“Yes,” she says, “but this is what makes me comfortable.” Her words are another locked door. In the gash that appears when I tear my thumb with my teeth. Her decision is not personal, but I feel it in my person. Nor will she order anything off the internet or leave her dog tied up outside a store or record her own voice on the answering machine. She had the locks changed after Dad moved out seven years prior and won’t give keys to anyone-not her children or the neighbors or the cleaning lady. “It’s not personal,” she says when I protest, which I do repeatedly. “I have an appointment,” she says, “I won’t be here.” The implication: if she’s not there, I can’t be either. With four other bedrooms, she doesn’t need the space. “I want to come to your house.” She has kept my room more or less intact. Also: a swirly painting of a fetus in utero I made for Mom one Mother’s Day in junior high and snatched back in high school when I found it in the attic. In the closet: stiff Archie comics and letters from sleepaway camp and ballet slippers that belonged to a beloved friend who died in fifth grade and the mustard-colored safe I received for Hanukkah and into which I stuffed Zima and clove cigarettes. That’s the mattress on which I applied what I learned. Beside it is the radio to which I pressed my ear long after I should’ve been asleep to hear Love Lines on Z100, so eager to find out what men wanted. The twin bed I hid beneath when home alone, petrified of any ghostly noise I discerned. A wooden desk in whose drawer I scratched my initials. Faint dots on the walls from sticky tack that held up posters of my paramours: Bon Jovi and Eddie Vedder. The second-floor bedroom with the fuzzy blue carpet bears all my marks. I am four months a mother and still unused to the pronoun: my. It is the house in which I grew up, from the age of two until I left for college. I ask Mom, “Can I come by after my second tutoring? To pump?” I am four months a mother and want to hug the woman in the other room, widowed in the most heinous and violent way, sole parent to a child who will depend on her for everything, and I feel the pressure in my chest-all grief and fluid and fear-when I tell her, insufficiently, that I am sorry. How agonizing it must be for his mother, I think, to watch her son grow into her late husband. I gnaw the fleshy inside of my cheek as he describes what it feels like to wear his father’s face. He doesn’t remember much-he was little-but is regularly told how much he looks and sounds and acts like his father. My roster of students includes a teenager whose father died in a terrorist attack. They are the ones who hire me, the ones who pay me, the ones who worry over the phone about their children’s futures. I am four months a mother and my tutorial work-spaces are dining tables lit by chandeliers and kitchen tables strewn with bills. I have four clients on Tuesday afternoon, I say, and each session is an hour long, and my body will need relief. Last week, I say, I pumped in my parked car, but it turns out that disrobing in daylight and affixing plastic shields and tubes to your breasts while your nipples are visibly tugged and squeezed unnerves passersby. Pumping sessions take at least twenty minutes and I tell her how the customers knocked and then banged on the door, and that I emerged into a cluster of disapproving eye-rolls and head wags. Where to pump? I tell her I had an academic job interview in New Jersey two weeks before and didn’t feel comfortable asking my would-be boss if there was a place to relieve full breasts and so wound up in the bathroom of a pizzeria by the train station. I have called my mother because I can’t figure out how to be a professional while breastfeeding. It is the community in which my divorced, single mother still resides. It is the community in which my father teaches, though he now lives with a new partner in Manhattan. I work as a college application essay specialist in the suburban county where I grew up, an hour away from where I live with my husband and son. I am four months a mother when I call my mother for help. My blind body accepts that the robotic suction is a hungry baby’s mouth. I need to pump because without a baby constantly at my breast, my supply will dry up and I won’t be able to feed my son at all. This is not only to have milk the babysitter can bottle-feed to Oliver, not only to relieve pain in my chest or avoid clogged ducts and infection. I am four months a mother and have returned to work and need to pump every few hours. I don’t think much about this until after birth. We will be forever tethered to each other by time, two hands on a clock. I am four months a mother, a fact proclaimed by my son’s age.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |