Motherloverpersonwife

"The most powerful love songs always turn on the discrepancy between the act of declaring love and the knowledge that the ostensible addressee is no longer there, was never there, and could never be there." —Mark Fisher

Luke started screaming in the middle of the night. I swam up towards the light, towards the air, a dream pulling me back, but Luke's cry made me surface, and I opened my eyes to his eyes, my eyes because we had the same eyes. But his were full of tears. He was sobbing.

"The mommy went away," he said. "The mommy's outside. She's gone."
"Luke, honey, I'm here, I'm right here."
"No!" he threw himself against me. "The mommy's outside. She went away."
His tears had wet the pillow. He must have been crying in his sleep.
"Puppy. I'm here. I won't go away ever again." I felt like I would choke on my own fear, regret, and sadness.
He quieted, stared up at me and stroked my cheek. "My mommy," he whispered.
"Yes. My baby."

He shut his eyes and went back to wherever he had been but this time the mommy was inside, the mommy was right next to him, my heartbeat a counterpoint to his own. Somehow,  I had diminished if not denied that he loved me with every fiber of his being and that leaving him had hurt him. Remembering the mad dance with Scott, my selfishness was fathoms deep, never mind that Kevin easily commuted between his work life and the domestic spider web he accused me of neglecting. I had shed all my previous accomplishments and titles while he had slipped into the forgiving garment of fatherhood without missing a beat. He had stayed thin, stayed smart and engaged, while I sat zombielike pumping milk into a tube that stretched my nipples like taffy, watching Teletubbies consumed by the failure to breastfeed, ashamed of the weight I had gained, traumatized by the three days I had spent in labor. I was eclipsed and canceled.

I carried this boy for nine months, lying awake as he kicked me, who had tolerated, after he went breech, his being turned in my womb by the doctor, the sensation so weirdly terrible it felt like my internal organs were being reassembled. Giving birth was madness, three days of labor and then the perfection, his silent stare, my startled greeting. Of course, I know you. At that moment, I had been born into the realization that, given the necessity, his life took precedence over my own; his pain mattered more; his happiness was priceless. I would kill and die for him.

"Oh, Luke," I whispered into his perfect ear, his hair smelling of boy and shampoo. I'm so sorry."

I considered all the women in all the books who had left their children either through suicide or flight, Nora Helmer, Anna Karenina, Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, mothers who walked away, who embraced death because they could not find a way to exist and survive. This was why I stopped drinking and stopped longing for blackout if not through drugs and alcohol, death. My feelings toward Kevin were less than my love for my son and Catherine. Scott wasn't the answer but nor was my attempt to transform, to dye my hair blonde, tighten my ass, write something that would make him remember why we had married. Once I had felt empowered by my status as a successful fiction writer able to handle the cutthroat world of literary New York. I had lost that edge, the ability to promote myself while appearing humble. My heart was cracked open by motherhood. I no longer knew how to manipulate and seduce anyone. I  had grown up with conditional love, but finally, I understood I deserved better.

photo by Liana Mikah

Karen was making coffee when I came downstairs, leaving Luke asleep. "Ready to go?" Karen handed me a mug.
"Yes. Sort of."
"Looking forward to Chicago?"
"I don't know. It has to be better than Dallas, right?"
"Kevin said you dyed your hair blonde."
"I looked like a meth-addicted stewardess."
"Molly?"
"Yes?"
"Try not to be so hard on yourself. Marriage isn't a featherbed."
"Bed of nails?"
"Something in the middle. You were meant to have Luke."
"I loved Kevin. I married him because I loved him. Not because it was an answer to my future or a way to have a baby. I loved him so much it took my breath away. I wrote a poem about a mermaid rising out of the foam and he gave me that. It was a stupid poem, but I really loved him. It felt like we'd be together for the rest of our lives."
"Is everything in the past?"
"I don't know."
"That baby wouldn't exist without the two of you, and the world would be much darker."
"Our perfect artifact. I remember Kevin waiting for me at the airport with an engagement ring. I remember asking myself what I had done to deserve someone loving me enough to take such a risk. It was like jumping off a cliff into a quarry. You had no clue what lay beneath. The first night we slept together. I felt safe. He soothed me. He put me to sleep."
"Don't tell him that."
"But it's easy to fuck someone. Sleeping with someone is about trust."

We drove away with Karen and Kevin's brother waving from the front door. Jack Sprat could eat no fat; his wife could eat no lean. I glanced in the rear-view mirror to watch Luke drink his bottle, fingers twisting through his hair. He pulled the nipple from his mouth and toasted the outside, a blur of highway. The frown line that had appeared on his forehead was gone. All that mattered most was restored. We stopped overnight in Saint Louis, staying in a huge hotel built around the Union Station with all sorts of train details and things that Luke could climb or strike to make noise. After he went to sleep, I called my mother. We hadn't spoken since I left for Taos. Chicago was a definite upgrade from Dallas, in my mother's opinion, especially as it pertained to architecture.

