The Push

by Ashley Audrain

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother’s blood before she herself is born. .

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

I used the word “luck.” I was lucky. I didn’t have much, but I had you.

We could have counted our problems on the petals of the daisy in my bouquet, but it wouldn’t be long before we were lost in a field of them.

I closed my eyes and I willed something horrible to go wrong. Death. I wanted a death. Mine or the baby’s. I didn’t think, even then, that we would survive each other.

She felt like a warm, screaming loaf of bread.

The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. Go away. Violet cried only when she was with me; it felt like a betrayal. We were supposed to want each other.

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.

I was focused on getting through the days as they rolled like boulders into one another.

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.

“We’ll be happy here,” I whispered and rubbed my socked feet over yours. “I thought we always were.”

I remember so little else about how he came into this world. I remember everything about how he left it.

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

Grace moved on to some brothers she had met, something about a rancher from Iowa. Were there ranches in Iowa?

“Be strong together. Many relationships don’t survive the death of a child. You have to be aware of this and work hard on your marriage.”

You bleed. You shed. You don’t need a baby inside you. Don’t listen when the world tells you that you do.

“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.”