That Kind of Mother

by Rumaan Alam

The baby made life seem both triumphant/powerful/enduring and horribly fragile. What on earth was she doing?

Rebecca tried to imagine her own mother, and herself, curled up as small as Jacob. She couldn’t.

She looked back at the baby. Someday, he’d go off to college. The crying wasn’t so loud, wasn’t so disruptive, but it had some other sort of effect on her, something chemical, or akin to those whistles that only dogs can hear. His crying affected her uniquely among all living people because he had issued from her body; it was her own cells calling back to her, saying, You feel hungry and you don’t even know it.

“It’s just . . . The thing I like about poetry is that it can mean whatever it is you want it to mean. There’s what the poet means, what the writer means, but I’m not sure that matters, ever, and less so even than normal with a poem. It’s just you, assembling the words and the images and the ideas and thinking about your own life and the things you know and the meaning is there, somehow, in you, and not where you think it is, on the page.”

She wanted to get back and see Jacob but also she did not; she wanted to sit at the table with a warm cup of coffee and say more about the black maid and the nice clothes and how she felt about life, but it was getting late.

She wanted to ask, but somehow could not: How was the breastfeeding, the sleeping, the pain, the blood, the bloom of sadness, the surprise euphoria, the balancing, the business of motherhood? Somehow it was too intimate.

Often, she could sit and narrate his play and this would be sufficient. But he knew when she wasn’t paying attention, when she was humoring him, and this made him angry. It wasn’t as though she could do the work she’d normally be doing, while sitting here on the floor, knees bumping up against the coffee table. Nor, though, could she give in to the reality of Jacobtown. She just shut off, or down, the way the refrigerator ceased its hum for half an hour or so when it had reached its favorite temperature.

It went unsaid, in the parenting books, in the chatter on the playground, in the warnings from her big sisters, that the baby needed you but also you needed the baby. They were reassuring. You could hold on to them and it was like you were holding on to life itself. You could hold on to them and nothing else seemed to matter, not the vanishing of species, not the signs of war, not the anger of your husband, the various depredations of contemporary life. A baby was so weak—why should it make you feel so invincible?

The ladder of the law had no top and no bottom, but every rung was paperwork.

Andrew was nine months old; what did he care about ducks? Some percentage of the things she did for the children were actually for her. The more clever rhythms in some of Seuss seemed strictly for Rebecca’s benefit. The days were long and repetitive, too.

The woman sat, went about her settling, lifting the baby from its stroller, coaxing the pacifier back into its mouth. “How old?” The argot of mothers. Shorthand for Can we be friends? “He’s nine months.”

Rebecca turned the lights down, just a bit, and the scene was picturesque, the food appealing, even if the reality was messy, Jacob fiddling and spilling, Andrew fussing and yawning, Ivy wanting to be held, Christopher going for a refill, Ian going to change a diaper. Only Rebecca and Cheryl sat at the table the duration of the meal, ignoring or soothing the children, and intent on actually eating their food, because motherhood was mercenary and you needed sustenance to survive it.

WITH THE BOYS OFF AT SCHOOL, REBECCA WAS FREE AT LAST, YET she missed them. Motherhood was idiotic.

“Looking at a child is like looking at the future. Sometimes I see past the moment, I see the boys playing, and the scene gets sort of frozen, and I feel so good about the future. It’s a passing thought. But it’s so powerful. I see the men they’ll be. I see. I don’t know. I see everything.” “I know what you mean, I think. Ivy lifts me out of time. But I get nervous. I worry about . . . everything. Boys. College tuition. My little girl making her way in the world.” “But you saw them.” Rebecca smiled. She wondered what that bright light did to her face as she did, knew she was transformed, aged, made into something else by a trick. “How can you look at our children and not feel better about everything?”

“The television has done something to us. To human beings. We can see so much, but maybe we weren’t made to see this much. Maybe it’s too much.”

She didn’t want to be that kind of mother, the one who can’t stop talking about her children, can’t stop thinking about them. Surely there had to be another kind of mother for Rebecca to be.

“Isn’t that how the mind works, though? It shows its own bias toward organizing experience. Toward teasing out something, some moral, some lesson. It’s all got to be for something. Or else otherwise everything is so frustratingly random.”

Who thought about investment banking or cardiology or selling real estate or animal husbandry on their deathbed?

Death was a betrayal, never mind its being a certainty.

“My husband, he says that what happens out there in the world is what matters, but he also says that what happens out there in the world is mostly horrible. Immoral. Maybe evil. So maybe I hide, here, at home. Your boys are princes. Actual princes. But so are mine. They’re what matters the most to me.” “Our children are special even if they’re not. Yes, mine are princes. I’m a princess, but that didn’t matter, in the end. I’m still dead.” “Cars still crash.”

Rebecca wanted everything. She wanted to be celebrated and she wanted not to be bothered. She wanted to be with her children and she wanted to be with her work. She wanted to be married and she wanted to be divorced. She wanted a man to want her and to fuck her and she wanted to be allowed to sleep in the center of the bed, all four pillows around her, a bulwark against the night. She wanted it all, and all was something impossible to possess.

Her sons were her suns, her life hostage to their orbit. Let it be thus. Drape her with bolts of scratchy black wool and place Andrew or Jacob on her lap. The baby was always the same. Cave painting, Christ on Mary’s lap, Cindy Sherman in the next room over, all babies, all the same. The baby was the only thing that mattered because the future was the only thing that mattered.

“It’s 1999 and I believe a better world is coming.”