Chapter 6 Angeni Luna #2
Just as she finished an email to the literary agent, suggesting they set up a phone call to talk, Sitka came to retrieve Freya for their daily nature walk.
“Mind if I join you two today?” Angeni asked.
Sitka shrugged as she reached for the baby. “Sure.”
The Land was eleven acres of forest, deep and dense enough to get lost in.
Angeni loved this about it—the way it offered endless exploration, new discoveries.
There were streams running through it, thin trickles of water in dryer months, gushing rivers after intense rainstorms. There were a few well-trodden paths weaving through the trees, foot-wide trails to keep them on course.
She couldn’t wait for Freya to walk these trails, to touch the blades of grass, to pick the flowers in spring, to search the branches overhead for nests.
She couldn’t wait to teach her daughter about all her favorite herbs and plants—motherwort, calendula, chamomile, lemon balm, feverfew.
It was the ultimate gift to her daughter, this land.
On it, Angeni could offer Freya an entire life.
“It’s so beautiful today,” Angeni said, face to the sky, skin absorbing the sun.
“It is,” Sitka said.
Freya was in the wrap on Angeni’s chest, and she started to whine. She wasn’t due for another feed, but Angeni figured she needed comfort.
“Stop for a few?” Angeni said.
They sat on a log, a fallen pine tree that Erik and the guys would need to clear at some point.
Tending to The Land was a full-time job, and without Erik, Matt, and Jer, Angeni could not have this life, this beauty.
She reminded herself of this whenever she felt stress or resentment creep in over her role as the primary earner.
Angeni removed Freya from the wrap and lifted her shirt so the baby could rest directly on her skin. Freya calmed immediately. Sitka leaned back, tilted her face to the sky, also absorbing the sun.
“Are you happy here?” Angeni asked her.
Angeni had started to become self-conscious that Sitka wasn’t happy. She’d become so quiet, so inward. She always seemed to be thinking about something, in another realm just out of reach.
“Me?” Sitka asked, looking over her shoulder, as if there were someone else with them.
Angeni laughed. “Yes, you!”
“Oh, sorry,” Sitka said. “Am I happy?”
Angeni nodded.
“Yeah. I mean, I’m kind of taking it all in, you know?”
“I guess I just hope you don’t feel like you’re just my helper or something. I care about you. I value your presence,” Angeni said.
“Oh, well, I appreciate that,” Sitka said.
“You’re so good with Freya. Do you want to be a mother someday?”
Sitka’s eyes went wide at the question. “Oh, I don’t know.”
“Really? You’re a natural.”
“Did you always know you wanted to be a mother?”
“Not always, no,” Angeni said. “I had to go through several stages of healing before I felt the pull.”
There was more of a story to tell here, but Angeni wasn’t ready to tell it to Sitka. It was a story of her own childhood. It was a story of an ache, a longing, to know what the mother-child bond was supposed to be.
“Your posts make it sound like you always knew, like it was your destiny,” Sitka said.
“It was my destiny,” Angeni said. “It just took me a while to realize it.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes while Freya’s tiny hands pressed on Angeni’s breasts.
“Can I ask you something?” Sitka said.
“Anything,” Angeni said.
“Do you ever worry about how your messages affect people?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have these followers who think you’re, like, a god. They live their lives according to what you say. Doesn’t that worry you?”
Angeni wasn’t sure what she was getting at. She loved that she was influencing people to enrich their relationships. She loved how mothers turned to her for ways to better connect with their babies.
“Why would it worry me?”
“I don’t know. Not everyone can . . . or should . . . do things the way you do, right?”
Angeni shrugged. “I don’t know. I believe pretty strongly in what I do. I think I have every right to share what I’ve come to see as true.”
“You do have every right,” Sitka said. “I guess I just wonder if you feel a certain responsibility to people?”
“Responsibility? I see it as my responsibility to share what I know, to share my truth. It is the responsibility of others to receive it as needed.”
Sitka nodded. She said, “I see,” but she seemed distressed somehow. A silence followed, and it was tense, awkward. Angeni felt the need to shift the energy, so she stood. Freya was still against her bare chest, not feeding, just playing with her breasts.
