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 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.”

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

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.

“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.”