by Rachel Yoder
And of course there was the sanitizing, the stiff paper towels, the policy of do not leave behind any parts to dry, pls respect other users, the spray can of industrial sanitizer to clean up the human bodily fluids that might be left behind.
Who ever thought a mother would need to sanitize a counter of the milk meant for her baby? The milk should be sopped up using a ceremonial rag that’s then set at the foot of a towering, infinitely beautiful sculpture carved to honor the Eternal Mother, Giver of Life and Maker of All Things. This, or else a small white kitten—preferably the runt of the litter—should be kept in the room, along with a very soft pillow, some good cat food, and cold, fresh water, and this kitten should be offered the wayward drops of milk, the occasional tiny spill.
She left behind a bag of tubing and plasticity one day, because who would steal it? No one stole it, but a part went missing, the part that suctions to the breast. Who would take just that part? Another mother? She might have cried at the loss. She can’t remember now. She never left the bag behind again because of this cosmic punishment. That’s what she thought it was. That’s what it felt like.
(Where does one acquire a new suction thingy? What is it even called, that part of the machinery? She would need to search for it online, commit time to research. She did not have any time for research. She did not have time to procure a name for the thingy, then to procure a new thingy.)
The room was not ventilated, so the door needed to be propped open when not in use, but the triangle stop had been flattened and gnarled. The door was heavy. Who had time to prop? But what of the other mothers? Use the chair instead to prop. Kick the doorstop in harder. Find a way. Consider the other mothers. Be grateful that you have this room. Some working mothers have no such thing. Be grateful.
Always in a hurry. Hurry, breasts. Hurry up and relax, then let the milk come. It’s her fault if the milk doesn’t come. Too much coffee. Not enough food. You need to figure out a way to minimize stress. Eat an energy bar. Eat these nuts. Eat an entire bar of chocolate while at the same time holding the device against your breasts. Take these special herbal pills. Eat lots of oatmeal. Figure out how to balance it all. Drink an entire liter of water in the hope of let-down. Meditate. Breathe deeply. You have eight more meetings today.
There was never enough milk for the baby. He was getting so big. All he wanted was milk, and there was not enough time or milk or hands. The day care closed at six, so no late meetings, must account for traffic, the walk to the parking garage, weather. Do not forget the milk. DO NOT FORGET THE MILK.
She forgot the milk one evening. She left it on top of the machine where she inserted her parking ticket to pay the toll. Crying, she drove the sleeping baby from day care back to the parking garage, called Security.
Yes, someone turned in your milk, the man said.
She sobbed. And the security guard brought her the lost, and found, milk. He delivered it to her car window, because she could not even get out of the car. There was a baby sleeping in the back. She cried as she drove home.
Imagine this person, finding a small box containing two bottles of still-warm milk, taking that small box back into the small, sad mall attached to the parking garage, wandering to find the security office, saying to the guard, I’ve found some milk. This must be precious to the owner. I hope it finds its way back to her. And the guard placing the small box in the mini-fridge in his office, shaking his head at the miracle of the find, the kindness of it, or at the mother’s loss, or at her lack of care—how could a person be so thoughtless?—or at all of it, all at once.
The mother would like to thank the finder of the milk. She would like to tell the person, You are one of the kindest people I have ever known, even though I never knew you.
As she walked to a lunch meeting—because who needs time to eat when you could also be working?—she began to have suspicions. And later, as she responded to e-mails on her phone with her right hand while pressing both breast pumps to her breasts with her left, the mother’s thinking began to coalesce into expansive conspiracy theories, but the kind of conspiracy theories that actually wind up being true.
Her parents would have said she was touched, would have called her touched and perhaps cursed and would have something to add about the devil, had they any idea of her thoughts, which they didn’t, because they never called and she never called, so they knew nearly nothing about each other these days. The mother was certain they, too, were responsible for the many injustices currently besetting her, as well as her paranoia about turning into a dog, responsible in some foundational way, but couldn’t specify exactly how, and, rather, indulged in a general rage directed at the past and to the east, where they lived, hundreds of miles away.
Truly, though, her parents were the least of her worries, since the whole fucking thing was a sham, the working and pumping and hurrying and not holding her baby. She inflated with mother-rage and composed elaborate, emotional arguments against the system and capitalism and the patriarchy and then religion and gender roles and biology.
She wanted to share these theories one day at the coffee shop, to which another kind working mother had invited her, a working mother who was also an artist, who had been in the same graduate program, who now taught at the university they had both attended and made art and had seamlessly transitioned into motherhood without so much as a mean-spirited hiccup. The mother had grimly watched at a distance—on social media, where else—as the working mother posted milestones, First day of day care! and Helping Mommy with her installation, the baby strapped to the working mother’s chest as she did something with a pile of chicken wire in a gallery.
Why can’t I do that? she always asked herself. How can it be that easy?
So how do you like being a working mother? the other working mother asked, and the mother—the tired, unhappy working mother, working her dream job and not holding her baby—that mother stared stupidly and wanted to present her theories about how this was all a trick, a trick to get them to do everything, a trick they could not escape. Yet her brain no longer worked as it once had. The friendly working mom waited. Was she supposed to say something? What was a “conversation”?
