A Mother’s Haven

I was your hero when I let my body break open and bear you screaming into this world. My power was the cord that threaded between my legs and into your stomach, beautiful and vivid evidence of the gift I gave you. For six beautiful moments you lay on my deflated stomach and screamed life into my swollen breasts, begging to sustain you. Every move you made I felt reflected with a tug in my own abdomen, ghost memories of when you tumbled through my womb, and not a hiccup could go unfelt. 

I was your hero until the midwife turned you on your back and handed silver scissors to your father, who cut the cord an inch above where it bloomed from your tiny round stomach. I have asked many mothers since if they could feel it when the cord was cut, and they have told me it is physically impossible. 

I don’t know about all the other mothers, but I felt the exact moment when you became disconnected from me, when my power to give you life was lost. We were no longer of the same blood, your heart didn’t beat because mine pumped. Your tiny feet and hands would grow on their own. If someone took me away, you would survive off of formula and surrogate love. 

It was the worst pain of my life, but I couldn’t weep. I had to look your father in the eyes and beam at him and pretend that he hadn’t just ripped my soul open, that the blood between my legs pooled faster because my heart was breaking. You lay in my arms, your tiny mouth searching for my nipple, and I stared at the curve of your forehead, and wished you were still inside me. 

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It took four weeks for your father to notice something was wrong, to ask the midwives furtively if they thought I was okay, if I was being normal. 

What is normal, Kent? I had raged at him when he admitted this to me. Nothing about this is normal, because this has never happened to me before.

I don’t know, he had said, desperate and pleading, holding you in his arms while you screamed like you wished you were anywhere except for on this Earth with these two frantic, exhausted people who were losing themselves day by day. 

Maybe it’s because she is colicky, once she is better everything will be okay, he said, placating, the shadows under his eyes making it hard to remember the handsome man who I fell in love with, whose hand I placed on my flat stomach years before you filled it, and prayed for life to grow. 

Maybe, I said, because I hated the midwives’ pitying looks at your check ups, taking in my unwashed hair and spit up stained clothes; the way I barely looked at you when I took you back from them. Maybe, I said again, looking at your red face, pinched tight as a baby fern, and wondered how this could have gone so wrong. 

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We tried for you for almost five years before two lines finally filled me with joy that threatened to suffocate me. Technically you had two siblings, but their little spirits never even grew big enough for me to tell in the mirror. By the time you came, your father and I were thinking about adoption, in vitro fertilization. We had seen shamans and physics and alternative medicine practitioners who prescribed us prayer and crystals and sex positions. We had cried in eachothers arms and fought bitterly and made up with more tears and kisses and beautiful lovemaking that eventually made you. 

The night before I took the pregnancy test that told me you were there, I dreamed in color. In the dream the sky was technicolor blue, I was on a swing set, and someone was pushing me higher and higher. I couldn’t see whoever was pushing me, but they were laughing, a little girl’s laugh as light as bubbles. Finally, the swing went so high I was thrown off, and when I hit the ground my hands went to my stomach protectively, instinctively curving to shield my abdomen from impact. Right as I landed I heard the voice behind me shout mama! and I woke up sweaty, both hands pressed to my womb. 

We picked out your name from a baby book only a week later, despite everyone telling us to wait. It made me angry that people thought we should fear your leaving us like the others did. I knew from the beginning you were the one who would finally stay. From the first time I heard your voice, in the dream before I even knew you were real, I knew you were a girl and I knew you were ours to keep, and your father’s desperation gave him complete faith in me, a blessing wrapped in sorrow. 

Haven, he said. We were sitting like pretzels on the living room sofa, his legs intertwined with mine, my head resting on his shoulder. It means a place of safety. He had placed his hand on my stomach, where you were the size of a pea. That’s what you are for her now, and that’s what we will be for the rest of our lives. 

I covered his hand with mine, and imagined the slow wave of your motion that one day would rise in me, sudden and dependable as the tide. Haven, I whispered, and somewhere behind my ribs I felt an unexplainable tug, a vow being made.

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You cried all night and you cried all day and you wouldn’t nurse and you wouldn’t sleep and you wouldn’t let me hold you and you wouldn’t let me set you down.

I don’t understand, I sobbed to my mother on the phone. It’s like she hates me. 

She doesn’t hate you, my mother soothed, placating into the phone. Babies can’t hate, darling, she just has colic. Trust me, in a month or two you won’t even remember this time, the newborn phase is hell, but what follows is sweet enough to make you forget all the sleepless nights. You forgot the pain of childbirth didn’t you, as soon as you saw her face?

Yes, I thought, but the pain of pushing you from my body is diminished by the agony of you being cut away from me, of our sacred connection being stolen in a single snip. It’s that pain that I can’t forget, that I am reminded of everytime I look at your alien face that is nothing like the cheek I felt pressed against the curve of my womb, the smile I swore I could sense whenever I laughed. My heart breaks whenever I see you and realize that you are not what I thought I had all along.

Instead I said, I hope so. And then, Can you come to Austin, I need help, Mama.

My mother arrived on a cloud of perfume and nursery rhymes. She swept in and did the dishes piled in the sink and vacuumed like a tornado, and then settled into our faded couch and pulled you to her chest. I watched, exhausted, as my mother rocked you, humming softly, and finally your tiny arms and legs unclenched, your face softened, and you fell asleep in her arms.

I turned, tears welling up in my throat and my heart pounding, and almost ran into your father. He was standing behind me, staring at you in my mother’s arms, spellbound. He looked at me, his eyes unfocused, like he hardly recognized me. Look at her, he said, and I fled, running away from him and from you and the deadweight of grief that had settled into my stomach.

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I wanted to be a mother from the time I was hardly more than a baby myself. I would make slings for my dolls and wear them against my chest, murmuring nonsense to them and holding their frozen faces to my little girl’s chest, imagining I was giving their plastic bodies life. When I was a freshman in high school a guidance counselor sat me down and asked me what my goals were, and when I told her all I really wanted was to be a mom she grimaced, and recommended I take cosmetology classes. I went to a year of college before dropping out, and finding a job as an assistant at a Montessori preschool. I found joy in the tinkling laughter of toddlers, and wonder from the smiles of two year olds pressing flowers into my palms. I saw the faces of my future children on every child I cared for, and when I gave them back to their mothers at the end of each day, I felt a yearning so fierce it ached.

Your father did not want children, but he loved me enough to change his mind, and I loved him enough to trust that he would. He cried happy tears at each positive pregnancy test, and held me close and shared my grief each time I woke in the night with the pain of loss racking through my abdomen. When I told him that you were the one, he trusted me without doubt, and was devoted to the life we had created from before it was even detectable on a monitor.

Your father was a king among men; he rubbed my feet each night, pressed his palms against my growing stomach, and told me I had never been more beautiful even when I had never been more fat. When the skin of my stomach developed angry red wounds overnight, and my belly button inverted itself, he kissed the unfamiliar territory of my body and told me I was a miracle. While I was your hero, your father was mine, until he took the scissors the midwife handed him, and did just what he thought he was supposed to do.

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Sometimes, in those early weeks after you were born, as I rocked you in the wee hours of the morning, your sobs making my head pound and my vision blurry, I had terrible thoughts. I imagined your father taking you for a night time drive, and going over the side of a bridge. I imagined the police officers coming to the door and telling me both of you were gone; I saw myself sinking to my knees, hand over my mouth with relief. I thought of how quiet the house would be without your sobs, without your father’s talking and chewing and snoring. In the fantasy world I created, I curled up in bed and went to sleep, no dreams finding me.

Those thoughts terrified me. What terrified me more, though, was when I found myself gripping you tightly one morning, squeezing your little body while I begged you frantically to be quiet. You were sleeping, and my mother had gone home for a few days since she had developed a cold. Your father found me sitting on the couch, tears streaming down my face and falling onto you, while you wailed, red faced and struggling against the desperate vice of my arms.

Mary! Your father shouted, although he never raised his voice to me. What are you doing? 

He pulled you from my grasp, and rocked you against his chest, making shushing noises that turned your wails to cries, and finally the hiccups of surrender. 

You need to rest, he said, and I couldn’t bear to meet his eyes, to see the disappointment and concern in them. I was sure he hated me, that he was disgusted and enraged that I would even come close to hurting his baby. I imagined that he was probably wondering how the gentle, caring woman he married had ended up being a damaged, useless mother. 

