The Push

by Ashley Audrain

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.”

Death. I wanted a death. Mine or the baby’s. I didn’t think, even then, that we would survive each other.

I was desperate to know who she was before she became my mother. 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.

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.

And by then I had a lot to prove. We kept busy and I kept quiet.

But nobody was scrutinizing Etta by then. The truth was they’d all given up. And yet something inside her made Etta want to try anyway. Sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn’t. But Cecilia rooted for her each and every time.

For the first time then, Cecilia realized she had a kind of power over Etta. She could make her angry. She could make her lose control.

Every time she screamed, the rage seemed to pump through her like a drug and Cecilia could see the shame in her face as the high wore off. Cecilia would come to know that feeling herself many years later.

But I couldn’t stop punishing her for being there. How easy it was to slip on my headphones and pretend she did not exist.

I felt desperate for her help, anyone’s help, but I had come to resent her capability, how easy she had made everything seem for your entire life.

“You’re both very lucky to have him.” And what about him? Isn’t he lucky to have me, too?

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.

She made no sense at all, and yet all the sense in the world.

She was not perfect, she was not easy, but she was my daughter and maybe I owed her more.

Where does it begin? When do we know? What makes them turn? Who is to blame?

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.

The only way forward I could see for our family was to have a second child. Redemption, maybe, for everything that had gone wrong.

She told you she hated me. That she wished I would die so that she lived only with you. That she did not love me. These words would have speared the heart of any other mother. You had said to her, “Violet, she’s your mom.” There were so many other things you could have said, but those were the words you chose.

was mush. But the only thing that mattered was that I could physically keep us all going. My body was our motor.

I forgave everything about the unrecognizable woman in the mirror. It never occurred to me then that my body would not be useful like that ever again: necessary, dependable, cherished.

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

“Blythe, people might think bad things about you that aren’t true. The only thing that matters is what you believe about yourself.”

I hated that my mother had left him, but I wondered if he ever really tried to stop her.

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.

“You’re a strong person,” she said quietly. Those words meant nothing to me—they weren’t true. She loved me, but she didn’t know me at all.

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.

There are days, like that one, that mark the moments in our life that change who we are. 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.

Surely there is a limit to how much sadness one person can hold.

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.

I looked up and felt nothing for you—not love, not hate, not anything in between. Is this what the end was supposed to feel like?

That night I got on my hands and knees before I went to bed and prayed that my mother would die. I would rather have seen her dead than as the new woman she had become, the changed woman who was no longer my mother.

I’d told so many lies. I couldn’t tell another one.

That didn’t make any sense to me—that my existence in the world could have taken poetry away from her.

“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.”

“I don’t want you learning to be like me. But I don’t know how to teach you to be anyone different.”

I didn’t think before I called your name. You didn’t think before you turned around. And so there we were, staring at each other. Strangers, family. I waited for you to turn away toward your car. But instead you came back. To the porch you rebuilt, to the home you had loved. The home we still shared on paper.

But then I cracked a smile. I couldn’t help myself. I started to laugh, too. It was absurd. You still had that pull on me, that way of making me want to be like you. We howled like a pair of old dogs in the night. At the thought of such a strange thing to do, at the ridiculousness of hiding it from me. At the idea that after everything, we could be there, that night, on the cold porch, together.

“She wasn’t always easy. But she deserved more from you.” You looked down the street toward your car and zipped up your jacket. With your hands in your pockets, you took one step down the stairs, away from me. “And you deserved more from me.”