Creative Nonfiction

I can still picture my mom pacing around our bedroom at night, waiting for the sound of artillery fire to get closer, occasionally daring to inch her petite and slender body high enough to part the blinds and gauge the distance of the explosions in the night sky.

I know now that I gave you up too easily. I should have fought harder, run away, found another way to survive, so you could live. But that is not what happened.

I often fall asleep at night, pinching the excess mounds that have filled in around my equator. I once had a small waist, a flat tummy like the woman on the magazine cover. But time muddles all things, even our bodies, smudging the edges and flattening the roundness of it all.

The truth is that Violet would not like to be any metaphor. She has only ever wanted—insisted upon—being herself.

Sitting next to Esti’s humming incubator, I kept remembering a promise I’d made to a friend in high school: if I ever had an ugly baby, I’d be the first to admit it.

There is no shared custody. There are no weekend visits. There is no child support. At bedtime, your weepy daughter asks, “Why don’t I ever see Daddy anymore? I miss him.”

As difficult as it is to admit, when I think about my body being finished with reproducing, part of me feels old, used up—even closer to death.

There is no calm within the skull of a mother, its cranium hard, not spongy like the woodpecker’s. The anxieties rattle within its frontal lobes. Peck, peck, peck.

He is unguarded, unselfconscious here between us. A unique moment. A teenager with his defenses down.

My neighbor looked at me quizzically, and I felt it again: a twinge of guilt for taking comfort in the global health crisis.

By the time I shut off the husband’s alarm, boil water, mix up the baby’s bottle, and empty my bladder, the baby’s room is suspiciously quiet.