"EMBRACE"
copyright 2006 by BARBARA JACKSHA

Mother Moment

A short story
by Kay Sexton

I was having a mother moment. I'd decided that this is what the ante-natal classes were really for. Not for the few short hours of pain or Pethidine that knit the experience of birth to the common quilt of female stories, but for the years you spend remembering to breathe in, breathe out, while the world reels away from your grasp and leaves you holding the nappies, the coats, the regrets: all the detritus of reality.

I had my hands in the sink, nearly elbow deep in hot soapy water, trying to remove encrusted food from a casserole. Mark had left the half-eaten lasagne in the oven the night before, and then he came home tonight with a takeaway fish supper which he stuck—in its paper—in the oven too. An hour later he remembered the over-heated fish and chips. He didn't remember the lasagne. I found it when I came downstairs at ten, after bathing Hettie and putting her to bed. By then, Mark and his guitar had gone to a wine bar where women with spiky eyelashes and gym-toned stomachs would glow at him as he played fusion flamenco. I was left to scrape and peel and soak and scrub, so that the dish would be fit again for lasagne. To breathe in, breathe out, and remember that although once they were my right, I had hated having spiky eyelashes. A mother moment.

Hettie began to cry. I took off the rubber gloves and went up to her. When she settled and I came back down I couldn't find the gloves, so I plunged my hands in the water anyway. It was cool and grey and skinned with turbid fat. So I emptied the bowl, fishing out lumps of pasta and béchamel fused to clinker. I turned on the tap and squirted washing-up liquid. I brushed back my hair and somehow flicked washing-up liquid from my finger into my eye. It stung. I scrubbed at my eye with the tea towel, inhaling old lasagne and younger fish and chips with shop vinegar, and the egg-and-bacon breakfast food that fourteen-month-old Hettie insisted on eating for supper. For breakfast she had lamb and tomato, pureed by loving machines in Switzerland or South Africa just for delicate palates like hers. I was already trying too hard to see her annoying preferences as lovable eccentricities. I was becoming a thin-lipped mother. Breathe in, breathe out. Any child could prefer supper for breakfast and breakfast for supper. It seemed, though, that only mine did.

My eye streamed salty tears. A year ago I would have found a tissue to mop it. Five years ago I would have been in front of the hall mirror, gasping in dramatic horror at the ruin of my spiky eye makeup. This evening I just swiped approximately with my forearm to soak up the fluid and plunged my hands back in the water. It was scalding. I yanked my parboiled flesh from the bowl and cursed out loud as I slammed my poor fingers under my armpits and rocked myself from side to side. I damned Mark and I damned our daughter and I damned me for having tricked myself into this pointless drudgery. I breathed in and breathed out, and ran cold water into the bowl. When my hands began to slow their throbbing I eased them back into the washing-up water. Now my eye stung and my hands pulsed with pain and my armpits were clammy with water and shock-sweat, and then the back of my head began to itch insistently.

A year ago I would have pulled my hands from the sink, dried them, and scratched my head. Five years ago I would have made the moment into a seduction: running my hands through my hair and gazing sensuously into somebody's eyes (my own, in the mirror, if there was nobody else around). Today I thought, It can bloody well wait until I've finished this, and I pushed my chin out to show myself that I could ignore anything, if necessary. Breathe in, breathe out. An itch is only a neurological indicator: it will go away. I scrubbed at the volcanic pasta.

Then the telephone rang. Breathe in, breathe out. I hoped that Hettie was properly asleep and it wouldn't wake her. But she started a thin wailing, like a starving kitten in a cardboard box on a poisoned landfill site in a war zone. Hettie gets her histrionics from me, but my timing is better. Much, much better. I dabbed at my hands with the tear-stained, food-smeared towel, grabbed the cordless, and plunged up the stairs, barking "hello" at Hettie and making smoochy noises at the phone. Fortunately it was my mother calling, not the fabled impresario who will one day discover Mark and make fish-and-chip suppers followed by Latin American wine bar gigs a thing of the past. She asked if I was sitting down. She was not joking.

In the stillness of the moment, as I plummeted down onto a step, with Hettie whimpering under one arm and the tea towel still clasped under the other, I began the mother's litany, from my heart to the universe, in silent pleading snatches of thought. Not my child, because she's with me. My husband? Please God, not my husband. Not my mother, because she's the one calling me. My father? Please God, not my father. I breathed in and breathed out, and waited for my mother to tell me.

It was not Mark, or my father. It was a name I hadn't heard for over a decade. Fiona Mulholland. We were at school together. She won everything. Trophies, competitions, hearts, minds. I hated her. I don't think she ever spoke to me. Smiled, yes. She smiled at everyone: she was heart-stoppingly beautiful and indiscriminate in her graciousness. My mother said she starved to death. Anorexia. The cause of death was heart failure, but the heart failure came from the punishment she inflicted on herself through refusing to eat. I tried to imagine her last moments. Did she panic for breath? Did she think, a year ago . . . five years ago . . . ? Did she say to herself, it can bloody well wait . . . and then discover that death wouldn't be ignored?

I asked my mother why. As if she could know. She said platitudinous things about Fiona's lack of direction after school, how that early glory faded swiftly into binging and purging and controlling herself because she could not control events outside the school gate. Once she had ruled my world so easily that my loathing had been a tribute. Now she was gone.

Breathe in, breathe out.

When Mark came home, Hettie and I were asleep on the sofa, wrapped in quilts and rugs and the food-blotched tea towel. Candles burned in the fireplace and Gil Shaham was playing rhapsodies in the background.

Breathe in, breathe out.

Copyright 2006 by Kay Sexton