The Push

by Ashley Audrain

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

You asked me to marry you on my twenty-fifth birthday. With a ring I sometimes still wear on my left hand.

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.

“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.”

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 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 grateful for everything you gave her that she didn’t want from me.

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.

Your lingering doubt, although it was silent, was so heavy that sometimes it was hard to breathe around you.

You wanted a perfect mother for your perfect daughter, and there wasn’t room for anything else.

Time had given me that. Time, and my will to forget.

She was trying, but she didn’t know how to be around me, and I didn’t know how to be around anyone.

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

These are, though, the kinds of things that fester in a person’s mind until she no longer feels loved; they are the happenings that took us from a place we could have survived, even in the grave face of a death that nearly killed me, too, to the place we simply could not come back from.

I watched you watch me. And I wondered what this body meant to you now. Was it just a vessel? The ship that got you here, father of one beautiful daughter and a son you’d barely known?

My mother unwrapped our lunch from cellophane and asked me what I had been up to. For the past two years, or just this weekend? I wanted to ask.

But I was on the cusp of the age when women worry about disappearing to everyone but themselves, blending in with their sensible hair, their practical coats. I see them walk down the street every day as though they’re ghosts. I suppose I wasn’t ready to be invisible yet. Not then.