The Push
“They’ll be a big help for you, honey. For all of us.” You wanted your perfect mother there.
“I’m still bleeding through my pad. I smell like rotting flesh. I can’t put my shirt on, my boobs are too sore. Look at me, Fox.”
“I’ll call them tonight.”
“Can you take her?”
“Give her here. Go get some sleep.”
“I think the baby hates me.”
“Shhh.”
I’d been warned about those hard, early days. I’d been warned about breasts like cement boulders. Cluster feeds. The squirt bottle. I’d read all the books. I’d done the research. Nobody talked about the feeling of being woken up after forty minutes of sleep, on bloodstained sheets, with the dread of knowing what had to happen next. I felt like the only mother in the world who wouldn’t survive it. The only mother who couldn’t recover from having her perineum stitched from her anus to her vagina. The only mother who couldn’t fight through the pain of newborn gums cutting like razor blades on her nipples. The only mother who couldn’t pretend to function with her brain in the vise of sleeplessness. The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. Go away.
Violet cried only when she was with me; it felt like a betrayal.
We were supposed to want each other.
11
The night nurse had the softest hands I had ever felt. She barely fit in the nursery chair. She smelled like citrus fruit and hair spray and she was unflappable.
I was tired.
Every new mom goes through this, Blythe. I know it’s hard. I remember.
But your mother must have been worried because she hired the woman without asking us and paid her fee. We were three weeks in and the baby wouldn’t sleep longer than an hour and a half at a time. All she wanted to do was feed and cry. My nipples looked like raw ground beef.
You barely saw the night nurse—you were asleep most nights before she came. She brought me the baby every three hours, not a minute sooner or later. I would hear her heavy feet coming toward the door and startle from the glorious depths of sleep and fish my breast out of my nightshirt with my eyes barely open. I would hand her back when we were done. She would take her to the nursery and burp her, change her, rock her, and put her to sleep in the bassinet. We rarely exchanged a word but I loved her. I needed her. She came for four weeks until your mother said to me on the phone in her firm but delicate voice, Honey. It’s been a month. You need to do it on your own now.
On the last shift she was with us, the night nurse brought the baby into our room for the early morning feed before she went home. But she didn’t step out of the room like she normally did. You were snoring beside me.
“She’s a sweet baby, isn’t she,” I had whispered to the woman. I shifted to relieve my stubborn hemorrhoids and then fiddled with my nipple in her mouth. I really didn’t know if she was, but it felt like something a new mother would say of the warm, pink flesh she’d pushed into the world.
She stood over us and looked down at Violet and my huge brown nipple as she tried to latch again. We still hadn’t got the hang of it yet and milk sprayed the baby’s face. She didn’t answer me.
“Do you think she’s a good baby?” Maybe she hadn’t heard me. I winced. The baby was on. The nurse stepped back and watched us as though she were trying to figure something out.
“Sometimes she opens her eyes so wide and looks right at me, like . . .” She let her words trail off and then she shook her head and sucked through her teeth.
“She’s curious. She’s alert,” I clarified with words I’d heard other mothers use. I wasn’t sure what she was implying.
She stood still and silent while I fed. She nodded sometime later. Too much time later. I wondered if there was something else she wanted to say. When the baby was done, she lifted Violet quietly and patted me on the shoulder. She left to put her down and I never saw her again.
You were irritated when it took weeks for the smell of the woman’s hair spray to leave the nursery, but sometimes I went in there just for the scent of her.
12
The month with the night nurse helped. Violet and I emerged from the fog and found ourselves a routine. I focused a lot on that routine. Our day was bookended by you leaving for work and you arriving home again. All I had to do was keep her alive in between. One thing a day—that was always my goal. A few groceries. Her doctor’s appointment. Exchanging a onesie I’d bought that she never wore and had already grown out of. Coffee and a muffin. I’d sit on the park bench in the cold and pick away at the dry bits of bran while I stared at her stuffed in a down-filled snowsuit, and waited for the next nap time.
I’d met a small group of women in the prenatal exercise class who had all been due around the same time as me. I didn’t know them well, but was added to their email chain at some point. They often invited me to meet for a walk, or lunch somewhere that would accommodate our brigade of strollers. You loved when I had plans with them—you were excited for me to be like other moms. I mostly went for you. To show you I was normal.
Like all of our days, the conversations had a mundane routine. How the babies slept and when and where, when they ate and how much, the plan for solid foods, day care or nanny, what contraptions they’d bought that they couldn’t live without that the rest of us needed to buy, too. Eventually it would be nap time for one of the babies, which was allowed only at home in the crib so as not to disturb the hard-earned schedule. And so we’d pack it up and go. Sometimes, as we paid the bill, I’d find the courage to say what really was on my mind. I threw it out like bait: