There are bruises all over my legs: a booger-colored, kayak-shaped one plunging down my shin, a bland purple coin in the center of my knee, fingertips in yellows and browns dancing up and down my flesh.
I go to the gym as often as I can. It’s something to do. I bring the kids, deposit them in the free daycare, wave bye-bye and blow kisses. Grip the oily handles of the elliptical machine, feel silent, smell my own sweat, silently seeping out of me. Everyone talks about seeing results. I see results. New lines and tone. A half hour of quiet, like pushing the reset button. I want to wear shorts more now, despite the bruises.
Push reset! I instruct my older boy, when he’s getting going. We all need to push reset. No one pushes reset for the momma, though. She’s got to heave up, stumble over, prod for the button all on her own.
My older boy whispers, “I have to tell you something,” stomping all over my feet to get close enough to my face, knocking his knee into my shin, pinching and pulling and shoving. There is no grace to being a toddler, no grace to being a toddler’s mother. In the morning, there’ll be more bruises, but I’ll have forgotten what he wanted to tell me.
The baby wakes in two- to three-hour intervals, or whenever he pleases. He’s too old to do this, just google it and see for yourself. But here we are, settling into the farting glider cushion, his room dark but for the alien blue of the light coming from his sound machine. What I asked for was a hush, a loud quiet, a mechanical mouth shushing in my absence. I got the mouth, but it came with an eye. Nightlight, it threatens. It’s the kind of blue light that makes my throat feel scraped, makes me feel clinically alone at ten p.m., at one a.m., at three a.m., at oh my God o’clock.
But the thing about staying at home—such a funny way of putting it—is that you are never alone. There is the toddler, the baby, the dogs.
The other thing is that you are always alone. What I asked for was more time with the kids. A chance to step back, breathe them in. What I got was that plus that blue light, flooding the room, that scraped throat feeling. The baby is always so happy, relieved, to see me. I’m here, I coo, and I don’t ask, What are we doing here? Why am I still going in and out of this dark hush of a room at all hours of the night? What do you want, from me?
In the morning, bruises. Spilled grinds I mistake for ants. A hissed goddammit! “Ma, he said ‘stupid,’” my son tells me, pointing at the TV. He is learning that it’s not nice to say stupid, fat, ugly. He is learning that from the TV. So often TV is the balm, the reset. I am failing. Ah, that’s it, I’m getting to it: the blue light floods the room so we can all see how much I’m failing.
It goes by so fast! People trip over themselves to tell me this. Enjoy it. It’s over before you know it. I know they’re right; I know it in my bones. I know it in my bruises, tender the way my heart is now, never quite healing from the blast each birth gave it. But still, I want to quip, Promise? Instead I make that face I’ve been making lately, that approximation of a smile, pulling my lip up and showing my teeth and, because it feels like a threat, like a baring of teeth instead, which I don’t mean, I add a wink at the end. This is what I’ve come to think of as my mom face. I’m crazy, my face says, but don’t worry, I don’t mean it.
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