I stripped off my clothes, barely registering their smell, and crawled into bed naked, curling up beneath the blankets and hugging myself close. I felt empty, too hollow even to cry. Taking the pillow from under my head, I pressed it to my stomach and curved myself around it, my body a parenthesis of sorrow. If I let my mind relax enough, the exhaustion made me confused, and I could almost pretend the pillow clutched against my middle was my belly, a full moon again, and inside you were still connected to me, that I was still your whole world.

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The counselor who specialized in post-natal depression had a picture of her grandchildren on her desk, evidence that she had survived and her daughters had survived, and one day, so would the laughing golden haired twin girls in the picture frame. This seemed to imply that one day, so would I. 

Mary, the counselor asked, tipping her silver head towards me and holding out a box of tissues preemptively, I’m sure, from years of experience. Tell me how you are feeling.

I stared at her, and wondered if she had looked at her own daughter, and saw a stranger, touched her tiny bird fingers and couldn’t understand how such an unfamiliar being had somehow grown inside her. 

Do you feel alone, Mary? The counselor asked, and I thought about how two mornings ago, while I watched your father coo over you in bed, I felt a sudden jealousy so fierce I almost leapt across the bed and knocked you from his arms, a place that was once mine.

It’s okay to feel unlike yourself, the counselor continued, there are scientific reasons new mothers experience depression postnatal, and fortunately there are strategies to combat it. 

Can you make me love my child? I asked, and the woman set down the tissues and took my hands.

You do love your child, she said softly, you made her, Mary. She is a part of you, and you are a part of her.

Not anymore, I said, and imagined the flash of silver scissors, felt the ghost pain radiate through the very center of me. 

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The night you were born it was raining, so hard that the midwives almost couldn’t get to our house on time. I was in the birth pool in the living room when they arrived, wetter than I was and smelling of wind and fallen leaves. I was listening to my birth playlist, and your father was in the birth pool with me, pressing on my hips as each contraction raised its fierce dragon head and clawed my insides. 

At first, the contractions reminded me of the pain of when I lost your siblings, but as they progressed, they changed, making me think not of loss, but of victory. I felt like a soldier, carrying his wounded brother miles to safety. I felt like a child lifting a truck off of her father, unexplainable strength coming all at once. I saw the visions behind my tightly closed eyes, as I felt you sink lower, making my hips feel as though they were splitting open. I breathed deeply and exhaled as loud as I wanted, and felt the heroic pain of all the mother’s I had ever had, and all the ones I had ever been. I became everything, and then nothing except for the bright spot of pain low in my core. And then, suddenly I became you.

I felt the pressure on my head, the force that was moving me through my slow watery world. I felt a strength pulse through the cord that entered my belly, love so fierce it sent me spiraling back into my own body, awareness flooding in right as I felt your crown split me open, my skin tearing in its rush to bring you forth. I broke myself open because I couldn’t wait to meet you, without wondering if I would ever be able to be whole again.

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A month after you were born, I asked your father why I was like this.

I don’t understand, I said, this is all I ever wanted.

No, he said, and held you out to me. You were sleeping in his arms, swaddled like a burrito, your face serene. She is all you ever wanted.

That night, I dreamed about the first time I felt you kick inside me. I was fifteen weeks pregnant, and I thought it was too early. I was talking to you while I washed the dishes, telling you meaningless stories from my day, and all about the flower garden I was trying to plant.

One day we can pick flowers together, I had said, while your father laughed at me from the kitchen table. How would you like that, Haven?

And in my womb I felt it, the barely there suggestion of movement, your unmistakable answer. 

In the morning, as dawn broke outside the window like an egg, the yolk dripping down the eves and dappling the floors, I held you in my arms. You were sleeping for once, but you awoke suddenly as a ray of sunshine passed through the blinds across your face. You blinked up at me, and I stared into your eyes, blue as the cloudless sky. I held my breath, expecting you to cry. When you didn’t, I relaxed, and eventually- oh so hesitantly- I reached up and stroked your head- the soft fuzz- and beneath it the delicate bones. 

Hello, I whispered, and when you moved gently in my arms, I felt it reflected deep inside, not in my womb, but perhaps higher, in the heart that had never stopped holding enough love for us both. 

Hello, I said again, and one tiny fist came up to rest against my cheek and the sunlight came in all at once, my tears sparkling on your beautiful face.