression, it is less studied. Most often, it appears after periods of insomnia or disrupted sleep.
What I knew was that buildings built on a slope were as unstable as ones perched on toothpicks; that a whistle could make a ceiling cave in; that bridges swung as recklessly as ships in a gale and tipped unwary passengers into the sea.
What I knew was that my wife loved me. What I knew was that she was a good person, “salt of the earth.” I knew this because people told me so, over and over, when I tried to explain what was happening at home.
What I didn’t know, what I couldn’t figure out, was which of these things were true. Which of these threats were real.
As the months drew on, I returned often to the day on the bridge, picking it over thread by thread, hunting for the knot that could be tugged loose, could unravel the tangled distortions that came after.
“Why were you laughing?” I asked my wife repeatedly, churning the memory as if to unearth some new narrative that finally made sense.
“I’ve told you already, I laugh when I’m nervous. I do it all the time.” We had been together for seven years, and I had never known this to happen.
“Of course it has. You just don’t remember.” Then: “Anyway, you looked ridiculous, dragging yourself off the bridge, crying. How was I supposed to react?”
It would take another five years before I understood that this question was rhetorical. Meanwhile, it was safest to stay away from buildings and bridges, away from underground trains buckling the asphalt, away from my wife’s smoldering anger and her sporadic detonations. In the morning, in the evening, in the afternoon; in the darkest, most capacious hours of the night, I fought back the creeping sprawl of anxiety and walked outside to the safety of the trees.
Four years later, I was pregnant again and planning another homebirth with a new midwife. I explained, as I had countless times before, about the anxiety and the panic attacks and the steadily constricting parameters that girded my life. But it was under control, I assured her. I had become an expert in avoiding things, tempers and triggers both. I had shrunk my world into a thimble, smaller than a two-mile island, and I was safe inside. She listened carefully, her eyebrows climbing increasingly higher.
“So. . . . Jenna.” She leaned in, eyes enormous. “None of this is normal. This isn’t okay.”
She was the first person to ever say this to me.
She kept talking, asking questions and outlining protocols. There was medication, she assured me. Hadn’t anyone suggested it? Three months after my son’s birth, I began anti-anxiety medication, and piece by piece, my reality returned to scale.
* * *
There are many things which might cause a tree to become hollow. Arborists call them “agents of wounding.” These wounds are not always apparent to a casual observer. Sometimes a tree looks dead but is in fact thriving. Sometimes, it seems as magical as a fantasia, but inside it is infected; destabilized; succumbing to rot.
* * *
We return to the fig tree the next day. It is the type of weather that passes as sunny in a cloud forest, a perfect climbing day, and the hill is full of tourists. Lyra waits in line, one slender child bracketed by a dozen amused adults. She marvels at the tour guide free-climbing the exterior of the tree. He is barefoot, barely using his hands as he runs lightly up the sloped trunk, calling encouragement to climbers halfway up, then coaching a panicked Australian woman who has made it to the top, but is unable to climb back down.
It takes a while, with two more climbers helping from within the tree, to slowly guide her to the ground. When she emerges, wan and trembling, she is greeted with cheers and encouraging applause from the crowd. As she clings to a friend and struggles to escape her vertigo, I cannot fail to notice that not one person has laughed.
My daughter is undaunted by her plight. “Can’t they all get out of the tree already so I can climb?!” She has the focus of an aspiring Olympian at a qualifying race. I intercept her before she tries the external climb herself. Finally, it is her turn. I leave my son on the ground with a friend, one of the trip’s birthday celebrants, and this time, I follow my daughter up the tree.
She climbs effortlessly, so sure-footed I have to call to her to slow down. “When you reach the top,” I remind her, “keep your legs inside the trunk. Do not climb out onto the limbs without me.”
The tree narrows as we ascend, the roots melting together into a net almost as solid as a wall. The vibrant canopy arcs over the opening of the canal, blotting out the sun. For a moment I am disoriented. It is night, in a forest. I am wrapped in a hammock of firm vines, and my daughter is here, crowning, emerging through the hollow and into the light.
“Another person has existed in her,” Rachel Cusk observes in A Life’s Work, her memoir about motherhood, “and after their birth they live within the jurisdiction of her consciousness. When she is with them she is not herself; when she is without them she is not herself.”
In the place your child grew, there is a lacuna: a blank space; a missing part.
A hollow.
I lean back against the cool bark and take a moment to listen. I am undone by the comfort of the tree’s embrace. I cannot remember the last time I was held. For the first time in almost seven years, I feel safe.
Above me, my daughter crests the lip and pulls her torso beyond the trunk. No cut, no assistance is needed this time. She scoots sideways as I squeeze through beside her; for these few moments, we are cleaved once more. We wave down to our friends, their forms as small and indistinguishable as the columns of leaf-cutter ants the children have been tracking through the forest.
Past the hollow passage, beyond the imprint of the negated tree, the fig’s roots merge into a shallow platform. We are in the height of the canopy. In this brief respite from the clouds, we can see miles ahead. We spy distant volcanoes, shimmering lakes. Before us sprawl twelve unique ecological zones, one of the most biodiverse concentrations of life in the world.
The lessons contained within these ecosystems are instructive. Birth is often viewed in terms of the child’s passage; their inaugural journey earthside. But your first child marks your own birth, too. When my daughter was born, I was remade as a mother. Caught so long in that transition, I had forgotten that there are multiple models of symbiosis. This tree alone began its life commensally as a self-contained epiphyte; served its host briefly as a mutualistic protector; and ultimately, turned parasite, suffocating its host in pursuit of domination.
I realize I have spent years asking the wrong questions. Perhaps the cause of that first debilitating breakdown was never important to unearth. Perhaps my wife’s cruelty flourished simply because it could: there was a rupture, and thus, an opportunity. Once enabled, it behaved like any living thing, seizing power to catalyze its growth.
Most mature trees harbor hollows; longevity is often gained through loss. Yet these trees can thrive for centuries, supporting entire communities of dependent life. The cause of the hollow, the “agent of wounding,” is not important. What matters is the way the tree heals.
In the next year, I will divorce my wife. I will relearn to drive. We will return from Costa Rica alive, my deepest fears unrealized, and I will uproot our lives, transplant them where we can grow as rapacious and wild as this cloud forest, unhemmed by abuse or fear.
Things will become worse before they get better; change is a messy, incremental process, for people as well as for trees. But in this moment, alive with my daughter at the top of the cloud forest, I stare down at the world as if peering over the ledge of a bridge. Nothing quakes or wavers. The tree waits beneath me, but I do not recede into the safety of its carapace.
Finally, I am not afraid.
This is Jenna Devany Waters’ first print publication. Her work has appeared online in MUTHA Magazine and jmww.