The Push

by Ashley Audrain

It is often said that the first sound we hear in the womb is our mother’s heartbeat. Actually, the first sound to vibrate our newly developed hearing apparatus is the pulse of our mother’s blood through her veins and arteries. We vibrate to that primordial rhythm even before we have ears to hear. Before we were conceived, we existed in part as an egg in our mother’s ovary. 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. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb and she in turn formed within the womb of her grandmother. 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.

We’re all entitled to have certain expectations of each other and of ourselves. Motherhood is no different. We all expect to have, and to marry, and to be, good mothers.

Your unconditional belief in me felt magical. I desperately wanted to prove to myself that I was as good as you thought I was.

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.” 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.”

I half listened but my mind was elsewhere, searching my past for the same kind of familiar tokens, blankies and stuffies and favorite books, but I couldn’t find any.

The howl. She sounded so familiar. “Are you ready, Mom?” someone said. They placed her on my bare chest. She felt like a warm, screaming loaf of bread.

She was alive. She came from me. She smelled like me. She didn’t latch for my colostrum, not even when they squished my breast like a hamburger and pried at her chin. They said to give it time.

Nobody talked about the feeling of being woken up after forty minutes of sleep, on bloodstained sheets, with the dread of knowing what had to happen next. I felt like the only mother in the world who wouldn’t survive it. The only mother who couldn’t recover from having her perineum stitched from her anus to her vagina. The only mother who couldn’t fight through the pain of newborn gums cutting like razor blades on her nipples. The only mother who couldn’t pretend to function with her brain in the vise of sleeplessness. The only mother who looked down at her daughter and thought, Please. Go away.

The woman turned to me and we shared a look. Not a smile, but an acknowledgment that we had both morphed into a version of ourselves that didn’t feel as good as had been advertised.

My warmth and my smell seemed to mean nothing to her. They talk about the mother’s heartbeat and the familiar sound of her womb, but it’s as though I were a foreign country.

You told me it was all in my head—that I was making a big deal out of nothing. That she was just a baby and babies didn’t know how not to like a person. But it felt like two against one.

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.

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

What I couldn’t tell her was that I felt I’d aged a century since I’d given birth to Violet. That she seemed to stretch every hour we spent together. That the months had crawled by so slowly I’d often splash cold water on my face during the day to see if I was just dreaming—if that’s why time never made any sense to me.

Us. No couple can imagine what their relationship will be like after having children. But there’s an expectation that you’ll be in it together. That you’ll be a team where the teamwork is possible.

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 child.

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

I could barely remember the mother I had been. Motherhood is like that—there is only the now. The despair of now, the relief of now.

But here’s what you didn’t understand: There weren’t many places my mind wouldn’t go. My imagination could tiptoe slowly into the unthinkable before I realized where I was headed.

I had been numb—the cruel lack of pain had been numbness. Later on, I would pray for the numbness to return. Even though I found satisfaction in the pain, I knew I wouldn’t survive it.

I had spoken to the police with the tone of ordering at a drive-through window: My daughter yanked my arm. I was burned by the hot tea. I let go of the stroller. And then she pushed it onto the road.

Anger made it hard to breathe. Sadness made it hard to open my eyes, to let the light into me. I belonged in the dark, I was owed the dark.

I didn’t want to have to say our daughter’s name out loud while I was there. I had left to get away from her. I was not interested in talking about her, or you, or how fucked up my own mother was. I had a dead child. I just wanted to be left alone.

“I want you to leave again.” “Your room?” “Leave us. Me and Dad.” “Violet.” She turned the page. My eyes welled. I hated her. I wanted him back so badly.

The mother’s head moved slowly forward and then back and she mustered the words, “Of course, honey,” and she put her hand on his for the most fleeting moment before she tucked it back beneath her thighs under the table. A mother’s heart breaks a million ways in her lifetime.

But looking at a photograph of oneself is not proof of an affair. And asking a question about a type of flower is not proof of an affair. 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. These things became too heavy and too hurtful, habitual abuses in what once felt like the safest place in the world.

You stared at my body differently that morning; the hanging skin that had held your children; the breasts those children had sucked dry; the patch of scraggly pubic hair that hadn’t been cared for in years—all there, for the eyes of a man who had something better, younger, firmer to look at.

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?

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.

I couldn’t find enough heartbreak in your betrayal. What happened with Sam had blunted me, knocked me so hard that I still couldn’t feel anything more deeply than his loss. You wanted another woman? Fine. You didn’t love me anymore? I understood.

We can sense fear in less time than it takes for us to be aware of what we are seeing or hearing or smelling—just twelve-thousandths of a second. We respond so fast that it can happen before we’re consciously aware that something is wrong.

This boy she spoke about was yours. She had given birth to your son. You had been given another chance. And then it hit me—the thirty-eight weeks it takes to grow a baby from conception. That she conceived in September, the month before you were fired from your job. That you would have known she was pregnant well before the time I asked you to leave. You knew the whole time. You knew.

I had talked myself through different versions of what I could say to you, but nothing felt right. I didn’t want to apologize for the mother I’d been to her—I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t want to say I was wrong—I didn’t know if I was. I just wanted you to know that something inside of me had changed. And I wanted to see our daughter more.

When the baby moved inside her, sometimes Cecilia wondered if her feelings were changing. Once she stood naked in the mirror and watched the lump of the baby’s foot move across the top of her stomach, tracing the arc of a crescent moon. She laughed out loud and the baby moved some more. She laughed some more. They were having a moment of fun, the two of them.

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.”

Not the mistakes she has made as a mother. Not the guilt she carries for the damage she has done. Not her unbearable loneliness. No, she will not think about any of that. She has worked too hard to let it go. I am capable of moving beyond my mistakes. I am able to heal from the hurt and pain I have caused.

She hushes into the phone and as she does this, she realizes who it is she is soothing. She closes her eyes. It is Gemma. “Blythe,” she finally whispers. “Something happened to Jet.”

What makes a person with a loving, positive upbringing behave unconscionably? How does a person with a traumatic childhood completely break the cycle of certain behaviors with their own families? The evolving science of inherited trauma is particularly interesting, the way a severe emotional experience can physically alter the cells and behavior of that person’s own children.

There is increasingly more discourse among women about the failed expectations of motherhood, but there are still taboo truths that few women will share, like regretting the decision to have a child, or not feeling the love they thought they would. Motherhood is so often discussed in clichés: “The most important job in the world,” or “The days are long, but the years are short.” What if it feels like the worst job in the world? What if the years feel like decades? Those opinions aren’t a part of the mainstream language around motherhood, but I think a lot of mothers can relate to them.