"Where are you?"
"Saint Louis. We drive to Chicago tomorrow."
”And you have a place to live?"
"A condo on the North Side.” 
"How many bedrooms?"
"Two, I think."
"Two? What if you have guests? Why is it so small? Don't you need a study?"
"He had to find it alone and fast. I don't think I can complain."
"Why not? Who spends the most time there?"
I was silent.
"What's wrong?"
"Everything's fine, Mom."
"Everything is not fine, is it?"
"Not really."
"Did you meet someone in New Mexico?" 
"No. What? Why?"
"He's treated you badly. Making you live in that terrible place. Saying you were fat."
"He didn't say I was fat. He requested a timeline for weight loss."
"Fine! When will you stop being fat? He knew you'd hate Texas."
"I agreed to go."
"Fiddlesticks. Are you in love with someone else?"

Ever since Catherine died little had been normal. My father had an affair; my mother invested their life savings in a risky land development deal. She seemed determined to make a vast amount of money or go bankrupt. I knew about my father's affair because my mother had told me. There was a baby born a day after my birthday. A girl who was my doppelganger. A girl he would never know. When my mother called me to tell me this news, she said, "I don't care. Why should I care? Your sister is dead, and I can't be bothered."

I looked over to see Luke curled up asleep on the bed. "I miss Catherine."
When I mentioned my sister, my mother's voice changed, becoming sharp and flat. "How is Luke?"
"I hurt him by leaving. He didn't know about disappearing mommies."
"He'll get over it."
"You and Daddy left us all the time."
"Not all the time. Anyway, you were little."
"I remember crying myself to sleep at Grandma's. She made me go to bed when it was still light out. Tears in my ears."
"You need another bedroom."

I turned on the television and watched part of a documentary on PBS about WWII. Back then, America seemed like a different country, with almost everyone knitting or collecting scrap metal, having bake sales, and writing letters to soldiers. Growing up during the Vietnam War, I had watched campuses and cities burn, and when the war ended, the soldiers were vilified as baby killers. I was taught not to believe in God or to feel little but contempt for the illiterate. When questioned about my ethics or core beliefs, I often made things up. After I got sober, I used the AA template and adopted the attitude promoted by other sober people: hopeful, simplistic, and slightly selfish in terms of a refusal to absorb the pain of the world. If challenged about my faith, I said something vague about my higher power, but the fuel of my existence was rage, rage, and grief.

Until Luke was born, my secret plan was suicide, unstated, not pursued, but like having an extra key hidden in a magnet attached to your bumper or that ten-dollar bill squirreled away in one's wallet. Before Catherine died, we had gone out for breakfast with Henry, and she had told me that motherhood had completely altered her life. "I learned how to trust other people and to find a way to live. Molly," she said. "We were raised by wolves."

Catherine had known motherhood would cure me of my desire to turn off the lights permanently. But she was supposed to be there to guide me, love my baby, and show me how to be a good mother, whatever that meant. The WWII documentary showed footage from the German concentration camps, parents lining up with their children, being separated, and then led away to the gas chambers. This, I thought, is suffering. I'm just married to someone I need to divorce. I need a divorce. This thought had not manifested before, but now it was a syllogism. I fell in love again. The man is not my husband. I need a divorce.

I remembered the syllogism template from my first year of teaching English composition. I had created a faulty syllogism because you had to accept the idea that you could only be in love with your husband, and that seemed wrong. I tried again. My husband neglected me. I fell in love with someone else. I need a divorce. But this wasn't right either. Our desire blinded us; we had a baby, and we lost each other.

There was a cassette player in the radio on the bureau. Making sure Luke was barricaded into our bed and dead asleep, I grabbed the room key and slipped out of the room, took the elevator to the parking level, and retrieved the tape from the car. I took the radio into the bathroom, plugged it in, and inserted the tape. I rarely craved alcohol, but a bottle of wine now seemed exactly right: my child asleep, a hotel room, three hours from my husband, many hours from my would-be lover. However, a bottle of wine would send me into the night to drink more, find a man, leave my child alone, get arrested for child abandonment, and possibly wake up in a jail cell having lost custody of Luke with a screaming headache, dry mouth and vague memories of the previous night.

I had not finished the entire playlist. The first song was by Luka Bloom, a French Canadian who sang of loss and desire with mournful intensity. The next song was a ballad about a woman begging to be allowed inside so she wouldn't freeze to death with her unborn child. The third song was slightly creepy, a stalker scenario of a man telling a woman he would gladly kill her husband if she would agree to love him. I felt angry. If he didn't want me, why create this tape of love songs? Stopping short of throwing it in the trash, I buried the tape in my suitcase and called Scott.

"Where are you?"
"St Louis. In a renovated train station hotel."
"How's Luke?"
"He thought I was gone for good."
"Dead?"
"He doesn't know what death is. More like a TV show. Over."
"I miss you."
”I just listened to your stupid tape again. Seriously, Scott, what were you thinking? Every song is about unrequited love or jealousy or slutty women leaving their husbands or slutty women freezing to death. You never wanted me to leave him."
"He's the father of your child."
"Then why the fuck did you come after me?"
"I couldn't help myself. It was bigger than both of us."
"Who are you flirting with now?"
"No one. Helen."
"Helen's gay, Scott. Is that your thing? Going after unavailable women?"
"No. When do you reach Chicago?"
"Tomorrow afternoon."
They were both silent.
"I'm sorry, Molly," he finally said.
"I'm not sorry," I said. "You woke me up."

—Molly Moynahan