(Maternity) Leave

There is a stretch of the most precious time in the mornings after your husband has gone to work when the baby wakes up and you feed her and she falls asleep on your chest, her small arms holding your torso, their full length barely reaching the edges of your back. You can't move, of course, so you listen to an audiobook and lie there in the mostly-dark room and you are two places at once: this most precious place with your daughter sleeping on your chest (which she does not do throughout the day, high on milk scent too close to your boobs, demanding to be held but a safe enough distance away from the food of you) and the other place of deep deep sadness that in 35 days you have to return to work and these small morning hours will go away. Bad mother. She will sleep this last stretch of night sleep instead in a pack n play or not at all, having to be woken up more fully and moved around, crying while you get dressed and cannot hold her. She is so small. Impossibly small. Bad mother. This most precious time is a gift and you are squandering it thinking already of when it will be over. Your neck hurts because you spend so much time staring at her. You don't eat enough in the day and you've been crying more at night again and my God there are already so many things you are doing imperfectly (which is to say, wrong). Bad mother. She already grew out of her newborn clothes and you cried when you packed them into a little plastic bin for storage. The beginning especially was so hard and exhausting, and there was so much pain (the literal, physical kind) it was almost unbearable but now you worry you missed it and you're missing it and you aren't ready to leave her. It is perhaps technically far away but it feels far too close and you aren't ready for these small hours between night and day to disappear, packed in a small plastic bin. You aren’t ready.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Sinkhole

A sinkhole appeared in the street over the summer. It hadn’t rained in months, and wildfires were burning across the state. Containment percentages, mass layoffs, budget shortfalls, 9-1-1 hold times: The sinkhole felt like another in a long list of calamities we’d learned to accept. My dog sniffed at the edges. The darkness went on forever, mute and terrible, sunlight unwilling or unable to find the bottom.

Walking her again in the evenings, I called out to neighbors, “Watch out for the sinkhole,” or sometimes, “Somebody ought to do something about that sinkhole.” I could swear it was growing. Eventually, the City came and set up two worn, wooden barricades and a pair of bright, orange cones ringed in reflective tape. 

I stopped seeing the sinkhole for a while after that, at least until the plastic tyrannosaurus appeared. Frozen in mid-roar, back leg emerging from the hole as if it was scrambling up to the surface, it carried all the fearsomeness of that immeasurable darkness with it. “Did you see the dinosaur?” we asked each other now. I told my neighbors not to get too close. They laughed like I was joking.

One afternoon, the dog and I passed the spot where the sinkhole had been and saw that the City had cut a large rectangle out of the street. The bottom was just two-and-a-half inches deep and covered in gravel and sand. Some of the neighbors expressed disappointment, as if the sinkhole had deceived them into believing it was more than it was. I knew better, though.

The sinkhole was still there, waiting to swallow up anyone who dared to step on it. The dinosaur was probably hiding nearby behind some compost bins, surviving on squirrels and blackberries. I had not forgotten. Not while there was still sunlight in the evenings. Not while the red sun chased the night sky away every morning.

At the end of the summer, the City paved over the hole. The rains came a few days later, steady and soft, clearing the haze from the skies. But underneath that benighted patch of gravel, sand, and tar, I hear the quiet contracting and swelling of the street, of all the other dinosaurs working at the seams. My neighbors have forgotten they are there, but I still whisper to the sinkhole as I pass, careful not to let the dog get too close.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Number 3. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.