Confessions of an Unlikely Mother

By Phyllis Rittner

PROMPT — Ask Me.

"Want to hold her?" she asks. My friend places a spit up rag on my shoulder, then her wriggling infant, with its mass of dark hair, into my arms. I hold her as securely as I can, my feet rooted into the floor. As her black eyes search mine, a tiny string pulls inside my gut. I long to press my lips to her forehead, drink in her sweet scent. Another part of me wants to bolt out the door into the street, blend with the throng of strangers, dull this unexpected ache.

When I was twenty-one, my boyfriend declared he wanted five children. I laughed in his face, secretly horrified at the idea of giving birth. My parents taught me nothing of sex. They were frightened people suffering from mental illness, who I ended up parenting at the age of twelve. As I grew into adulthood, pondering the weight of my responsibilities, the loss of simple childhood pleasures, I resisted talk of children, even marriage. Resentful of my sacrifices, I left my boyfriend at thirty-six, free but lost on how to care for myself.

Meanwhile, my friends, desperate to beat their biological clocks, struggled through miscarriages and IVF treatments. I attended their weddings, their baby showers, gushed at their photo albums. When asked of my status, I lied. "I haven’t found the right man, the right job, the right home. No, I’m not pregnant," I answered. "Just plump, thank you very much." But every now and then, I longed for that fizzle of delight I used to have playing with my childhood Barbies, brushing their silken hair. And now, holding this tiny infant, an unexpected memory rushes in.

I’m eleven, baby bag slung over my shoulder, hired to watch my neighbor’s toddler while they play tennis. We’re under an enormous elm and the child nestles in my lap, sipping apple juice while I narrate Green Eggs and Ham. Later, I lift her onto the swing. When her soft cheek presses against mine a strange glow floods through me. Near tears, I bury my face in her hair, which smells of limes. This is what it feels like, I tell myself. To be a mother. I imagine wading into the ocean, my future child’s arms wrapped tightly around my neck.

"You’re really good with her!" my friend says, as I bounce the baby lightly, shifting my feet side-to-side. This comment is not lost on me. Others have remarked over the years on my innate desire to soothe, the switch that goes off in my brain whenever I witness someone in distress. How my voice lowers an octave to calm a hotline survivor, how my hand automatically reaches out to a friend in the ER. Where does this mothering come from? I wonder.

I think of my mother’s attempts at mothering, publicly devoted but privately detached. Flashes of her crawling into my teenage bed, sucking my attention to soothe the empty places left by my father’s temper and neglect. And while my fourteen-year old self stroked her hair, smoothed away her losses, I waited for my grown-up mother to appear, to hold me the way a mother is supposed to, without hesitation or expectation.

The child starts to wail. The familiar sound pierces my chest and my arms prickle with electricity. Years of therapy have prepared me for what was once unthinkable, the sensory memory of a toddler howling in a crib, a mother nowhere to be found. I hand the infant back to my friend.

In bed that night my gut swirls like a tornado. I’m falling through space with no one to catch me. I do what I’m trained to do. Flick on the light, practice counting five blue items, then five green. I cross my hands over my shoulders, slowly stroke my arms until my palms slide together. I do this, again and again, inhaling and exhaling until I’m wrapped in the rhythm, until I feel the softness of my own skin. "It’s okay," I whisper. "I love you." Somewhere between breaths I find the adult me again. Then, as if on cue, a dreamy sort of calm melts through me as I settle into myself. "Yes," I murmur, as I slowly drift off. "This is what it feels like. This."

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Phyllis Rittner writes poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction from her home in Watertown, MA. Her work can be found in Fictive Dream, Emerge Literary Journal, Portrait of New England, Wrong Turn Lit and others. She can be reached at https://www.facebook.com/phyllis.rittner