The Nursery

by Szilvia Molnar

All while you are still a thought and I think about how I am going to resent you once you arrive. You will disrupt the peace. You will get in the way of my freedom. It’s possible you may one day ask for an apology, I’m just being honest. I want you as much as I fear you.

Sitting and listening to him makes me wonder if the word “compatible” is in any way connected to “compassion.”

This is what “hard” does to the mind and that hard body is my body and my body is so tired it is losing me, walking away.

I suppose it’s love when the person you are with doesn’t expect anything from you in terms of productivity or performance.

marriage is about the many unspoken but assumed factors between two people.

There is nobody to teach you that motherhood is forever, so how is it not a shock to your system when you find out that it is, in fact, until forever? How can this even be called motherhood?

He remembers never seeing her clearly, as if she were always slipping through his fingers. I remember often questioning why she loved me.

This day is going to disappear, taking itself with or without me having accomplished anything.

Ultimately remaining clueless to what next year will entail and unaware that from now on, time will be the main character and culprit in our lives.

Motherhood might be about having lost my mind, and I am about to spend the rest of my life searching for it.

The possibility of you is constantly on my mind. But I realize there is nothing exciting about describing the unknown or the potential.

I want you and I want to be alive, loving you. This is the purest gesture I can give you.

Some other friends will never return, again without my knowledge. A wall is erected—the one that separates the child-ed with the child-less. It is built brick by brick from the mutual understanding that we do not understand each other anymore.

Whatever did happen, I decide then and there, at that overrated place, that I’m not going to end up like my friend. I am not going to let motherhood drag me through the mud. I know better.

love comes with sacrifices. The important kind of love does not exist without the existence of certain losses. It remains to be seen which loss is possible enough to bear, to endure, to relinquish.

I thought I loved her in theory, but I hated her as Button, as everything I think of and everything that I am. What am I anymore?

So much of what I am going through these days is out of my control. There is a mind but the body rules. The heart beats for the baby, the blood flows to the baby, the air travels to the baby. I am the stupid vessel, through and through. Can a childbearing woman be any more of an alien?

He goes about his ways, about his life, his interests, sorts his papers, polishes his shoes, exercises, makes a smoothie for himself, empties the recycling, runs an errand, and lets me sit and soak in my lie, in the shameful envelopment of denial.