Elsewhere

by Alexis Schaitkin

I watched these girls, now mothers, parading their babies about town and taking roll upon roll of photographs of them, as if there were nothing you could do to use them up, and I consoled myself with the bitterest thought: You could be torn from this child. I thought how careless of them, how indulgent, to let their children out of their bodies, while I kept mine secreted away inside me, deprived myself of them to keep them safe.

‘Do you think I’ll be a good mother?’ I must have asked him this a thousand times. ‘Are you kidding? You’ll be wonderful. You’re patient. You’re resilient. You’re kind.’ He was right, I was these things, I didn’t doubt it. Yet I suspected that being a good mother had little to do with possessing those traits good mothers ought to possess, that it hinged on something else entirely, required other, obscure qualities that could be neither honed nor harnessed.

We reassured her that any mother could lose her composure under those circumstances. Besides, it had only happened the one time. ‘Does that matter?’ Liese said. She was right. We had seen all our lives how the smallest moments could turn out, in retrospect, to be signs. We had seen this, but we had not understood what it would mean for us until we were mothers ourselves, when our days appeared to be made up of nothing but such minor incidents, every moment, every misstep, a possible indication.

At one group, Cecily told us that lately all she wanted was some time each day to play her flute, but she couldn’t get it. She didn’t know why she couldn’t, when babies sleep so much; the hours just slipped away. Sometimes she looked at her flute in its case and then down at her son cooing in her arms and she found herself digging her fingernails into her palms until it hurt. She felt such anger toward him in these moments, and how terrible it felt, how dangerous, to be angry at this child she loved so much.

Tess said she had instituted a system for herself. During the baby’s afternoon nap, she set an egg timer for an hour and went to her easel to paint. She forced herself to do it even if she didn’t feel like it that day, which most days she didn’t. Sometimes the whole hour was a chore, but occasionally the old rhythms returned to her, the sweep of the wet brush over the creamy paper, the bloom of color in water when she washed the brush. Minutes would pass during which she thought of her child not at all; she forgot she was a mother and remembered what it felt like to just be Tess, painting.

Iris filled my entire field of vision. I could find no want within myself for another.