The Push

by Ashley Audrain

All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother.

We slipped out of the social orbit and were happily all each other needed.

I’d never met someone with a heart as eager as yours.

I loved you the most there when it was morning.

“Marriages can float apart. Sometimes we don’t notice how far we’ve gone until all of a sudden, the water meets the horizon and it feels like we’ll never make it back.” She paused and looked only at me. “Listen for each other’s heartbeat in the current. You’ll always find each other. And then you’ll always find the shore.” She took your father’s hand and you stood to raise your glass.

We thought we knew each other. And we thought we knew ourselves.

I wanted to be anyone other than the mother I came from.

I believed you. Life was easier when I believed you.

you were excited for me to be like other moms. I mostly went for you. To show you I was normal.

“You want them and grow them and push them out, but they happen to you.”

Time goes by so quickly. Enjoy every moment. Mothers speak of time like it’s the only currency we know.

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 child.

We were both pretending that things weren’t as bad as they were. That Violet’s behavior could be easily explained.

She made no sense at all, and yet all the sense in the world.

was nine, but I had already learned how to manage my own disappointment.

She had a brilliant, beautiful mind and sometimes I longed to be inside it. Even though I feared what I might find.

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.

Motherhood is like that—there is only the now. The despair of now, the relief of now.

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

There are days, like that one, that mark the moments in our life that change who we are. Was I the woman being cheated on? Were you the man who betrayed me? We were already the parents of a dead boy. Of a daughter I couldn’t love. We would become the couple that split. The husband who left. The wife who never got over any of it.

Surely there is a limit to how much sadness one person can hold.

People do that, don’t they, when they spend time together—take on each other’s subtle gestures, begin to act like each other.

But I have to admit, I began to doubt myself more as time passed. The conviction I’d carried for years was losing its weight somehow. I was having a harder time seeing that day clearly in my mind. Sometimes I woke up in the morning and it was the first thing I did—search my memory for the replay. Had it faded? Was it further away than it was the day before?