The Perfect Mother(2)
I think I hear him calling for me.
I give in and lie down. It’s him. It’s Joshua, calling to me through the darkness. The doctor’s here. She’s speaking to me, and they’re wrapping something around my bicep, sticking a needle smoothly under my skin, at the bend of my arm, like the blades of skates over ice. They’re asking who’s come with me, where my husband is. The room spins around me, and I can smell it. The liquid seeping from me. Like earth and mud. My bones are splitting. I’m on fire. It can’t be right.
I feel the pressure. I feel the fire. I feel my body, my baby, breaking in two.
I close my eyes.
I push.
Chapter One
Fourteen Months Later
To: May Mothers
From: Your friends at The Village
Date: July 4
Subject: Today’s advice
Your toddler: Fourteen months
In honor of the holiday, today’s advice is about independence. Do you notice that your formerly fearless little guy is suddenly afraid of everything when you’re out of sight? The neighbor’s adorable dog is now a terrifying predator. The shadow on the ceiling has become an armless ghoul. It’s normal for your toddler to begin to sense danger in his world, and it’s now your job to help him navigate these fears, letting him know he’s safe, and that even if you’re out of sight, Mommy will always be there to protect him, no matter what.
How fast the time goes.
That’s what people were always telling us, at least; the strangers’ hands on our bellies, saying how careful we must be to enjoy the time. How it’ll all be over in a blink of an eye. How before we know it, they’ll be walking, talking, leaving us.
It’s been four hundred and eleven days, and time hasn’t gone fast at all. I’ve been trying to imagine what Dr. H would say. Sometimes I close my eyes and picture myself in his office, my time almost up, the next patient eagerly tapping a toe in the waiting room. You have a tendency to ruminate on things, he’d say. But, interestingly, never the positive aspects of your life. Let’s think about those.
The positive things.
My mother’s face, how peaceful she looked at times, when it was just the two of us, in the car running errands; on our way to the lake.
The light in the mornings. The feel of the rain.
Those lazy spring afternoons, sitting in the park, the baby somersaulting inside me, my swollen feet bursting from my sandals like bruised peaches. Back before all the trouble started, when Midas hadn’t yet become Baby Midas, everyone’s latest cause, when he was just another newborn boy in Brooklyn, one among a million, no more or less extraordinary than the dozen or so other babies with bright futures and peculiar names asleep in the inner circle of a May Mothers meeting.
The May Mothers. My mommy group. I’ve never liked that term. Mommy. It’s so fraught, so political. We weren’t mommies. We were mothers. People. Women who just happened to ovulate on the same schedule and then give birth the same month. Strangers who chose—for the good of the babies, for the sake of our sanity—to become friends.
We signed up through The Village website—“Brooklyn parents’ most precious resource?”—getting to know one another over e-mail months before we met, long before we gave birth, dissecting our new lot in life in a level of detail our real friends would never tolerate. About finding out we were pregnant. Our clever way of telling our mothers. Trading ideas for baby names and concerns about our pelvic floors. It was Francie who suggested we get together in person, on the first day of spring, and we all carried ourselves to the park that March morning, under the weight of our third-trimester bellies. Sitting in the shade, the smell of newly awakened grass in the air, we were happy to be together, to finally put faces to the names. We continued to meet, registering for the same birthing classes, the same CPR course, cat-cowing next to one another at the same yoga studio. Then, in May, the babies began to arrive, just as expected, just in time for Brooklyn’s hottest summer in recorded history.
You did it! we wrote, responding to the latest birth announcement, cooing like seasoned grandmothers over the attached photo of a tiny infant wrapped in a blue-and-pink hospital blanket.
Those cheeks!
Welcome to the world, little one!
Some in our group wouldn’t feel safe leaving the house for weeks, while others couldn’t wait to come together, to show off the baby. (They were all so new to us still that we didn’t refer to them by their names—not as Midas, Will, Poppy, but simply as “the baby.”) Freed for a few months from our jobs, if not concerns about our careers, we got together twice a week, always in the park, usually under the willow tree near the baseball diamonds, if someone was lucky enough to get there first and claim the coveted spot. The group changed a lot in the beginning. New people came, while others I’d grown used to seeing went—the mommy-group skeptics, the older mothers who couldn’t stomach the collective anxiety, those already departing to the expensive suburbs of Maplewood and Westchester. But I could always count on the three regulars to be there.
First, there was Francie. If our group had a mascot, someone to glue themselves in feathers and lead our team in three cheers for motherhood, it was her. Miss Eager-to-Be-Liked, to not screw anything up, so plump with hope and rich Southern carbs.
And then Colette, everyone’s girl crush, our trusted friend. One of the pretty ones, with her auburn shampoo-commercial hair, her Colorado-bred effortlessness and unmedicated home birth—the perfect female, topped in powdered sugar.