Kat Zagaria
She struggles to sleep.
The day adds up in an exhausting tally, but she does not realize that sleep can bring relief. She understands that sometime after consciousness slips, she is left alone, released from a parental embrace to dream. And so she has begun to fear that time without, the hours when darkness engulfs and her caregivers’ presence is elsewhere: the time of absence. For this reason, she fights. She battles drowsiness, resisting inevitable submission as sleep closes in on her. She kicks and cries, nuzzling the floor, pounding it with clenched fists.
I rub her back until she has exhausted herself, then pick her up. Her weight rests heavy across my chest; her legs dangle over my swollen belly. There is no respite from the screams ricocheting in my ears. I wonder if her gestating brother can hear her fear-turned-anger, can feel the heat of her head, burning like a meteor.
Last night, he kicked from inside. Simultaneously, her heel pressed on the exterior of my stomach, and their soles met for a moment across a layered veil of skin and muscle. I imagine lifting the shroud so they can glimpse one another. When their eyes meet, will there be recognition? Will his irises hold the same oceanic depths that hers once rendered?
One constitutes me, the other orbits me in dizzying and ever-expanding ellipses. She unspools from my new center of gravity — him — testing how far my penumbra of protection will reach. I feel her tether. Its elastic grows taut with her cry and slingshots me to her side, demanding a fruitless attempt at reënvelopment.
Back to “Motherhood and the Body”
Kat Zagaria is an Italian-American writer and curator based in Maine. A recovering academic, Kat holds a Master of Art in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her essays “I/We” and “A Matrilineage of Wolves” have appeared in effy literary mag and HEAL Zine, respectively. In 2023, she was a Curator/Writer-in-Residence at Hewnoaks. She gave birth to her second child in 2026.