Lauren
I’m a terrible mother. I’m a neglectful, resentful and awful mother. The horror in their faces. I will never be able to un-see their faces. I will never be able to un-see Woody’s face – so confused and scared in Steffi’s arms, wondering why I didn’t come for him. Why didn’t I come for him? I’m so selfish, and shit, and not cut out for this. Being a mother. A parent. Having a baby. It’s broken me and keeps further breaking the shattered parts within me and I don’t know what to do. I have to somehow keep going because I have a baby, and the only thing you can do is keep going, but I feel like I’m dead, and I don’t know how. I’m sobbing so hard I can’t stand. I try placing Woody down, but he crawls right to the edge of the stairs in an instant, so I scoop him up again, and carry him back down into the remnants of the party. There’s wrapping paper everywhere, streamers, balloons, a wall full of flowers smashed to the floor. His face brightens at all the things to poke and shove into his mouth, and I figure he’ll be OK here, for a second, while I fall head-first into the abyss. I plop him down and sink face-first into the sofa, sobbing in a way that shakes my entire body, as I contemplate the rest of my life and how fucked it is. There’s no going back to before. To when I was happy, and free, and capable. When I could get a train and pick up a coffee and a croissant and a magazine at the station and look out as the landscape sped past the window, taking small, slow, sips. When I could work late, deliriously high on a deadline for a project I loved so much I felt it in my soul, messaging Tristan to say I’d sleep in the spare room, as the office cleaners sprayed desks around me, feeling so present, and wired, and complete. When Tristan and I would sleep late on the weekends, one of us dashing out to get the good coffee and the croissants from the bougie deli, bringing them back to our sheets, sprinkling them with pastry dandruff, flicking through a newspaper supplement, before having slow, steady sex as the sun grew higher in the sky behind our thin curtains, our eyes locked on one another. When I would see at least one friend, at least once a week, gossiping over the syrup of cocktails, throwing my head back laughing, psychoanalysing every shred of their dating partner’s childhood, getting into super niche discussions about super niche parts of a subculture we were both into, while swirling delicious pasta around a silver fork, in total awe at how smart and brilliant my friend was, and how precious they were to me. When I could pull up a pair of jeans and do the button up. When I could set an alarm at nighttime on my phone and it would tell me, confidently, how much sleep I would get before I woke up. When I could read books. Go on walks. Go away for weekends, to see friends or new cities or cute cottages with a good pub next door. This life I had. This wonderful life that’s a rotten carcass now because I’ve had Woody. I miss that life. I miss who I was. I hate this person – fat and sobbing on the sofa after giving her son his first traumatic core memory. I’ve been drowning every day since he was born, dead by the end of each of them though I lose track of the days – bloated with stress and worry and unpredictability, and yet, love too. Pulsing, powerful, want-to-eat-him love. The love is too much, very often. It hurts to love this much. To worry this much. To need to put him first this much. I almost don’t want the love because it can only bring pain and worry and guilt. The guilt. I let my baby cry, alone in the dark, because I’m too weak and I never should’ve been allowed to have a baby and . . . and . . . I almost can’t breathe I’m crying too hard. I bury my face further into the sofa and give into it entirely.
I don’t notice anything other than my own misery until I hear a horrific shriek.