as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,
an old debt I must assume.
Ugly angels, I thought, yes, that’s what they are.
They are not devils. Devils, I could disregard.
You cannot do this, my angels told me.
You miscalculated, they said.
You are prone to miscalculations. Untrustworthy.
You cannot even trust your own thoughts—look at you.
Still struggling to resist the naked truth.
You are not mother material, they said.
A mother is a house.
A mother is a house at night, with everyone safe in bed.
I lived in terror of my enemy. Because of course I understood that the angels were not real—my enemy was worse than that. My enemy had no form, no gender, no name. Even the evilest people had names. I didn’t know what had come over me. I had been fine…well, I had held myself together. I had held myself together all my life. Then I became a mother, twice, and I was not fine.
I was the opposite of fine.
My first bout occurred after Sybil. I didn’t know how to describe my state, or to whom. I didn’t have a way to speak about it at all. Back then, I blamed winter. I blamed Michael. I blamed myself. The angels came, swarmed around me for months. I held on. I swallowed my story. But then they left. And I forgot.
After George was born, everything was OK for a while, just long enough to get comfortable. Then my moods darkened. The small things that a house contains—the objects one props in corners for the hell of it, flowers or a photograph or a bird feeder or a trinket from vacation—upset me, and I packed them away. I let the cleaning go—I barely had a handle on it anyway. I started to have trouble sleeping. Sleeplessness is not unusual, but you should know I’d always been a champion sleeper, famous for nodding off no matter what bedlam surrounded me, so I had no weapons against it, and once the angels returned, I remembered how they had behaved the first time around, noisiest at night, lecturing me in the darkness. A mother is a house…A mother is a house with everyone safe in bed…I found myself starting to get very disorganized, late to get Sybil to preschool, sprawled beside baby George on the floor during tummy time, wondering how he’d gotten there, and why the poor child was being forced through such a humiliating exercise.
I hid this all from myself and from others. But I remember the moment when I was found out. It was early spring. We’d almost made it through winter. George had just started to pull up on things, and I resolved to get my head on straight. To regain control. In a fit of spring cleaning, I decided to go through Sybil’s old baby clothes. Maybe there were some things I could use for her brother.
Michael had just come back from another trip to Akron, where Omni had a regional office, and with some help from my Basement School friends and box wine, I’d made it through all right. I figured that this time around, I was armed with my past mistakes. I wasn’t in a lonely city, I wasn’t trying to be Helen Vendler. I was giving myself a little more amnesty. You know, yelling was OK, Oreos were OK. It was too much work to try to be special, to flatter oneself with special accommodations. I wasn’t going to buy into that. This time around, I swore I was going to be a good enough mother. A one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sort of person.
The seasonal shedding of clothes is a rite, the way one has to put away the outgrown items, and usually stumbles upon last year’s outfits. The shoes are bittersweet—tiny little sneakers with Velcro tabs, rubber toes, cartoon characters, or dirty glitter, the grooves still bearing the grit of distant playgrounds, sand lodged under the insole. Evidence of last year’s child. After all, children grow in inches and the rest of us inch toward the end.