Old Flame

by Molly Prentiss

This was capitalism at work: the deep sensation that you were going to start falling behind. Poverty was waiting for you, and then death.

Or it won’t matter if I do, because I’ll be beyond procreation by then. And what is a woman without babies? Is she even real?”

“Being a feminist is about love,” she said. “It’s about finding power in love, finding a politics of love. Once I had the girls—well, I finally knew what that meant. A mother’s is the deepest love that exists. There’s nothing else that comes close.

As my ankles ballooned, my curiosity withered. The bigger my body became, the smaller my ego got. I didn’t even miss her, my old self, because this self felt so much easier. More convinced of her place in the world, less worried about everything, more easygoing. More like the woman I’d imagined I should be.

I was two floors away from my baby, but we were crying out in the same key.

would rather have my nipples bleed than hear my child cry. When my child cried, I felt a ripple of panic move through my entire body, all the way to my toes. “Do you feel that?” I asked Wes. “Feel what?” he said. “When she cries. Do you feel like, electricity in your veins?” “I believe that’s adrenaline,” he said. “Probably a mom instinct.” “So you don’t feel it.” He shook his head.

Later that night, when I finally brought myself to plug in to my breast pump, it started speaking to me. Black hole, the pump said, out of nowhere. Black hole, black hole, black hole. I wondered if it was talking to me specifically, or just to anyone who would listen.

But I chalked it up to it being 4 a.m., the hour when the mind’s anxious volcanoes erupt, when everything seems bleaker than it really is.

“Of course you have power,” I said. “You’ve always had it, just by being born a man you’ve always had it, living within you from the very start. So you can’t even see it.”