Chapter 5
“Do you think there’s a chance you could drop Isla off instead of me?
” Sloane asked her husband, Max, after the fourth day of her new life.
By that point, she understood that the air-conditioning in her office was broken, and that while multiple work orders had already been issued over its repair, it was unlikely to be fixed.
Her officemate was an art history adjunct, a squirrelly, awkward man in his forties who was so plainly inadequate as a lecturer because he loved his work too much—so much so that his enthusiasm was unbearable.
It was a common curse. As with dating, you couldn’t lust too hard after your subject matter. Love it, yes. But coolly, with reserve.
“Hm?” said Max. “Hang on, just let me finish this email.” He paused to think, then typed a response into his phone. “Okay, sorry, you have my attention.” He reached out and gripped Sloane’s shoulders playfully with both hands. “What was it?”
“I just…” How to put it into words. Sloane technically understood the nature of linear time, that a ten o’clock lecture took precedence over an eleven o’clock, but did it matter?
Wasn’t there some form of consideration within any relationship that meant easing life’s burdens from the suffering partner’s shoulders for a more evenly distributed collective load?
“It’s just so hard for me to watch her cry like that,” Sloane attempted, and wilted from a general sense of shame.
Her pediatrician had given her a similar look when she’d confessed to struggling with sleep training; it was the look of a mother who had simply gotten over it, as all Good Mothers do, or perhaps true Good Mothers never even considered sleep training.
It remained unclear to Sloane despite much scrolling in pursuit of an answer.
“I know she’s fine,” Sloane argued with herself aloud.
“I know that, I know she’s safe, but still, it’s just—I just—” She broke off, and beneath the sound of Frankie the dog licking the floor with an ardor once reserved in Sloane’s brain for pornographic cunnilingus, resorted flaccidly to, “I don’t like it. ”
Max gave her a look of sympathy, drawn deep from within their communal well. It was a gentleness Sloane was grateful for in the moment, because only Max could even come close to loving Isla the way she did. “But it’s been getting better, hasn’t it?”
The first day, Isla had visibly spent the entire morning crying.
By the time Sloane had arrived to pick her up, her face was swollen with tears, and her voice—her tiny voice with which she produced little more than gibberish—was hoarse, like she’d spent the day chain-smoking.
“She doesn’t like to be comforted,” said a slightly frazzled Miss Lily.
“Obviously we try to hug and kiss her, but she prefers to soothe herself. It’s a good thing!
” she added, catching the dawn of apocalypse on Sloane’s face.
A good thing, sure, but also tragic. After the first day, Isla had been mostly fine at pickup, but every morning, as it again came time for Sloane to leave, Isla clawed into Sloane’s sweater with an animal desperation, her desire for Sloane eventually coalescing with pain and grief into a pterodactyl scream.
The sound, if you could call it that, carried the weighty implication that Isla knew, she now bodily understood and could never unknow, abandonment.
She would forever understand that Sloane’s love had limits; that Sloane had chosen work over her; that love itself was fleeting and could fail.
It didn’t help that the eighteen-month pediatric appointment had been an unmitigated disaster and the follow-up blood tests were looming, sinisterly.
Despite purposefully selecting a female pediatrician after their first pediatrician, a man, had told Sloane within forty-eight hours of giving birth that firstborn monkeys often died of starvation due to their mothers’ milk not coming in quickly enough (Sloane’s underachieving tits had taken several days to set up production despite what she considered ample warning from the rest of the mother machine), Sloane still could not escape the dread of it—the numbers on the scale, the impossible tick box of achievements.
It was almost worse, actually, that Isla’s doctor was a woman, because at least if a man failed to credit Sloane’s motherhood, she could remember that he was only a man.
But now, Isla’s development was actually a metric of Sloane’s success or failure.
Did Isla sleep a normal amount? Did she eat all her servings of leafy green vegetables?
Was she suitably enriched with iron? No?
Well, then Sloane should read to her more, she should engage her child with sign language and an endless stream of narration, she should try smoothies, these first three years were so important.