“I have an idea,” Angeni said. “The light is so beautiful right now. Maybe you can take some photos of Freya and me?”
Sitka had assumed the photographer duties on a couple of occasions before. She shrugged and said, “Sure.”
“Are you okay if I’m naked?” Angeni asked her.
“Sure,” Sitka said again. She had seen Angeni in various states of undress on a daily basis, after all.
Angeni handed Freya to Sitka and took off her socks and shoes.
She stepped out of her leggings and pulled her shirt down over her hips, letting it fall to the ground.
Though it was sunny, there was still a chill in the air, and goose bumps dotted her skin as she stood in her underwear before casting that aside too.
She watched Sitka’s eyes scan her body, the pooch of her belly where Freya had resided all those months, the full bush of hair beneath that.
Angeni extended her arms to receive Freya, unsnapped the baby’s onesie and cloth diaper, and set them on the ground next to her own clothes. She held her naked baby over her head.
“Do you have your phone, or do you want to use mine?” Angeni asked.
Sitka took out her phone and started taking photos.
That night, Angeni, Erik, and Freya nestled together in the family bed—Angeni in the middle, the baby on her right side, Erik on her left.
She’d decided that having the baby between them was too risky.
Erik could roll on top of her. He was a typical man when it came to sleep—it took him approximately thirty seconds to fall into a deep slumber, and nothing short of a significant earthquake would wake him.
Angeni considered mothers to be like the orca whales that swam the waters around their island.
They could selectively shut off one hemisphere of their brains to sleep, while the other hemisphere was awake and propelling their bodies through the ocean.
The people who condemned co-sleeping were idiots.
Mothers and babies had been sleeping together, body to body, since the beginning of time.
It wasn’t dangerous—it was natural, beautiful.
She would never roll on top of Freya, never suffocate her.
It just wasn’t possible. Part of her maternal brain was always on watch.
Freya finished feeding from Angeni’s right breast, so Angeni rolled on her side to offer the left breast. As she did, Erik rolled, too, spooning her body with his own.
He kissed her neck, her earlobe. She used to love when he kissed her earlobes.
It always awakened desire, sent a pulse of energy down her body.
Now, though, it felt strange and unwelcome, as if he were kissing some completely unerogenous area—her nostrils, her eyelids.
She shrugged a shoulder up toward her ear so it came in contact with his face, nudging him away.
“I miss you,” he whispered.
“I know,” she said.
Instead of leaning back into him, just a bit, she leaned forward into their daughter, stroking Freya’s head as she suckled. As long as Freya was feeding, Angeni had reason to keep her husband at bay.
He wasn’t taking the hint, though. He moved closer to her again, and this time, she could feel his erection at her back.
It was embarrassing how men’s needs were so obvious, so out there.
It was infuriating that they felt no shame while women suppressed their every urge and desire in a never-ending quest to be seen as decent and good.
He kissed her neck, and she couldn’t help but laugh. It tickled.
“You’re laughing at me. That’s not a good sign,” he said. He sounded sad, but she could feel his lips part in a smile against her neck.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Do you miss me?” he asked.
It had been a while since they’d been intimate.
How long exactly, she didn’t know. A month?
Two? Whenever the last time was, it had been in the wee hours of the morning and obligatory.
She was trying to be the woman she showed to the world—a woman who respected her husband’s masculinity, who encouraged him to be his full self.
But the truth was that his full self was a burden.
She didn’t have any parts of herself left to give.
It wasn’t fair to him, but it wasn’t fair to her either.
“I’ve just been so busy with Freya and—”
He shushed her lovingly and kissed her neck again.
“You’re such a wonderful mother,” he said.
This was his version of foreplay now. Or a version he was trying out for her benefit.
“Sitka took some beautiful photos of us today—Freya and me,” Angeni said.
He kept kissing her neck. “Oh yeah?”
“We were both naked.”
“You and Sitka?”
She laughed, reached over her shoulder to playfully hit him in the head.
“Me and Freya.”
“Oh, I was gonna say.”
“I’ll post them tomorrow, the photos.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Did you want them to be of me and Sitka?” she asked, laughing to signal that she was joking, though she did wonder. Sitka was objectively gorgeous.
