‘Totally.’ I always gave some indication of agreement. But then I would stare at Violet’s face in the stroller all the way home, wondering why she didn’t feel like the best thing that had ever happened to me.
Once, weeks after I’d stopped joining those girls, I passed the window of a coffee shop where at the counter inside, overlooking the street, a mother sat staring at her baby. Maybe three or four months old, just a bit younger than Violet. The baby was slumped in the grasp of its mother’s fingers, staring straight back at her. The woman’s mouth did not move. There was no assurance from between her lips: You’re Mama’s baby, you’re my sweet baby. You’re such a good baby, aren’t you? Instead, she turned the baby ever so slightly to one side, and then to the other, as though she were examining a clay artifact for marks of imperfection.
I lingered outside the window and I watched them, looking for love, looking for regret. I pictured the life she might have had before the baby had confined her to choose between the option of a stuffy, messy apartment that smelled like her own soured milk or the lonely window of a coffee shop.
I went inside and ordered a latte that I didn’t want and sat on the stool next to her. Violet was asleep in the stroller and I pushed it back and forth gently so she wouldn’t wake up. The diaper bag slipped from the handle and her bottle fell out and rolled across the floor. I collected it and decided I would not wipe off the nipple. I felt a rush of power when I made clandestine decisions like this, decisions other mothers would not make because they weren’t supposed to, like leaving a wet diaper on too long or skipping her overdue bath again because I couldn’t be bothered. The woman turned to me and we shared a look. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment that we had both morphed into a version of ourselves that didn’t feel as good as had been advertised. Curds of milk came out of her baby’s mouth and she wiped it with a rough paper napkin.
‘Tough days, aren’t they?’ I had said, lifting my chin toward her baby who was still and expressionless, staring at her.
‘There’s that saying, the days are long but the years go fast.’ I nodded and looked at my own baby, who was starting to stir, her chin crinkling. ‘But I guess we’ll see,’ she said flatly, like she, too, did not believe her experience of time would ever change again.
‘Some women say being a mom is their greatest accomplishment. But I dunno, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished much yet.’ I laughed a little bit, because it was feeling too personal all of a sudden. But I needed this woman. She was everything the lunchtime friends were not.
‘A girl?’
I told her the baby’s name.
‘Harry,’ she said of hers. ‘He’s been here fifteen weeks.’
We sat in silence for a few more minutes. And then she said, ‘It’s like he just happened to me, all of a sudden. Slammed into my world and knocked over the furniture.’
‘Yeah,’ I said slowly, looking at her baby as though he were a weapon. ‘You want them and grow them and push them out, but they happen to you.’
She took Harry off the counter and put him in the stroller. She tucked the blanket under him sloppily, like a poorly made bed. She still hadn’t spoken to her son in a singsong voice, like all of those other mothers, and I wondered if she ever did.
‘See you around,’ she said, and my heart sank. I was worried we’d never find each other again. I stammered, trying to find something else to say to keep her there.
‘Do you live around here?’
‘No, I don’t actually. We live a bit north of the city. I’m just down here for an appointment.’
‘I’ll give you my number,’ I said, my face flushed. I had never been comfortable making friends. But I suddenly flashed forward to late-night texting, when we would exchange brutally honest grievances and lament our existence.
‘Oh. Sure. Here, I’ll put it in my phone.’ She looked uncomfortable, and I wish I hadn’t offered as I told her my cell number. She was never in touch and I never ran into her again.
I still think of that woman sometimes. I wonder if she eventually felt she’d achieved something, if she looks at Harry today and knows she did well as a mother, that she raised a good person. I wonder how that feels.
13
She smiled at you first. After bath time. You were wearing your reading glasses and said she must have seen her own reflection in the lens. But we both knew she wanted you the most from the beginning. I could never comfort her when she cried like you could – she melted into your skin and seemed to want to stay there, a part of you. My warmth and my smell seemed to mean nothing to her. They talk about the mother’s heartbeat and the familiar sound of her womb, but it’s as though I were a foreign country.
I listened to you placate her with soft whispers that soothed her to sleep. I studied you. I imitated you. You told me it was all in my head – that I was making a big deal out of nothing. That she was just a baby and babies didn’t know how not to like a person. But it felt like two against one.
We were together around the clock and so yes, there were inevitably times she gave in, falling asleep on my chest or at my breast.
