Chapter 13

13

She smiled at you first. After bath time. You were wearing your reading glasses and said she must have seen her own reflection in the lens. But we both knew she wanted you the most from the beginning. I could never comfort her when she cried like you could—she melted into your skin and seemed to want to stay there, a part of you. My warmth and my smell seemed to mean nothing to her. They talk about the mother’s heartbeat and the familiar sound of her womb, but it’s as though I were a foreign country.

I listened to you placate her with soft whispers that soothed her to sleep. I studied you. I imitated you. You told me it was all in my head—that I was making a big deal out of nothing. That she was just a baby and babies didn’t know how not to like a person. But it felt like two against one.

We were together around the clock and so yes, there were inevitably times she gave in, falling asleep on my chest or at my breast. You’d point this out like it was proof I was wrong—See, honey?Just relax more around her and she’ll be fine. I believed you. I had to. I would run my nose over the fine hair on her head and breathe her in. Her smell was good for me. Her smell was a reminder that she had come from within me. That we were once attached by a living, throbbing cord of blood. I would close my eyes and replay the night she came out. Looking, feeling, for our connection. Those first hours. I knew it had been there. Before the chapped, bleeding nipples and the utter exhaustion and the crippling doubt and the unspeakable numbness.

You’re doing great. I’m proud of you. You would sometimes whisper this to me in the dark while I fed her. You would touch both of our heads. Your girls. Your world. I would cry when you left the room. I didn’t want to be the axis around which you both spun. I had nothing left to give either of you, but our lives had just begun together. What had I done? Why had I wanted her? Why did I think I would be any different than the mother I came from?

I thought about ways to get out. There, in the dark, my milk flowing, the chair rocking. I thought about putting her down in the crib and leaving in the middle of the night. I thought about where my passport was. About the hundreds of flights listed on the departures board at the airport. About how much cash I could take out from the ATM at once. About leaving my phone there on the bedside table. How long my milk would take to go dry, for my breasts to give up the proof she had been born.

My arms shook with the possibility.

These are thoughts I never let leave my lips. These are thoughts most mothers don’t have.