Before we knew about the Freedom Industries chemical spill, I met my mom for lunch at a pizza parlor in my hometown. We were only a few miles away from the contamination site. It was about noon, just after the holidays, and the restaurant was packed with families. My baby had not yet been born – he was a mere idea, a plan. It would take me several more months before I was ready to discard protection. 

We ordered water to drink and a pizza to share. The server delivered our beverages to the table. My mother inserted her straw and took a sip. 

“Does your water taste funny?” my mother asked. 

I took a drink. “No,” I said. “It tastes like water.” 

My mother was like this—always on the lookout for problems, hypersensitive to her environment, inventing threats, I believed, in places where there were none. 

She sniffed at her cup, paused, and took another slight sip. “I’m not drinking this. It tastes like licorice. And I don’t think you should drink yours either.”

I shrugged my shoulders and rolled my eyes as I took a long gulp. 

Later that day, after making the forty-five-minute drive back to my home, I checked my phone to see a text from my mother. I expected a message from her—she always checked to see if I’d returned safely from even the shortest of trips. But this time, she wasn’t checking on my arrival. 

Did you see the news? I knew that water tasted strange. Don’t drink any more of it! she wrote. And soon, another message: thank goodness you’re not pregnant. 

**

I was born and raised in Charleston, West Virginia—a place also known as Chemical Valley. The town hospital where my mom delivered me had a bad reputation. Ladies at a church baby shower cautioned my pregnant mother to be careful. Babies have been switched, they warned.

 “Even one mistake is awful enough,” Janie, one of the church ladies, said in a low voice as my mother opened another package of pink onesies, holding them up for admiration against her swollen belly. 

The women continued to describe stories they’d heard from friends of friends who’d given birth in previous weeks, who would have had their own babies switched had they not taken care to closely observe the birthmarks of their newborns, the amount and color of their wispy hair. 

 “That hospital opened too soon. They didn’t have time to fully train the staff. Better keep your wits about you,” Janie said with a nod and wink to my mom. 

My mother didn’t need another reason to be anxious: she’d spent most of her pregnancy confined to the couch on bed rest. She was there due to early bleeding, a “weak uterus.” Her high-risk pregnancy was directly linked to exposure to toxic chemicals. 

My grandmother also woke to spots of blood in her underwear early in pregnancy. In the hope of saving my mother, her doctor prescribed a drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES). My grandmother accepted the medication gratefully and with little concern. 

I imagine my pregnant grandmother waking each morning, buttering a slice of toast, placing a tiny white pill on the tip of her pink tongue, partially dissolving it with the heat of her own saliva, washing it down with a cold glass of milk. She rubs her belly at the kitchen table, feeling the firm bulge of my tiny mother. I imagine her thankful for the grace of modern medicine and of the intervention of her doctor, totally unaware that while her medication may be saving the life of my mother, it would jeopardize the potential of me. My grandmother had no conception that each time she placed this small substance in her mouth, she was swallowing both life and death. 

A decade after my grandmother took this medication, the term “DES daughter” became an identifier of pathological fertility. Many DES daughters had full hysterectomies before they ever reached adulthood. My mother was more fortunate. She was still able to get pregnant, though her pregnancies were complicated. She was forced to spend half her pregnancy lying down, relying on the goodwill of those around her. 

My mother spent the warming of spring and the hot nights of summer expanding on the couch. As she grew with me, women from church would stop by with gifts of groceries or for conversation and lunch. 

She also spent so much time alone. My father worked long days at the electrical company. While he was gone, she wrote. When I was a teenager, I found one of her journals from her pregnancy with me, a black hardbound notebook with flowers on the cover, in a stack of books in the basement. I sat on the cold, concrete floor and reclined against the wall to read the words of my young mother. Each entry was addressed to God in the form of a prayer. In so many pages, the only image present was that of blood, unnecessary, ill-timed blood. In each prayer, she begged for God to make her body corporate, for her body to make room for the life of me. She promised to sit still, to not move. She would stay quiet and small, if only He would allow this one thing to grow. 

And so, I grew. When my mother went into labor, my dad drove down the interstate and over the river for her to check into the delivery unit at the hospital. From one wing, patients had a clear view of the Kanawha River, a water source infamously contaminated by so many industrial spills. I envision a floor of laboring women sucking on ice from the tap in their complimentary cups, riding the waves of their own contractions, and as they looked out their windows, all they saw was gray water. 

My mother’s labor was as easy as her pregnancy was complicated. She felt little pain, she told me, only pushed for a matter of minutes. 

When the nurse laid me on her chest, my mother stroked my downy dark hair. It covered both my head and my back. She counted my toes (all ten), and then my fingers (there were eleven). She counted again. Still eleven. My mother softly rubbed the additional thumb that extended from my right hand.  

