Photographs of Anita’s belly cover the fridge door – striae, mottling, the dark line from her umbilicus – a burnished passage from tree to bud. My temples flicker – will I love my baby, as if he had grown inside of me, will I feel like a real mother, a real woman? I gnaw on pulled loops from my cardigan, and the chill from the stone floor aches my thigh bones.
I go to bed in my tatty pyjamas, I side-sleep, empty belly breathing into a bundled blanket, his flailing limbs detailed in the dark-room beneath my lids. Gusts hurl ruptured magnolias at the window, -the tap, tap, tap wakes me – they surge above the vacant cot, some have come too early, and the icy wind shivers their tawny down.
Have you known the ruins of an early spring-glimpse – winter returns to seize the miss-timed hatchings of catkins inside their warm sweaters.
Tickets, planes, hotels, births – choreography failed. Rows of plastic cots, tiny feet boxing, blankets wriggling, purple cries – pleading, alarmed – there is no oxytocin – only plodding feet, caustic perfume, and disinfectant.
The silent sacrifices of motherhood – I could not afford the ‘best chance’ package, so I took a ‘standard chance’, and the wind-raging jealously that tore around my womb when Anita sounded flouncy, or easy, and seeing him curled on Anita’s chest, her waxy-bloody entrails clotting around his eyes, mouth, nose.
Snatches of him in a hotel room. The nurse, a different one from yesterday, holds him up to the screen with her fat arms. I press hot spots of breath, my voice a scrambling, quiet siren – searching for love, because I know the cord between giving him everything, and nothing, how easy it would be to turn my closed fists to the sky – stretch that cord, and then break it, forever.
Soon, I return to my blanket. Anita to her own hungry children. The nurse to her quiet house.
And my baby searches for his mother, because he is part of her body. The body he doesn’t yet know.