No, the mother finally said. I think working mother is perhaps the most nonsensical concept ever concocted. I mean, who isn’t a working mother? And then add a paid job to it, so what are you then? A working working mother? Imagine saying working father.
Ha! she spat bitterly, without having even known how bitter she truly was.
The kind working mother nodded with pity on her face. The other mom—the mom who did not sleep and had a baby and worked her dream job, the mom who was perhaps struggling, who needed some support, who was doing her best…but yeesh—was not making this look like it should look. Appearances. We can have it all. Why was she so ungrateful?
That night, the mother cried as she held her sleeping baby after work, because she saw him awake for only an hour, maybe two, each day. He refused to nap at day care and came home exhausted, wanting only her milk and to be held and to sleep in his mother’s arms. She cried holding him, and then he cried when she put him down. He wanted only to be held, all the time, and really she couldn’t blame him, so she strapped him to her chest and e-mailed into the night until she and the baby both fell into bed.
And so, when it had come time to make a baby and then make a decision, it was her husband who made more money and she who made less, which ensured it was she who was made to stay home. It was just that simple.
At the time, when decisions had to be made, she had truly wanted to stay home—she was, in a word, exhausted—though she had never wanted such a thing before. And, honestly, what a privilege. What a treat. She understood that she was just a privileged, overeducated lady in the middle of America living the dream of holding her baby twenty-four hours a day. According to basically everyone’s standards, she had nothing to complain about, ever, after that point a
nd possibly even leading up to it. In fact, wasn’t it a bit, you know, hoity-toity, a bit oblivious middle-class white lady of her, even to think about complaining? If she read the articles, examined the data, contemplated her lot in life, her place in society, her historical role in the oppression of everyone other than white men, she really had not even a sparse spot of yard on which to stand and emit one single strangled scream.
But, as babies do, hers grew. It widened and lengthened. It grew more charming and less. It walked, but it didn’t talk until well after medically-agreed-upon speech milestones had been surpassed, because it had a near-psychic bond with the mother, who could intuit its needs via the position of its eyes or tilt of its hands. In an essential way, at that point in the boy’s life, she was the only person in the entire world who could understand him, understand this unspoken language only the two of them shared. He cried when she tried to leave him with a family friend, and then cried when she successfully left him with a babysitter, and then cried even when she left him with her husband because she had to go get groceries and really just wanted to enjoy it, get a coffee and put it in the little holder that attached to the side of the cart, and really examine the produce, you know, look at it and touch it and take her time. She just wanted one shopping trip to herself, and yet they all wound up going together—packing up the diaper bag with snacks and wipes and a bottle of water and a change of clothes and a selection of toys and should we bring a book?—because the boy had been sad to see her go even though his very own father, who was never there, would have finally been there with him, just the two of them, at home, but no, the child would not have it.
Yes, indeed, she was a good mother, one of the very best.
A testament to her goodness: that preternatural ability to wake and wake and wake again, night after night, ever since the day the boy was born. Her husband—bless his heart—had never done well with sleep deprivation, yet she, surprisingly, had taken to it as if she hadn’t been a lifelong oversleeper, as if waking at all hours of the night and getting up at 5:30 a.m. was something she was somehow genetically programmed for. While, yes, she had indeed been exhausted by this life, the peculiar thing was that she had not been tired. Overworked, pushed to her limit, bedraggled and bitter and on the verge, indeed, but each morning she rose and stayed upright for the entire day, overcome as she was by a near-miraculous ability to simply not need sleep in the way she once had.
I’m not tired! she had said during her darkest days of working, and continued to intone, clear-eyed and astonished after a year at home, mostly by herself, with her young ward.
I’m fine! she declared somewhat hesitantly to no one in particular. And she had been fine. She nursed him and walked through the neighborhood with a cooing bundle strapped to her chest. She rocked him and napped with him and cooked and cleaned. She slept, but mostly she did not sleep, and it was fine, but then the boy turned two, and with that, something in her turned as well.
She didn’t want to be Nightbitch, wouldn’t have chosen it if she felt she did indeed have such a choice. And her husband: she didn’t want always to be angry at him, for she did, she really did, love him. It was just so hard to conjure these days.
Of course, there had been reasons she fell in love with her husband, despite his overly rational tendencies. She was—or at least had been at one point—an artist, and so it seems her husband must have in some way distinguished himself from other engineers, regular engineers, and indeed he had. When she first met him, back in grad school, he had been working for a local DNA company and living in a basement apartment with another thin, pale, twenty-something man who rarely talked, preferring the company of his computer to human interaction. The mother had been intrigued by her husband’s job—You make DNA? she had asked him. What are you? Some sort of evil wizard?—and he in turn was delighted by her questions, answering them with a good deal of technical lingo and lab-speak, at which she squinted and nodded, then asked more questions. Yes, he had come to her art shows and had reveled in her work, as much as a DNA technician could revel. And, yes, he had been a good sport. He had enjoyed himself. But what finally made her fall in love with him was a thing he referred to as his Folder.
Would you like to see my Folder? he asked one evening as his roommate silently murdered ninjas on his computer while wearing headphones, because he was, after all, polite. Her future husband’s computer was on the opposite side of the living room, and he bade her sit on his lap, and proceeded to open a little yellow folder on his computer that said it contained more than eighty thousand items.
This is where I keep all the good things I find on the Internet, he said, and proceeded to flip through the items, one by one, without explanation. A short clip of a naked woman farting into a heavily iced chocolate cake. A cute white puppy photoshopped with human eyes and teeth. A naked man in a mask peeing on a pile of stuffed animals. A fat cat walking on a treadmill. An old man with a cactus up his butt. A man covered in slices of bread on a beach with a horde of seagulls around him. A sloth sitting at a classroom desk with a notebook opened in front of it. Sex dolls, Furries. Weird little people and weird little situations, inexplicable, funny, perplexing, disturbing. And her favorite: two naked Japanese ladies squatting and peeing on a small octopus, which, understandably, squirmed away from them on the floor.
Wow, she said.
Poor octopus, he said.
Why are they doing that? she asked.
I guess they’re into it, he said. I really have no idea.
Although another person might have been offended or alarmed by such an array of the human experience, the mother was not. To the contrary, she absolutely swooned when her husband, then just a strange man she had happened upon and was getting to know, would say stuff like Just look at these strange humans—without a hint of judgment or disdain, with nothing but pure fascination, pure wonder. It was this wonder the mother loved then and continued to love passionately: how wonderful to find a person who delighted in all the aberrations and quirks of human behavior. It was, perhaps, the best quality a person could have, she saw in that moment, there on his lap, and she decided she would marry him.
So, yes, he was an engineer, but he also had a Folder, and a collection of messed-up stuffed animals on his dresser (some with their heads on upside down), and a carnivorous frog named Hopkin in an aquarium by his bed. Since she had fallen in love with him, the frog had died and his job had changed, but the Folder abided, though they hadn’t looked at it in years now, for she could no longer stomach it, ever since she’d had the baby. Humanity and all it entailed was too much, far too much, given the great new weight of humanity that had entered into their home with the birth of their son.
* * *
—
SHE WAS NO LONGER well rested, well fed, well. She was tired and cranky and worried about her body, whether it was changing and what the changes meant. And she dreaded the nights, those long dark nights, promising herself she would not yell when the boy woke, then yelling, then apologizing, pulling him to her, saying Shhh and I’m sorry and It’s all right.
She was so, so tired, was the thing.
You really should stop worrying about your hair growth or whatever and get on top of your week, her husband suggested just before he left again, at the end of the forty-eight-hour stretch of time he had been home that weekend. Structure, you know? Make a plan. Draw up a schedule. Treat it like it’s your job. Happiness is a choice, he said.
She wanted to say something, or maybe slap him right across his talking face, but instead she tried to take his suggestion to heart. He only wanted what was best for her. Perhaps he was right.
And so, although it was Monday yet again and, yes, her husband was gone again, she was choosing happiness this week. She was determined to really get ahead of her obsessing, to stop with the negative thoughts, the daydreaming about turning into a dog (even though the coarse patch of hair had lengthened and sp
read), the worst-case scenarios and hypochondria and Internet searches. She had made a weekly schedule. She had meal-planned.
Since happiness was a choice, today she chose motherhood. Today she chose art. Today she would beautifully merge the two and in doing so find happiness. She loved her positive outlook! She would be present to the child all morning, she wouldn’t look at her phone, she would be filled with inspiration by his play, and then, at naptime, she would pull out all her old art stuff and get inspired, start working on something new. That she didn’t have a project in mind, that she hadn’t been inspired for years, that she feared opening the closet where she had stashed former projects, old supplies—all that was silly. She just needed to have some confidence. Believe in herself. Make the time.
She had once, in grad school, conceptualized an entire outdoor nighttime installation that involved transforming a local playground into a sort of wonderful nightmare, the geodesic climbing dome covered with an enormous many-layered skirt and, atop the dome, her friend dressed as a human-sized white rabbit, wearing the dome skirt. The swings became the flicking furry tails of invisible animals. The metal bars on which they were suspended she covered with iridescent fabrics so as to invoke something reptilian. The main play structure she made into a many-headed and -legged and -armed beast out of whose mouth show goers fanciful enough to take a ride down the slide emerged, coated in glitter and spangles that had been deposited on them as they descended. She got the feeling her professors and classmates did not find this work serious enough, though. She had, after all, included glitter in the final project, and so, when she applied to programs for her graduate art degree, she really laid into her unique upbringing in her personal statement, emphasizing her family’s homesteader aesthetic, the folk traditions with which she was familiar, her desire to transform and elevate traditional farm skills and domestic know-how to art. Once admitted, with a scholarship based on her stoic come-to-Jesus Appalachian farm upbringing—which she had actually been running away from since childhood, only to capitalize on it when she decided it would serve her, but whatever—she undertook the collection of the plentiful roadkill found in the area surrounding her Midwestern university.