Same As It Ever Was

by Claire Lombardo

she’d sworn since before he was born that she would never make him worry about her the way she always worried about her own parents, but it had happened anyway; she had let it happen anyway.

reading him Snuggle Puppy for the thirty thousandth time, trying to keep him alive and teach him how to be a good person in spite of the fact that she herself felt neither good nor alive most of the time?

That was motherhood: she would stay here forever, mired in her own unhappiness, if it meant his sweet sleeping head didn’t move from where it rested on her stomach.

her days before Ben and Alma, before Mark, have taken on a wobbly, psychedelic quality, a series of poorly dubbed short films—she has

the things she couldn’t control and for all the things she could, for all the ways her child would come to know the world while not wrapped in her arms, and she wondered if her mother had touched foreheads with her like they were ponies, because that’s what she was doing with Ben, this person who was inexplicably hers.

“That’s my advice. Try to count on her, try to be there for her. If you’re trying, it means you care.”