Everything
Everything is motherhood. Every single thing. I put an ask out to the world to recommend a book for me to read between Book Club books. A dear neighbor, who I don’t know very well but we’re working toward it, said “borrow this one!” Our entry point into friendship was and is motherhood. I put the baby in the carrier and walked a short ways to grab it from her porch. We thought we’d chat but her baby needed more time to be coaxed to sleep.
On the return home I felt cramping in my lower abdomen. That dreaded life theme of a woman. I remembered how yesterday a friend told me she’d experienced the beginnings of prolapse from toting her 2nd child around all over, all the time. The tip-off was cramping. That cramping.
I dragged home and collapsed on the couch, but a structured collapse, for I am the shoring entirely supporting my baby. She is 5 months into being a grabby limp thing and she’s the size of someone who might be able to walk by now, or who might begin to be called a child. I didn’t know what to do with her so I took her up 20 minutes early for her 4th nap of the day.
We lay down together, facing each other on our sides, and she settled into a comfortable latch and drifted quickly to sleep. I opened the book I was lent and on the first page it beautifully, brutally flashed me an impeccably written scene about motherhood.
My phone was plugged in at the very edge of my reach, and I angled it toward me with my fingernails when it lit up. The physical therapist I had texted at the end of my walk responded, asking if I’d like to have a phone consultation first or just have her send me paperwork. “Paperwork,” I don’t have time to fuck around, I need someone to help me keep my guts inside my body at their earliest convenience. To send this message I somehow stretched my side so far that my skin felt thin over my ribs, while also scrunching to keep my breast in place for the baby—it was the only way the whispers of my fingertips could reach to type the words, just barely, and not without failed attempts, just the latest cause of that unseen fury dapples every day as a mother. But first I had removed the cloth breast pad from my cropped tank top and found it was dry enough to use as a bookmark. It was that or the small bottle of infant Vitamin D on the mattress nearby. It didn’t feel earned to dog-ear the corner of page 2.
Do you see? It’s all motherhood, all of it, every move, every word, it’s entirely motherhood.
It hit me manically. I started to pick the book back up and then immediately closed it down again. I unplugged my phone in that tugging way my husband advises me not to — 9% — and frantically typed out the moments leading up to this one in the past tense.
But really, it’s right now.
