The Push

by Ashley Audrain

The comfort I found in you was consuming—I had nothing when I met you, and so you effortlessly became my everything.

We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.

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.

“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.”

I started to understand, during those sleepless nights replaying the things I’d overheard, that we are all grown from something. That we carry on the seed, and I was a part of her garden.

Mothers speak of time like it’s the only currency we know.

writing. I didn’t mention it to you—you always insisted that I sleep while she napped during the day, and asked me when you got home if I had. That was the only thing you cared about. You wanted me alert and patient. You wanted me rested so I could perform my duties. You used to care about me as a person—my happiness, the things that made me thrive. Now I was a service provider. You didn’t see me as a woman. I was just the mother of your

You were so sorry I was her mother. That’s what you had meant.

was so disappointed she was mine.

Mothers aren’t supposed to have children who suffer. We aren’t supposed to have children who die. And

we are not supposed to make bad people.

Thank you, he’s mine, I made him. One whole year ago. He was so much a part of me that in the seconds just before he cried, my insides grew physically tight, like someone was blowing up a balloon in my rib cage.

a reminder that they are new to this world, that they can’t possibly understand when they’re safe or not.

Even though I found satisfaction in the pain, I knew I wouldn’t survive

The incapable woman. Look—I have to put her ointment on. I have to shush her.

sun hits her in the morning and brightens the colors on her dress for hours.

“My daughter made a mistake. You never made a mistake before, Maureen? Come on now, we’re all human.”

Attempted murder???? Im sorry but thats not a mistake

hated her and I loved her.

A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime.

There were fields, I think, outside the window. I remember looking out and wanting to run through them until you caught me by the hood of my sweatshirt. If you ran after me at

habitual abuses in what once felt like the safest place in the world.

made me feel like I was a clandestine part of the new family you had built, one step removed from the clutches of your judgments at last.

“You know, there’s a lot about ourselves that we can’t change—it’s just the way we’re born. But some parts of us are shaped by what we see. And how we’re treated by other people. How we’re made to feel.”