The Push

My belly fluttered like a net of butterflies for the first time that morning. The baby was waking inside me. Violet had left her bag of orange slices with me at drop-off and I sucked the warm juice from them, tossing the rinds in a city garbage can as I followed the mother down the street and through two intersections. She stopped for salt from a corner market and I watched her from behind the pyramid of tomatoes. I wanted to see her face. To see if she carried him with her. I wondered how it looked—how it felt—to have that kind of connection to another person. I hadn’t yet found the answer when I lost her one block later in a crowded section of sidewalk construction.

These kinds of things happened around us, Violet and me, in a language we did not speak. So I was desperate to learn. To be better with the one who came next.

On the way home, I walked by a woman setting up a small flea market stand on the side of the street. She leaned a stack of old paintings against the lamppost as she put colored dots on the backs to mark the prices. She pulled out one in an elegant gold frame and looked at it thoughtfully, deciding how to price it. I stood behind her and found myself clutching my chest as I took the painting in. It was of a mother sitting with her small child on her lap, the rosy baby dressed in white and cupping his mother’s chin gently as she glanced down. One arm was around the child’s middle, and the hand of the other held his small thigh. Their heads touched. There was a peacefulness to them, a warmth and comfort. The woman’s long, draping dress was a beautiful peach with burgundy florets. I could barely speak to ask her the price. But it didn’t matter—I had to have it.

“I’ll take that one,” I said as she put it back in the pile.

“The oil?” She took her glasses off and looked up at me.

“Yes, that one. The mother and the child.”

“It’s a replica of a Mary Cassatt. Not an original, of course.” She laughed as though I should know how absurd it would be to have an original Mary Cassatt.

“Is that her in the painting? The artist?”

She shook her head. “She was never a mother herself. Maybe that’s why she liked to paint them so much.”

I carried the painting home under my arm and hung it in the baby’s nursery. When you came home that night to find me straightening the frame on the wall, you stopped in the doorway and made a noise. A humph.

“What? You don’t like it?”

“Not your typical nursery art. You hung pictures of baby animals in Violet’s room.”

“Well, I love it.”

I wanted that baby. That cupped face. That chubby hand on mine. That palpable love.



35



Violet quietly watched my shape stretch and morph. He moved all day long, dragging his impossibly small heels across my belly and back again. I loved to lie on the couch with my shirt pulled up, reminding us all that he was here. That we would be a family of four.

“Is he doing it again?” you would call from the kitchen, finishing up the dishes.

“He’s at it again,” she’d yell back, and we’d laugh.

The baby had caused a shift in our relationship somewhere along the way, although I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what that shift was. We were kinder to each other, although there was also a new distance between us, one you seemed to fill with more work. I took that space to turn inward. To him. We were happily each other’s worlds, even as early as that. Mother and son.

When the technician rolled her wand over the mass of white static and said, You’ve got yourself a boy in there, I closed my eyes and I thanked God for the first time in my life. I kept the news to myself for two days—it took you that long to ask what had happened at my ultrasound appointment. This was uncharacteristic—you had cared enough during my first pregnancy to come to every one of them. We were, at that point, passing each other in the night. You had several big projects on the go, new clients with big money. I needed so little of you then. I had him.

Violet wanted to help me go through her old baby clothes. We sat together in the laundry room and folded the tiny sleepers as they came out of the dryer. She would lift each one to her nose as though she were remembering a time and place when she wore them. I let her dress her doll in a knitted sweater and she pretended to nurse him. I marveled at the unusual carefulness with which she touched everything, the softness of her voice.

“This is how you did it,” she said, gently bouncing the doll twice to the right and then twice to the left, and then back to the right again.

At first I didn’t know what she meant—I didn’t remember doing that with her. But I took the doll from her and stood up and mimicked how she’d just rocked the baby. The familiarity of the motion came back to me instantly. She was right. I laughed as I kept bouncing the doll back and forth, and she giggled, nodding her head.

“I told you!”

“You’re absolutely right.”

It seemed impossible that she would remember this, that it would stay with her all these years. She put her hands on either side of my huge belly and mimicked that same motion for the baby inside me, rocking with my belly in her little hands. Soon we were dancing, the three of us, to the rhythm of the spinning washing machine.



36



I felt down with my hand as his head came through the hot ring of my cervix. The release was euphoric. You watched me guide him from my body’s opening and then lift him quietly, carefully, onto the place he’d filled for 283 days. You’re here. He looked for me and arched his back and then he began to slink up my stomach, like an inchworm covered in vernix and blood. His mouth was open and his glassy eyes were still black. His twitching, wrinkled hands looked covered in far too much skin. They found my breast and his little chin shook. He was my miracle. I pulled him to my nipple and tapped its nub on his bottom lip with arms that still shook from the oxytocin. There you go, sweet boy. He was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.