 In a way, my excess was a gift.  It would be impossible to mix a baby up who had three thumbs. My mother sighed with a peculiar sense of relief, Anna will not be switched, before she felt twinges of horror. She did not tell me about the horror. My dad did: “You had those three thumbs and downy, dark hair all over your back. No one was going to mix you up.” He shuddered in the telling. When my mother recounted the incident, I believed  I was born special, extra, blessed. But in my father’s tale, the mark felt closer to monstrosity. 

The third thumb extended from the side of my right hand. It did not contain a joint. Its tip was marked with a sliver of nail. When I squint at yellowed photographs from baby books, I am always drawn to the images where I am crawling, where I can see my tiny thumbs splayed out on the hardwood floor.   

When I was a year old, my mother scheduled surgery to have my extra thumb removed. Though the doctors claimed it was best to remove a digit early, before a child can remember, before a child can miss too many milestones, I have a hazy memory of what I’ll always think of as the surgery. There, I am placed on an exam table wearing only a diaper. A nurse with bright lips hands me a lime green jelly candy covered in crystallized sugar. I bite into the candy. I suck its juices. I have never tasted anything quite so sweet. Then I am whisked away alone to a bed with bars, a stuffed teddy bear waiting for me by a pillow. Time passes. My mother appears again by my side, stroking my bandaged hand, kissing my luscious cheeks, telling me she’s here, she will never leave me, everything went well, everything will be all right. 

For several weeks, my right hand was bound in a cast. When I began to use my left hand to pick up a spoon at dinner or crayons for drawing, my mother feared the preference was compensation. I adapted quickly, though, my mother told me, reassuring herself as much as me. I learned to crawl one-handed in a matter of days.  

What we do not speak of was how my adaptation was driven by pain. The surgery immobilized the joint in my remaining right thumb. Today, a scar, pink and puffy, bolts down its side. If touched the wrong way, my neurons fire with a spark, pain radiating from my thumb to my entire hand. I am left breathless, my whole body electric. 

Sometimes when my grandmother and mother would sit at the wooden dinner table in the kitchen, their conversation would veer into a discussion of our genetic history. I listened closely as they talked about the handedness of great grandparents (I wasn’t the only leftie in the family). Neither of them, though, could seem to recount a family member born with extra fingers, though they were sure there must have been someone, how else would I have developed that additional digit? 

In adulthood, I learned that extra digits (polydactylism) was connected to the prenatal environment, to pollution, exposure to particulates in the air. My mother was restrained, though, staying so still on her blue floral couch. I knew she refused any suspect medication from her doctors at appointments, she told me this often, she knew too well what could go wrong there. 

But maybe one spring day, Janie stopped by the house for lunch. Together, they ate sandwiches and drank sweet tea, and the weather was so nice that they decided to open a few windows. And then as each day warmed, my mother continued this practice, opening some windows, enjoying the breeze of the outdoors despite her confinement, and as she inhaled the mountain air, I grew, and I grew, and I grew.

◆

As a girl, we sheltered in place often. We did not worry about natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes – our mountainous terrain mostly protected us from these. Our fears were turned toward the industrial. 

I knew the drill. Whenever that distant alarm sounded, we hurried inside and shut the doors, closing the cracks with duct tape or dish towels. My mom turned on the news, the white noise of our detention. Eventually, the authorities gave us the “all clear” to return to the world again. 

And then my mother asked us to wait just a bit longer. 

My mother’s love language was worry. She chanted “be careful” like an incantation when we climbed trees or rode bikes around the block. Sometimes she said it multiple times, reflexively, like a plea or prayer. I think she believed that voicing her fears served as a sort of protection, an umbrella over our vulnerabilities. 

Maybe her worry did keep me safe – but it also infected me with anxiety. 

She never fully trusted the men in charge. She was also dependent upon them. We lived in West Virginia, after all, because my dad worked for an electrical company. There weren’t many other jobs in the state outside of the energy sector. Like most middle-class West Virginians, coal didn’t just keep our lights on – it paid our bills. 

And my mother never fully trusted doctors, either – not after what had happened to her and her mother. She was always suspicious of new vaccines and medications. Her life experience taught her that promises of safety were often empty. She knew that it wasn’t just chemicals that could be toxic – systems could be, too. She did not use this language. She communicated this inner knowing to me through her hypervigilance – a hypervigilance I would resent her for, one that I would never fully understand until I, too, became a mother.  

Perhaps that’s why when I became a teenager, I hated my period and what it meant – fertility. I knew the weight that came with that. 

Once I got my period the day before a pool party I’d been eager to attend. I asked to stop by the store to purchase a box of tampons, but my mother would not let me buy them. 

“Who knows what kind of chemicals are in those fibers – just sitting there, inside of you, for hours,” she said. 

“They make natural tampons,” I reasoned. “They sell them at the health food store. I’ll buy them with my allowance money.” 

“Natural.” My mother snorted. “Who knows what that means? I’m sure there are dyes in those, too.” 

I argued some more, but she would not be dissuaded. I’d gotten my period. There would be no party. I stayed home and did jumping jacks in a dark room. I coped with my anger and anxiety through movement. Obsessive, compulsive exercise. I hated being tied down. 

I vowed that whenever I had a child of my own, I would let them have more freedom. 

◆

MCHM, the chemical that contaminated the Elk River by Freedom Industries, is used to purify coal. It smells slightly of licorice. My mother was right. She sniffed it out before there were any other clues. 

For over a week, around 300,000 residents were told to not cook, bathe, drink, or wash with the tap. Grocery stores sold out of bottled water quickly. 

My mother was inconvenienced, but not desperate. She had a large supply of bottled water stocked in the basement. She was always prepared for disaster to strike.  

Each day, she called to chat about the horrific, mismanaged situation. Residents were going to the hospital with burns, nausea, and rashes. No one knew how the chemical would affect humans in the long term. 

“I just keep thinking about Lori,” my mom said one afternoon on the phone. “Pregnant. With a baby. I wonder how much water she drank before she knew. I wonder how much that baby drank. I would be beside myself.” 

My home’s water supply, several interstate exits away, was supposedly not affected by the spill. As I turned on my shower one evening, I pulled up a map of the rivers. The Elk, a tributary of the Kanawha, the Kanawha flowing into the Ohio: my home’s water source. I looked at the showerhead as I soaped my bare body. I wondered what was hiding in that clear stream, whether my nightly ritual was contributing to my purification or my contamination.

I tried to have a baby several months after the Freedom Industries chemical spill. It took several years. Infertility with no known cause, my medical charts said — though I had my theories. 

Eventually, there was no blood when I expected it. I took a test, and there, finally, two pink lines. 

The first question I asked my doctor at the initial appointment had to do with toxicity: “do the daughters of DES daughters have complications during pregnancy?”

“There’s no evidence that it affects the third generation,” he replied. “And I would know – my mentor in medical school specialized in studying the health effects of DES. I was a co-author on several of his papers.” 

I felt relieved that I’d found a doctor who’d specialized in something so specific to my own concerns. “Oh, good,” I said. “My mom had to go on bedrest for such a long time. I’ve been worried about that.” 

“All the research shows that you’ll be unaffected,” he assured me. And I wanted to believe him – that the medication’s impact had been watered down.

During those early days of pregnancy, I found myself preoccupied with the chemicals that characterized my self-care. I left my nails naked, unpainted, fearing the polish’s fumes. My hair grew dark without dye. And I did not nurse my nausea with Zofran, my heartburn with Tums. I was assured these were safe to take in pregnancy – but I knew to be wary of such certainty. 

I spent my pregnancy running. I was tired, exhausted, pregnancy consumed all my energy stores, but I could not slow down. I went on long runs, over mountain trails, through the park, breathing deeply into the outside air. 

I inherited my mother’s pathological worry. The only medicine I found was movement.

In my third trimester, I went in for a routine ultrasound. I was interested to see how many digits my baby had.  

“How many fingers do you see?” I asked the tech. She looked confused. “Only 5 on each hand?”

“Yes, only five,” she responded absently. 

She seemed preoccupied, measuring other things. She wrinkled her forehead, scrunching her nose as she stared at the screen. 

Eventually, my doctor appeared.  

“Well, looks like baby’s small. About four weeks behind. Nothing to get too upset about. Still, best to keep an eye on it. You’ll go to the perinatal center for non-stress tests and ultrasounds twice a week. Just as a precaution.”

I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. All my freedom during pregnancy flashed before me. “Is this my fault?” I said after a moment. I thought about all those long, tired runs. All that exercise. 

He looked at me kindly. “Oh, everyone worries about that. The truth is, sometimes these things just happen. I mean, you don’t drink. You don’t smoke. You don’t use drugs. Nothing to be done.”

But I didn’t believe him. I thought about my mother, on bedrest, during most of her pregnancy with me. I considered how she was willing to do the one thing I would not: sit still. I’d wanted more freedom. And now, I believed, my baby was paying the price. 

◆

I drove to the perinatal center blocks away from the hospital. I sat in the waiting room with other round women, all united under the label “high risk.” The Today Show played on a box television suspended from the ceiling. Jenna and Hoda poured themselves morning cocktails. 

A nurse called my name, and in a small room, she invited me to sit in a cushioned, reclining chair. 