“I’d much prefer you and Freya, babe,” he said. “I can’t wait to see them.”
Freya pulled off Angeni’s nipple and tipped onto her back, eyes closed, sleeping. There was no real reason Angeni could not tend to her husband now.
“I know it’s been hard to connect lately,” she said, still curled on her side, his erection still against her back.
“We knew it would be this way. You are in an entirely new role. It’s an adjustment,” he said.
He was so kind. He knew all the right things to say. They had talked about this so much before having Freya—this phase when they would feel distant from each other, when their relationship would be challenged in ways it never had been before.
“Maybe we can start with a date night,” he said. “Baby steps.”
Had he not seen her “Ask me anything” story the other day? She was explicitly opposed to this “date night” concept, this rush for couples to get back to their time together and put their own needs first when their babies were still so little.
“I don’t feel right being away from her,” she said, though perhaps the true, full sentence was I don’t feel right being away from her to be with you.
“But she’s away from you at night sometimes,” he said. “With Sitka.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
There was no good answer. It wasn’t different, not really. It was just that she was sleeping in those times of separation. She could wake up the next morning with the baby placed back beside her and pretend like it had never happened.
“I just feel like when I’m awake, I should be engaged with her.”
“You are engaged with her.”
She could hear what he wasn’t saying: I need you to be engaged with me too.
“Sitka takes her on nature walks, so you have that time away from her too,” he said.
“For, like, fifteen minutes.” Her tone was argumentative, and she couldn’t help it.
“I would take fifteen minutes alone with you,” he said. “I’m easy. It doesn’t take much.”
She imagined the rushed sex, his body hot and sweaty with pent-up need, thrusting faster than she liked in the interest of time. It would be nothing like the long, tantric sex they had enjoyed before Freya, whiling away entire afternoons in each other’s arms, making a game of tallying orgasms.
“I went with them today. On the walk. I go with them sometimes. It’s not always just Sitka and Freya.”
He sighed. “You don’t have to defend yourself, babe.”
She rolled over to face him now, took his face in her hands, pressed her lips against his. She didn’t feel anything. It was like kissing a distant relative.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Because she was. Of course he wanted more. He missed her. She should choose to see it as sweet instead of bothersome.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “I just crave you a lot lately.”
“I know.”
His hands stroked her bare belly, then moved up to her breasts, the very breasts that had just been feeding their child. She envied his ability to compartmentalize, to forget about all her motherhood duties and see her just as a desirable woman.
“I’m so tired,” she told him.
It was so trite, becoming this person. Shameful too.
People turned to her for guidance on creating an ongoing spark with their partner, and here she was, extinguishing the fire she’d tended for so many years, snuffing it out as if it were nothing.
Erik could easily call her out on her hypocrisy, but he wasn’t mean spirited that way.
Maybe he would be, eventually, if she let this go on too long.
“Maybe we can talk about this in our next State of the Union,” she said.
They hadn’t been keeping up with their weekly State of the Unions like they had before having Freya. It was something she had presented to her followers as a nonnegotiable, but, it turned out, it was very much negotiable. Forgotten, in fact.
“Okay,” he said, and kissed her on the nose.
He took his hands off her body, and she felt her body relax, finally. He rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling.
“I feel like I could lose you,” he said, to the ceiling instead of her face.
“Lose me?”
He nodded but didn’t look at her.
“You have Freya and now this book project.”
“Potential book project.”
“It’ll happen. It’s meant to be,” he said. “And . . . I don’t know. How could you possibly have space for me? How could I even expect you to?”
She didn’t know what to say. His concerns were valid.
“It won’t always be like this.”
She spoke with certainty, though she wasn’t at all sure it was true. It felt quite possible that it would always be like this.
“I shouldn’t need your reassurance. I should be more emotionally mature than that,” he said. “But thank you.”
“Needing reassurance isn’t emotionally immature, silly,” she said. “It’s human.”
He took her hand in his and squeezed.
“I love you,” he said.
He kissed the corner of her mouth and then rolled over on his side, away from her. From the rustling of the sheets, she knew he was tending to his own needs. She had given him no other choice.