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oh God what have I done to my baby
Everything she waited for is here. And since she is no longer preoccupied with the promise of the future, she is highly attuned to the now, which feels somehow two-dimensional in comparison to the three-dimensional world she had imagined.
He doesn’t get it. He didn’t feel the intense shame that Flora felt. Like she was outing herself on the spot: I’m so ill prepared for motherhood, I can’t even remember a diaper! The very first thing on her apparently useless iPhone checklist.
The cells of her body had formed another body that was now exposed to the world, and she knew that she would never stop fighting for that body as if it were still her own. If those cells died, then her cells died. Nothing had ever made more sense.
How did mothers survive before the internet?
And then it hits her: before the internet, mothers had mothers.
Time has a habit of folding in on itself if not watched closely.
and then she catches a whiff of something truly rank. She lifts her left arm and begrudgingly points her nose toward her armpit. Yep, it’s her. This isn’t the first time she has noticed her new body odor. She spent her last middle-of-the-night pump reading about it. Apparently, it’s some evolutionary thing so the baby can smell its mother and find the breast to feed. Flora can’t even describe the stench. Some combination of sweat, sulfur, and old cheese.
letdown noun [s] 1. the painful release of milk every two hours 2. life since Iris was born
Flora has the acute sensation that she did not exist until this very moment.
Having a partner who is there but not really there must breed its own kind of loneliness.
The irony of this is not lost on Flora: that she cannot feel what is there but she can feel what is not.
“Happiness is a privilege,” she says. “And I do not deserve it.”
Her mother wasn’t in that bathroom. Her mother was never even here. Because her mother killed herself two years ago.
But she doesn’t trust these hands that sometimes do not feel like her own.
And she needs answers now. Without them, she doesn’t trust herself around her own baby. And that, she is learning, is the cruelest form of torture.
She doesn’t even need breaks! She barely needs to eat or drink!
Together, they sift through the vacuum’s spilled guts, Esther looking for something that was never there, and Flora realizing now that she may be doing the same.
Maybe that is the burden of motherhood: to give all that you can and know that it will never be enough.
How often she cursed the calendar that told her she was doomed to another week, another day, another hour tackling parenting alone. And now that he’s finally here, it’s like she is the one who has left, her mind fighting a battle elsewhere.
“How many packs?” Flora asks, but she already knows the answer. no no no no no “Four,” he says. Four packs of sugar. just like Mom
Her right eye is twitching.
She lifts every hem of every dress and finds the same hidden name lovingly sewn on each one: Zephyr.
Zephyr had Flora’s same birthday. Which means Zephyr was Flora’s twin sister.
He looks up at Connor, his eyes determined but also kind and understanding. “You see it. I know you see it. Your wife slipping away little by little. Every day there is less and less of her left. And you don’t know why. It scares you, so you push her away. You push it all away because you don’t have the answers. And you don’t know what that means about who you are if this is something you can’t solve.” He looks at his own hands, inspecting the lines and wrinkles as if searching for some hidden message. “But if you walk out that door… then you will know who you really are. And you will struggle
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And she resolves to keep going. Because as long as this tiny human exists in the world, Flora knows it’s a place worth fighting for.
And finally, he says, “All right. Tell me what to do.”
But every pregnancy is different; discrepancies are normal.