“Boy or girl?” 

“Boy,” I said. 

She pulled a powder blue Velcro strip out of her pocket, wrapping the Velcro around my bare belly, securing a small monitor. 

“Where do you usually feel him kick?” I placed my hand to my stretched skin in search of the answer. 

“There,” I pointed upon feeling a swift kick. The nurse shifted the monitor’s position. She handed me an object that looked like a remote. There was a single button. 

“Your job,” she said, “is to click this button every time you feel movement. Let’s practice before we get started. Next time you feel him move, register it with a ‘click.’”

A minute passed. My belly was still. Time felt expansive. The nurse and I were quiet. Finally, a kick. Click.

“Okay, good,” the nurse said. “Just a moment.” She exited the room returning with a small bottle of chilled water. 

“Here,” she said, handing me the bottle. “This tends to wake them up.” 

I leaned back in my chair and took a large gulp of water. “Okay, buddy,” I said under my breath. “You can do it. Let’s pass this test.”

It was as if he heard my command. On cue, he began moving, valleys turning to steep mountain slopes on the screen. 

All it took was a little bit of water to bring him back to life. 

◆

But my son’s percentiles continued to shrink. 

I spent afternoons in bed, staring at shadows on white walls. I curled into a ball and whispered “I’m sorry” for hours, the way I used to whisper my prayers to God at night. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I wonder if contrition will be enough sacrifice to make my son grow.  

It was not. Eventually, after weeks of diminishing progress, my doctor intervened. 

“Babies with growth restrictions often have to be induced,” he explained to me. “The uterus becomes a space inhospitable for growth. Leaving the baby inside increases the risk of fetal death. The outside environment becomes a safer place than the inside.” 

And so it wasn’t the outside world that was the threat anymore – it was me. 

I reported to the hospital for an induction. I’d hoped for a natural labor, but I got one triggered by Pitocin instead. Synthetic oxytocin. Fake happiness. 

“Nothing wrong with inductions,” my doctor assured me as I shifted positions in the hospital bed and stared at the screen monitoring the waves of my contractions. 

◆

As the Freedom Industries water crisis dragged on into its second week, it was declared “not a disaster.” This was because U.S. code designates major disasters as having been caused by nature – and this, of course, was the fault of man.

 Still, FEMA deployed millions of dollars in aid. My mother, along with every other resident in town, drove to their designated location to receive their free package of bottled water. 

Information about the chemical spill dominated the local news. The leak, residents learned, had been happening for hours before residents were alerted. Freedom Industries was under no oversight. The company tried to keep the incident quiet, applying a band aid fix to the tank that held the chemical. 

The incident became notorious, evidence for the grim consequences awaiting those who placed their trust in systems rather than the self. Many used it as a rationale for never drinking from the tap ever again. Neighbors ordered gallons of spring water for doorstep delivery. Others consumed their water from plastic bottles packaged states away. 

But all those options had their problems, too. Even though choice gave the illusion of agency, no amount of personal responsibility could save us from a contaminated environment.  

◆

When my baby arrived, he was small. Not as small as my doctors predicted, but still – startlingly tiny. I cradled his bony body against my bare chest. As he rooted toward my nipple, he pursed his little lips to latch, but he could not suck. 

We did this for hours that turned into days. My baby on my bare chest, grunting, then screaming in thirst – his miniature mouth unable to take good gulps.

I was determined, though. I would feed him – not some plastic bottle, not some chemical formula. 

“Nothing wrong with formula,” my pediatrician reassured me. I responded with tears and took off my shirt to try to feed again. 

  Eventually, my husband looked at my stretched, swollen, bleeding body, and he begged me to sleep. 

Just rest, he insisted in the kindest of voices, and I drifted to a place beyond dream. 

I woke to breasts hard as drums, river of milk leaking into the bedsheets. I listened for the whimpers of my son – I expected wailing – but the room was quiet. I turned to my husband. He sat beside me, holding my son, content. 

“I need to feed him,” I said, sitting straight up. 

“He’s fine.”

“How long did I sleep?”

“A few hours.”

“He needs to eat!”

“I fed him,” he admitted. Then he told me that he bought a can of formula at the drug store – just in case – and while I slept, he went into the kitchen, turned on the tap, mixed it up – 

“Why would you do something like that?” I asked. 

“Because he needs to grow,” he said quietly. 

I started to cry. I started to scream. The fingers of anxiety gripped me. I thought of all that might happen if I could not do this one thing with my body right. 

But the only thing wrong in the room was me. My son was safe and sleeping, breath steady, lips curved into a slight smile. He was full, fed, free. There was no disaster. He was whole – and ultimately, everything I’d ever wanted.