Mother Person

“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” –Leonard Cohen

On the way home from the hospital we stopped for ice cream. Luke was in his car seat and we carried him in expecting a round of applause or at least a chorus of grateful angels. There was silence but that was fine. We put him down on the booth’s seat and when we went to leave we both stood and walked towards the door as we always had, childless, until the ice cream man pointed out we had forgotten the baby. This would never happen again.

I thought about Luke, dreamed about him, continued the struggle to successfully breast feed despite my midwife’s advice to pump and supplement with formula. This was the first devastation, he would not, could not breast feed. The only time he cried was when I attempted to gently shove a nipple into his mouth. I felt like a failure despite the endless labor, the nine months of limited coffee, carpal tunnel and sacrifice. So, I pumped and pumped with the rudimentary equipment available in 1993, a tube sucking my nipple instead of a perfect baby. One day I realized I was pumping next to a construction site and the men on the scaffolding waved at me. I threw myself on the floor and army crawled to lower the shades. Whatever it was they witnessed, it certainly wasn’t erotic.

I didn’t know how to be a mother because no one does until it happens and there you are holding this stranger and being told; “You are the mother. Make it work.”

How to make it work without any friends or family near us, just the two of us and this person, this boy, this child I had carried for nine months and spent seventy-two hours laboring to give birth to, was a mystery. I had been transformed, replaced, obliterated and then abandoned. I stood in front of the mirror and saw why I was given the body I was given. I stood in front of the mirror and grieved for the years of slender and unmarked beauty that I had regarded as never good enough. I was proud, sad, angry and confused.

I hadn’t made it to an AA meeting in several months. At nine years sober I had plenty of stored hours of attending meetings, but nothing had impacted my life like this motherhood thing except the loss of my sister and best friend and those were tragedies. This happiest of moments, this miracle, this opportunity for growth washed over me like a rogue wave, draining away much of what I had once believed, leaving behind a vulnerability I had never imagined, a joy that had hitherto eluded and a sense of failure, inexplicable considering what I had endured in labor but present, probably caused by his complete rejection of breastfeeding and my lack of anyone who could help me understand how I was feeling. Worst of all, I believed Luke was bored. “He thinks you’re a bottle of ketchup,” said my supportive husband. “He can’t see.”

The baby nurse funded by my mother came in the persona of a sad and angry Irish woman who told me her troubles while I made her tea and took a nap while I hid in the kitchen, baby in my arms. When Kevin returned from work, he fired her and requested someone who didn’t speak English.

photo by Michal Bar Haim

On my first visit to check-in with Poppy, Luke was splayed across my lap, one hand entwined in my hair while he sucked on a bottle, his face reflecting complete contentment.
“Is he all right?” I asked Poppy.
“That is the most relaxed baby I have ever seen,” she said, laughing.
“Is that bad?”
“He knows he’s totally safe. It’s wonderful.”

Lying in the bathtub I tried to estimate my current value. I had made a child, delivered it and now he was attached to me like a limpet. I could barely read the newspaper, mostly watching British soap operas set in villages where everyone was fucking everyone else or secretly gay or constantly telling the wrong person a secret that person would use to blackmail another person. Dear Abby had once advised braless women to check their breasts with a pencil. If the pencil fell, you didn’t need a bra. Now, the pencil would be perfectly safe. I finally understood the fertility goddess statues in the art museum that reduced women to boobs, huge stomach and hips.

The other women in my yoga birth group invited me to meet them in a café on Primrose Hill. They were all there except for Millicent whose baby had been a stillbirth despite nine months of perfection, no caffeine, sugar, raw anything, organic everything yet her baby had entered the room blue, still, a ghost child. Poppy was the midwife and was rumored to have taken an extended leave of absence. When I heard the news on the answering machine, I was watching him sleep, his chest rising and falling, a small snore that ensured he was alive, blue eyes nearly visible through his translucent eyelids. I shuddered, remembering I had disliked Millicent for her judgmental comments about caffeine and her raising her eyebrows when I confessed to a daily dose of Banoffee pie purchased at the Covent Garden Market. “Why is she so fucking smug?” I had muttered to the Welsh single mother who was expecting twins. “People like her make terrible mothers.”

Now Millicent might never have another child since she was over forty and who could ever forget the absence of sound in the birthing room, the non-beating of your child’s heart? We ate cake and drank fully caffeinated coffee and stuffed ourselves with whipped cream and strawberries (healthy). Lucy’s little girl, Hannah, was cross-eyed and Emma’s son, Spencer, had clubfeet but out of nine pregnant women, eight had healthy babies while one had a corpse. At first, we all agreed a healthy child was what mattered but then Felicity mentioned her live-in nanny and Sara had lost all her baby weight and the rest of them were breastfeeding which made me feel like a failure and a bad mother until I saw Luke was by far the most beautiful baby and his sense of humor was stunning while the rest of the babies mainly drooled. None of them admitted to feeling like a failure, hating their husbands, wanting to kill themselves or get really drunk.

“How is this group supportive if you compare yourselves to one another?” Kevin said. “It’s nice that you feel sorry for Millicent but otherwise it sounds awful.”
“Do you think I’ll ever publish again?” I looked at Kevin.

This question was a trap. It took him forever to answer. Sometimes these verbal gaps seemed passive aggressive. When we finally visited his family in Kansas, just before their move to London, I could take naps in the pauses in the conversation. I was brought up by people who conversed at machine gun speed using vocabulary honed by Catholic school, Harvard and endless reading of great works of literature. Kevin’s family came from Readers Digest and the local shopper. When my sister-in-law handed me a wedding present of a crucifix I held it in front of my pregnant stomach until I finally stuck it into the cake my mother-in-law had baked, unsure whether this was sacrilegious but tired of holding the surprisingly heavy object. In any case, what was one meant to do with a giant crucifix with its horrid depiction of Jesus dying on the cross, the letters INRI written above his poor head?

I’d spent too many hours during my childhood contemplating the entire story with my mother dismissing all of it as myth, wondering what it must feel like to be nailed to a piece of wood. Catherine was reading Ulysses and told me it meant “Iron Nails Ran In” which was wrong as it was the Latin acronym for “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” My sister’s explanation was better, I thought, because iron nails definitely ran in. 

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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