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.

I smelled your head of waxy dark hair while you slept at night and traced the line of your fuzzy jaw to wake you up in the morning. You were an addiction.

The lie was necessary, like the scattering of other lies I’d told so that you didn’t suspect just how fucked up my family was.

I wanted to be anyone other than the mother I came from. And so I wanted a baby, too.

She called constantly, and every conversation started with I know things are different these days, but trust me. . . . Gripe water. Tighter swaddles. Rice cereal in the bottle.

I’d done the research. 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.

We had established certain motions and we still went through them. But there were subtle absences. We stopped doing crosswords together. You didn’t leave the bathroom door open when you showered. There was space where there hadn’t been before, and in that space was resentment.

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 child.

You never heard her right away, and sometimes not at all, but it felt like my eyes opened a few seconds before she made her first noise from the crib down the hall. This unnerved me every time, the reminder that she was still so much a physical part of me.

Some people frame their perspectives of the past with worn photographs or the same stories told a thousand times by someone who loves them. I didn’t have these things. My mother didn’t either, and maybe that was part of the problem. We had only one version of the truth.

I looked at my mother again and imagined what they could see, without the burden of everything I knew about her.

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

The officer’s pale, chapped lips puckered. He nodded at you, an acknowledgment of some sort. The irrational mother. The incapable woman. Look—I have to put her ointment on. I have to shush her.

Things could be so easy, if only I could let them.

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.

I wondered if she liked to run her hand against the bristles of hair on the nape of your neck, if she would one day shave them for you like I did every so often.