Writing the Senses: Touch

In this five-part column, Hannah Howard explores the senses from a craft perspective

In my food writing class at Catapult, we talk about how good food writing is really just good writing. My theory is that food is such a powerful opening to talking about so many different things—tiny and big, silly and profound, personal and global—not simply because we all eat every day or because eating is an integral part of being human. Those things are true. But for me, the magic of food on the page is its sensory-ness.

When in doubt, start with the five senses. That’s some of the best writing advice I’ve received and I’m happy to pay it forward. If you think back to the last thing you drank or ate (or maybe you are enjoying a steaming cup of bitter coffee or a bag of crispy/dusty chips at this very moment), you’ll notice it looked a certain way, smelled like itself, and hopefully tasted great. The mug felt hot or heavy in your hands; those chips greasy against your fingers. You heard the sound of the crunch, the tinny crinkle of the bag. That’s the beginning of setting a scene. Painting a picture with the senses is a way to grab the reader’s interest, to root us in time and space. Now that I have the reader’s attention, now that I have created something tangible, I can take the reader anywhere. Those roots can grow and blossom into so many different kinds of stories.

Food is closely related to all our senses, but you can approach writing about any situation by beginning with the senses. We experience so many tactile things every day. Our butts in the chair. The jet of water in the shower. Our feet on the floor. Our hand in someone else’s hand.

My daughter was born nine months ago. Having a baby has been so touch-heavy for me. This little body on my body. Her fluffy hair on my lips when I give her a kiss. Her kicking foot against my arm when I have to wrestle her to change her diaper.

The senses are just the start. Feeling something physically is a way in to feeling something emotionally. By writing about touching things, we can touch someone. When in doubt, start with touch.

As you read this essay I wrote focusing on touch, see how your body reacts.

*

I was sure Ace, my fourteen-pound maltipoo, was with me in the hospital bed after my emergency C-section, curled up by my feet. I could feel the weight of his little head resting on my calf. I’m a squirmy sleeper, and yet most nights Ace still decides he wants to join me in bed. He fits himself into the bend of my knee or sprawls alongside my back. As I toss and turn, he patiently repositions himself. Sometimes one inside-out ear flops against the pillow. His fur is as soft as anything I can imagine.

What I was feeling, while woozy from drugs and adrenaline in the Hunterdon Medical Center, were the compression devices the nurses had affixed to the bottom half of my legs. They were there to prevent blood clots after the surgery. They kept squeezing and releasing and squeezing and releasing. Even after I knew this, I could have sworn Ace somehow made it into the hospital, whose doors had been locked due to Covid-19. We had to wait for someone to answer the buzzer when we arrived at 4 a.m. the day before, while I sunk into a bench as a tidal wave of a contraction crashed over me and my husband stood with the car seat in the dark, empty parking lot. I could have sworn the pressure on my shins in the hospital bed was the curly cue of Ace’s furry body, coiled in dog sleep.

I’m someone who gets so lost in my head I can forget I have a body. But labor brought me into myself. My waters broke with a great gush, the way they told me only happens in the movies. I called the doctor, who asked if I felt any contractions.

“I’m not sure,” I answered. I felt a dull ache in my back but that had been a pregnancy constant.

My body answered the question. Not ten minutes later, I was on the floor of the bathroom on my hands and knees. The feeling was so much bigger than I was. It was in my hips and in my pelvis. It sent daggers radiating out to my belly, my butt.

I had watched a hypnobirthing class, narrated by a perky British lady who said labor was a lot of sensation, but it was not pain.

It was sensation, and it was wholly painful. It brought me literally to my knees. My body’s instinct was to go down, down, down. I became intimately aware of the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, the scratchy green carpet in the bedroom of my parents’ house in New Jersey, where I had been staying with my husband and Ace when the pandemic first came. I hadn’t given the carpet much notice before. Then on April 8, right before midnight, it suddenly became a huge part of my world. I felt the rough edges of its fibers on my knees, between my fingers, against my cheek.

Down, down, down. If only I could have merged with that carpet.

Instead, I labored. We brought a bucket with us in the car ride to the hospital in case I kept throwing up. I half laid down, half writhed in the backseat. Cool air on my face from the open window. Empty middle-of-the-night roads.

You can approach writing about any situation by beginning with the senses.

At the hospital, I tried to keep my mask on despite needing to vomit again and again. Crisp paper against my mouth. My knees on hard tile. The nurses kept bringing me differently shaped pillows, propping them on the bed, but all my body wanted was to lower itself onto the floor.

Hours passed. I had an epidural, which I hadn’t initially wanted. I waited. Suddenly, the baby’s heart rate plummeted. Suddenly, I was being run through the hospital to the operating room, also like in the movies.

They pumped me full of so many drugs. I felt the cool rush of liquids, through the IV and into my bloodstream. The warm, strong hand of my husband, who stood beside me in his mask and his hairnet. Crushing pressure in my stomach as the doctor performed the surgery. The enveloping clutch of fear.

Then there was a cry that filled the air, the best noise I have ever heard. My baby girl was here. Her name was Simone. She was healthy. She was perfect.

There are two births, they say: a baby and a mother.

I couldn’t get up from the hospital bed at first. The compressions on my legs kept squeezing. I wished my puppy was there instead. My husband had to hand me our baby from her little plastic bassinet, this burrito wrapped up in the stiff hospital blanket, small yet solid. I watched her chest rise and fall, transfixed. I held her foot in my hand, counting her toes.

When we got home from the hospital, I could make it up the stairs, but I couldn’t bend down to pet Ace, who jumped up and wiggled his tail in ecstatic greeting. I tried, but my incision yelped in protest. I pressed my palm against my stomach, against this new scar I hadn’t wanted. It twinged. Later, it itched.

My world was newly small and my feelings enormous. I wasn’t sure what part of that came from having a newborn and what part from this pandemic that suddenly kept us at home. Being a new mom was so physical. Here was my own achy exhaustion, the way it consumed me. My bleeding nipples. Needing my husband to help me step into my pants, yoga pants that wouldn’t rub against the incision.

Here was the impossible softness of Simone’s fluffy hair, her cheek on my cheek. Here was her strong grip, her tiny hand squeezing my finger. Reaching for my face. Here was my body, feeding her body.

By writing about touching things, we can touch someone. 

I healed slowly. Simone and I cried a lot as we learned together: how to hold her in the nook of my arm, how to feed her. She didn’t make tears yet, but sometimes a yellowish goop collected in the corners of her eyes. We wiped it away with a washcloth. My own tears were hot on my cheek. We had to feed Simone every three hours and sometimes it took her a whole hour to eat, even more. We’d both fall asleep with her on my boob. I didn’t realize how all-consuming this would be, how relentless.

At night, Ace slept with my parents. I felt betrayed, but also understood; we were up every few hours with the crying baby. I kept thinking I felt him there in bed, his velvet paws, the hair all askew on his sleepy face. But it was just a pillow, just my husband’s foot, just the blanket of my own confused exhaustion.

Simone started to make real tears. The pandemic dragged on and on. We moved back home to Brooklyn and Simone moved into her own room. Ace came back to bed.

First thing most mornings, I walk into Simone’s room and pick her up from her crib. Ace follows me, wagging his tail. At least for now, Simone is a morning person. She smiles and says “bababababababa.” My world is the weight of her in my arms. I kiss her belly. I feel everything: her warm breath on my face, her skin’s unthinkable softness, a love that that holds me, that sometimes hurts.