Mama-me

It was early, and my mother was still asleep. The light sneaking its way through the window was cold and blue, and it got caught in the moisture of my breath. It illuminated each exhale as I approached Mama’s bed. My bare feet rasped over the wood floor and when I was close enough I stepped onto the corner of the blanket that had puddled next to the bed; it was much warmer than the bare wood.

“Mama.”

This time she stirred, and I began to make out her shape in the almost-light. Mama pulled her arms from beneath her pillow and pushed herself up onto her side, holding the free edge of the blanket up in invitation. I sat on the edge of the mattress and swung my chilly feet into her warm nest. Mama’s bed smelled like it did when I was a child, sweet and earthy, sunshine and patchouli.

I buried my face in the sheets and closed my eyes. Mama’s breathing told me she was already asleep again, but I lay awake for what seemed like hours as the sunrise made my eyelids seem thinner and thinner until finally I opened them completely. Mama was still there, and still asleep. The pleat that years had sewn between her eyebrows remained steadily present, even as she slept. The familiar sight calmed me and her breathing lulled me back into darkness.

When I awoke, it took a minute for me to remember how old I was. I remembered waking up in this same bed before my first day of school, and again after my first broken heart the summer after 7th grade. I shuffled to the en-suite and sat down. My thighs pressed against the toilet seat, my elbows pressed into my thighs, and my eyes pressed into the heels of my hands.

Not too many mornings ago I sat like this at home, I sat, and I counted in my head. I remember how I’d passed the number I had started counting to and kept going. 121, 122, 123… I remember that four days ago, I’d wanted more than the two minutes allotted by the instructions on the back of the box. The more seconds I count now, I’d thought to myself, the more seconds I won’t be a mama. Just a few more, then I’ll be ready. Then I’d turned that test over and suddenly, I was pregnant. Then, yesterday, suddenly I wasn’t.

Today I wished for every second back; I would have watched the pink lines darken on the test strip so as not to miss a moment. When I was pregnant, it was like I woke up with two more people inside of me. Baby was one, and baby was gone now. The other was a Me, I suppose, a Mama-me. She was still there, and she hadn’t slept when I had. Instead, she was pacing about my insides, causing the pain in my belly.

I emerged from the en-suite to Mama orbiting outside the bedroom. The light through the window was yellow now, and considerably warmer. Mama was on the telephone, I could tell. She wasn’t saying anything, but I could hear her creaking up and down the hallway and occasionally I heard the click-click-click of the phone cord jumping curl by curl over the trim on the doorway to the kitchen. I wondered if she was talking to my husband. I was the one who had suggested I come here and he, I think, had been too tired to compose any other opinion.

I opened the bedroom door and Mama hung up.

“There’s breakfast,” she said, and shepherded me into the kitchen. Mama wasn’t the domestic sort, so she was speaking of the potential for breakfast only, and I obligingly collected the necessities, placing milk, eggs, potatoes and cornmeal on the counter before lighting the stove beneath a cast-iron pan. The pan was my grandmother’s, but it was heavy and my grandmother had given it to Mama because she couldn’t lift it anymore. Mama-me winced at the effort it took to lift the pan, but I wanted to use it. It didn’t see much action now that it lived in Mama’s kitchen.

Mama worked more hours in a week than she spent at home, and while we ate I realized that she must have talked to my husband or she’d already be out the door and about her business. And since she hadn’t asked me what I was doing back home, I knew that my husband had told her what had happened. I couldn’t justify to him my desire to return home, even to me I couldn’t explain my sudden pilgrimage. All I knew was that this house was where Mama was.

If my mother wasn’t going to work today, she certainly wasn’t wasting a good work day. As soon as I’d cleared the plates from breakfast Mama set out to tame the wild house that had been slowly rebelling due to lack of attention and discipline. I joined her with vigor. It was an attempt on my part to satisfy mama-me. She was still frantically searching for something to mother, her lack of purpose causing her to rattle unsettlingly about my belly. The kitchen was scrubbed so fiercely that if it was a child it would be red and raw, and Mama had set me about the place with a rag and some oil soap to shine up the wood furniture. Every rug in the place was beaten out behind the house and then brought back in and put in its place.

We cleaned until the sun went down, then tucked the last stray linens away in their nooks. Mama and I turned off the lights and retreated quietly out onto the kitchen porch. The unpainted wood siding was showing some dust, but Mama had been satisfied with the behind-the-ears treatment we’d given our old house. She rewarded us both, first with wine and then with Redbreast and finally with conversation.

Mama spoke about her baby. How we didn’t have a car and the bus didn’t run near our house but my daycare was on the C line. She carried me almost a mile in the morning and the same distance home.

“Weren’t you tired?” I asked her. Mama-me was tired, and she had no child to carry.

But Mama said that walk wasn’t the one that was hard. She did more walking at night, she said, when I wouldn’t sleep. I’d wake up if she’d lay me down, so instead, Mama remembered, she’d hold me to her front with one forearm tucked under my legs and the other arm wrapped around my back. The hallway outside her bedroom was eleven paces long and she’d trudge along for hours, rubbing her cheek back and forth on my duckling fuzz head.

I was tired like a baby tonight, too tired to fall asleep, so I just drank and drank and listened to Mama remembering. She remembered for hours, speaking slowly and laughing too loud. Then, finally, somewhere below my stomach, Mama-me closed her eyes and slept.

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