To a Good Mother, nothing would matter more.
But in the face of Sloane’s daily drop-off-related chest pains—Max sighed. He seemed to understand that there was no need to revisit logic. The problem was simply intestinal, some internal rupture, which did not require him to overturn his own carefully curated schedule.
Instead, he pulled Sloane into his arms and kissed her temple. “Isla’s going to adjust, I promise, and it will be good for her. Social skills! Communication skills! She’s already so much more playful at home. She’s getting so much easier every day.”
Easier? Watching Isla grow was remarkable, that went unquestioned, but it was also unsettling and occasionally depressing.
She was more active, sure, climbing on every item of furniture and trying to engage with all the heavy textbooks on the bottom shelves, and as her vocabulary broadened she became increasingly capable of a personality that, already, Sloane treasured above every other human she’d ever met—but in achieving personhood, Isla was also more declarative, more mercurial, more expressive of a range of complex malcontents that exceeded simple matters of hunger or tiredness, and with that spark of consciousness came the probability of Isla noticing Sloane as something other than the beloved creator-god from whence she’d come.
Sloane saw it in her daughter’s eyes each time she left her behind; the more distance Sloane claimed, the more likely it would eventually become the way of things, irretrievable and lost.
Sloane supposed, in fairness, Isla was becoming easier for Max, who had never been able to calm her without the use of one or both of Sloane’s boobs.
But still, Sloane felt an acute loss of her baby; a loss she knew she wasn’t supposed to resent because she hadn’t had a child just to trap them in eternal infancy.
She wanted Isla to become independent and strong-minded and curious, she just … wasn’t ready for it to happen just yet.
She considered all this on Friday as she sat outside the daycare, crying silently into Isla’s T-shirt.
She scrolled VidStar from a fugue state of despair, not even stopping to properly digest her consumption until she found a new post from an account she particularly liked (by which she meant despised, but couldn’t look away from) called @TheCountryWife.
Objectively, Sloane understood that the nonsense about “traditional” gender roles conveniently forgot things like women being historically barred from having their own bank accounts; she knew that so much of what went viral on the platform was rooted in the corruption of evangelistic bigotry, white supremacy, and systemic power imbalances—a long, storied tradition of institutional misuse.
But still, it was so fucking soothing, watching someone wear linen dresses and putter around the garden, running the homestead and nursing baby pigs and curating holiday-themed mantels and declaring by virtue of God-given youth and beauty that women’s work was something inherently profound.
Sure, it was a lie, and the content was sponsored, but for the sweet love of fuck, The Country Wife’s Sunday roasts looked genuinely life-changing.
Her homemade bacon was seemingly to die for, and although in some very distant (albeit extremely real) way Sloane lacked the stomach for any kind of animal husbandry, in certain moments it seemed feasible that she herself could even …
do it? Perhaps she, too, could abscond to a beautiful house in the country at a fraction of her current mortgage; she, too, could give up her highfalutin dreams, satisfy herself with the coziness of her home and the development of her child—who, of course, would only need her less and less as time went by, such that Sloane’s mind would inevitably atrophy like her postpartum glutes, her capacity for intellect and ambition so shriveled from disuse she might not even stop to wonder when exactly she’d lost herself or who that person in the mirror even was.
Well, as always, the infinite scroll was doing wonders for her state of mind.
Isla was wriggling disinterestedly in her arms, mewling for rocks on the ground or the freedom to charge headlong into traffic.
Sloane’s lecture wasn’t until two that afternoon; still, she and Max and Miss Lily had agreed that consistency would be best with regard to easing Isla into her new schedule.
Sloane had plenty of work to do in the meantime, but nothing pressing, which meant she wouldn’t be properly distracted.
Which was probably why she had the time to access the deep well of pain that seemed to have taken on an alarming level of sentience each time she paid it a visit, greeting it with little treats like intrusive thoughts and capitulation to the void.
“Are you okay?” came a voice.