The Life of the Mother

Content Warning: Miscarriage, abortion

Following the meeting with the doctor, there was no thought of a baby shower. Too much rage. Too much grief. The two were indistinguishable, separate ropes twisted into a single noose. Bullshit about stages of grief, the mother thought; it was everything all at once. Including this: she was nonstop clammy from morning sickness. Before the diagnosis, she sometimes dry heaved pre-dawn in the downstairs half-bath so as not to wake anyone. After the diagnosis, she didn’t care; she just bowed over the side of the bed and dry-heaved into the wicker wastebasket. After the second time, the father lined the wastebasket with a garden-scented bag.

They sought a second opinion, then a third. “It’s extremely rare,” the third doctor had said of the mother’s condition. Seated behind an antique desk, the doctor removed her glasses. “This…” she began. “This is… kind of our nightmare scenario.”

“There has to be something we can do,” the father said. Oh, he had some ideas. Once, in a movie he loved, a vicious man had punched his wife in the stomach, and that had been the end of that. Could he punch his wife in the stomach? The father tried to picture it but couldn’t even get past the act of making a fist.

In the fourth month the morning sickness subsided, but the mother was weak, dazed. Her stools were laced with blood. She couldn’t sit without pain, so she spent much of the day in bed or stretched out on her side on the living room couch. She tried to spoon her daughter, but Allie wasn’t having it, slithering out from under her arm as soon as the mother’s embrace loosened even a fraction.

Her parents rented an Airbnb a half-mile away. When she asked how long they’d reserved it for, they wouldn’t say. They stayed at the house during the day while the father was at work. The grandfather flipped through the cable channels but kept the TV on mute. The grandmother played Candy Land with Allie while the mother watched from the couch across the room.

In the fifth month, she woke one morning, rolled over with effort, and said to the father, “Let’s do it.”

“Do what?” he asked. He’d been awake for hours. Most nights, he only slept from 3 to 5 am, when his body shut down and buried him in a dreamless, thick ink. In the moments before the ink, all he could think of was how he would possibly survive afterward: a single father with a three-year-old and a baby, or a three-year-old and a disabled baby, or a three-year-old and a dead baby.

“Let’s have a shower,” she said.

For a moment, he thought she was suggesting they have sex, and he felt such a shocking juxtaposition of desire and terror that he only gaped at her.

“We should get everyone together,” she said. “It would be good for my mom. My sisters. And Allie.”

“What about you?”

She scoffed. “What about me?” she asked. 

The father and the grandmother had been at odds for weeks, which they both recognized had nothing to do with either of them, yet they kept finding things to argue about. Now, in the kitchen, they argued about the shower. About flowers – the father wanted them, the grandmother did not. About presents – the grandmother wanted them, the father did not.

“What kind of presents are people supposed to bring?” he asked. “Seriously.”

“She wants it to be normal.”

“Then why not have flowers?”

“Flowers are for funerals,” the grandmother said flatly.

None of this mattered because just then the mother shuffled into the kitchen and announced that not only were there going to be flowers and presents, goddammit, but there would also be blue and white streamers, and It’s a Boy balloons, frilly napkins, champagne punch, and vanilla cupcakes decorated with cute teddy bears.

“Sweetheart,” the grandmother said.

“I want it to be NORMAL,” the mother shouted. (The mother never shouted. She didn’t even recognize her own voice.) “You can’t pick and choose. It’s all or nothing. It’s normal, or it’s not. And it’s going to be normal.”

There was nothing they could say. At this point, they’d be cruel to try to talk her out of anything. Instead, they looked past her and at each other with seething resentment. They both so desperately wanted someone to blame.

Allie and the girl cousins wore matching purple dresses. Purple was the mother’s favorite color. She had invited almost everyone she knew: old roommates, former colleagues, and neighbors she rarely spoke to. No one wanted to go, but how could anyone refuse? The champagne punch was gone in an hour. The aunts stood in the kitchen with a bottle of peach schnapps on the counter between them. Last month, one of the aunts had found a doctor in Canada. There’d been whispered plans. Then, the doctor and four of his patients were arrested and charged with murder.

The mother opened presents. The grandmother sat beside her, making a list in loopy cursive of who’d given what, knowing she would be the one sending thank you notes. Jamie: Hippopotamus blankets; Gretchen: truck onesies; Ashley K.: Spiderman rattle.

A friend from college wept openly until the father finally escorted her to her car.

Someone threw up at the base of the Black Walnut in the backyard.

The body inside the mother was busy growing in all the wrong places. If he lived, the baby boy would be swaddled in the hippopotamus blankets. He would wear the truck onesie. One day, he would reach out and grasp the Spiderman rattle. If he lived, all the people in this room would tell him stories about his mother. They would say, she chose you. And he would believe it until he was old enough to know better. He would believe it until one day he was old enough to understand that the only thing his mother had chosen were the cupcakes.