nonfic by jazmine aluma
35 Things About Raising a Child
Walking becomes her prayer. The soles of her shoes meet the ground the way lips touch when they say Amen. A prayer in the early morning when the new day smears over her skin. A prayer at dusk as she counts down.
A watch would be helpful. But she never buys one.
She is told humans can only easily identify four emotions: happy, sad, angry, scared.
Hollow is not on the list.
She thinks of her pre-parenting self and wishes there had been a funeral so she could have known it was real, believed them when they said everything would change. Had she known, she might have asked for an open casket, looked on at the clothes they had chosen for her. Clothes she’d never wear again.
Her body was once shaped like a capital letter, straight and tall. An announcement. I am here. I say things. I think thoughts. She is now lowercase. Curved for cradling things.
Can a body be uncoiled?
Her hips have shifted. Her hard-as-bone bones have widened to hold all the worries—sacrum expanded so mothering can fill the cracks, hairline fractures filled with a powdery fine anxiety. Once she expands, she can never shrink back to the size she was. Her mother’s line etched in calcium and clay. These more expansive hips move differently through the world.
The root of her sways now. Soothing a baby, her own sorrow, and sacks of groceries. There is comfort in knowing she was made for this.
She’s not sure she was made for this.
Her mother tells her this is a drop in the bucket.
Her bucket is overflowing.
Her therapist tells her it’s okay to give in. Just don’t give up.
She wants to give up.
The baby’s body is so tiny, a dollop in the space between her shoulder and her breast. The weight of him is delicious, like a lover’s arm draped in sleep.
She imagines horrible things happening to the baby. Though the fear is deafening and the thoughts strange, it’s how the baby dies that is so unnerving.
She learns that these thoughts are called “intrusive” because no one invited them. They barge in unannounced.
It will be years before she learns they are a harbinger for postpartum depression and OCD.
She makes lists of the things that scare her. She doesn’t remember how many people she’s kissed. Or fucked. She can only count in ounces and hours and how many times she imagined her child dead.
She was once a yoga instructor and told her students to be gentle with themselves. That some days were strong days and some days were not. That our balance changes with the weather. She talked about trees and how they sway. Now, a mother, she knows how trunks can also snap. She thought she understood strength and balance. She will never teach yoga again.
She wants the morning barista to remember her name. How many people order coffee while wearing a baby? To become a mother is to become invisible.
It’s love that makes her slice grapes into quarters. Love and a very real fear of her child choking to death.
This is why bouncy balls are not allowed in her home.
She wears bright red lipstick and wonders if she’s still the kind of person who wears bright red lipstick.
She imagines book titles for her life, but they always sound like lies.
Social media tells her that the moms in her parenting group have become the best of friends. She clicks on each post to see what they do outside of the weekly class. It takes a whole year for her to look away.
She wears a hole into three different socks within the span of two weeks and knows something has shifted about how she moves through the world.
Taking long walks feels like entirely the right thing to do when one is lost. She walks and walks.
She has her car professionally cleaned and feels in control of her life again. It’s not real, but it feels like fresh school supplies in September, navigating home through her new city streets pretending.
Her child receives a bouncy ball at a birthday party. She sneaks it away when he’s turned his attention and buries it in the trash under egg shells and soggy tissues.
A song comes on that feels like bruised fruit. She remembers the smooth back of a lover she abandoned long ago. His name is lost to her.
She feels like she’s living a first draft, which she never has time to rewrite.
There are names for this kind of life: sloppy copy, vomit draft, rough sketch, unlicked. Her shitty first draft.
She is told helium is a finite resource, and now, she can’t stop wondering where it all comes from, this element that makes things rise. And when it’s gone, how will we know where the party’s at?
If it wasn’t for her child, she’d float away like a birthday balloon into a treeless and overcast sky. Someday, she thinks, he will untie me from his wrist.
Jazmine Aluma is a Chicanx-Jewish writer and poet, and MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Antioch University. Her work has been published in The Boston Globe and Bust.com among others. Jazmine is a teaching artist for Get Lit–Words Ignite, guiding teens in the art of spoken word. She also hosts a podcast called First Words, which explores the space where parenting and writing collide. Pronouns: she/her www.jazminealuma.com