Daughters for a Time

With my nose pressed against the glass of motherhood, I was on the outside looking in, consumed with a want so big I would wake in the night, craving the fleshiness of chubby cheeks and equally chubby thighs. I had it all planned out. I
knew
what kind of mom I wanted to be. I’d name her Samantha, but I’d call her Sam, Sammy, Samarooni. I’d give her sloppy, wet, suck-on-her-bottom-lip kisses. I’d blow raspberries on her tummy while she convulsed in giggles. My husband, Tim, and I would laze around with her in bed on Saturday mornings, squishing each other, arms and legs crisscrossed and tangled.

What a big girl you are!
I would coo, kissing the bottoms of her feet.
What a big girl!

In the early years of trying, I had become conspicuously present at the house of my older sister, Claire, bouncing her new baby on my knee, logging each moment with my niece as on-the-job training for what lay ahead. I furtively tore recipes from
Family Circle
and
Woman’s Day
at doctors’ and dentists’ offices, stowing away in my bottom desk drawer recipes for jack-o’-lantern-on-a-stick cookies, gummy-worm pudding, and cupcakes baked into ice cream cones.

Plans were made. Claire and I would mother together, a tag team of kisses, juice boxes, and promises. Loving arms circling our daughters with assurances that their childhood wouldn’t be cut short, like ours had been.

Years passed, though, and then I became
that
woman, the sad and desperate one. The one who overstepped her boundaries, the one in the checkout line who couldn’t help but touch a strange baby’s foot dangling from her mother’s Baby Bjorn, just to get a quick fix of that new silken skin. An anger and sadness consumed me, but of course, the babies themselves were always exempted from my fury. Them, I still loved. It was their mothers—those women who could do the one thing I couldn’t—who I grew to despise.

More years passed, and still nothing. A single pink line, a viscous swirl of blood, an ache in my heart that nearly split me in two. “Not you,” my body would cackle. “Anyone but you.”

Get up! Get out of bed!
my mind blared.

Forget it!
my body countered. I was warm, the down comforter was as soft as a cloud, Tim would be gone soon, and most of all, I had cramps and the pillow jammed under my abdomen felt good.

Get up
, my mind admonished again,
before your husband loses his patience with you and packs his bags as your father once did.

He wouldn’t do that
, some other part of my mind reasoned.
He’s nothing like my father.
I flipped over, blotted my tears on the pillow, and gave myself five more minutes.

On the toilet, I peered between my thighs, watched blood swirl to the bottom of the bowl, and said good-bye to another month. Statistically speaking, each month was another fifty/fifty try, an even flip of the coin, but I was the idiot who couldn’t tear herself away from the roulette table, so certain that there had to be redemption for the loser who kept placing bets. Four years of trying, forty-eight months—now forty-nine—had to build up some sort of probability karma. Surely, next month would land in my favor, wouldn’t it?

Not if you’re broken
, my body jeered.
If you’re broken, then it’ll never be your turn.

I changed my pad, chose a super-maxi, and waddled out of the bathroom and down the steps to the kitchen.

In the hallway, I caught my reflection in the mirror, saw the sadness that now resided in the purple shadows under my eyes. I reached for my face: Zits
and
wrinkles? There ought to be a law that forbids a thirty-five-year-old from enduring adolescence and aging at the same time. I gave myself a once-over: gray sweatshirt, flannel pajama bottoms, my hair as matted and drab as wet poodle fur. In the kitchen, another mirror, this one hung by the door so that I could check my face before leaving the house. Today I lifted it from the wall hanger and placed it facedown in the junk drawer.

I walked into our kitchen, slipped into Tim’s cooking clogs, and bored my toes into the soft wool. Our kitchen was small, a space about the size of the walk-in refrigerator at Harvest—the restaurant that Tim and I owned. The restaurant that had now made Tim nearly famous, and the place from which I’d recently taken a leave of absence, after the depression brought on by infertility had left me ineffective at work, as impossibly flat as a deflated soufflé.

Tim was pedaling on the stationary bike in the exercise room. I could hear the cranking of the bike through the floorboards, along with Bobby Flay’s muffled voice. Tim would click back and forth between the Food Network and CNBC as he put away twenty or so miles. I peered out the window over the sink. Spring was showing off its wares: pink and red tulips, grass greening, shiny leaves cloaking bare limbs. More evidence of the fertile ground all around me. I rinsed and wrung out the sponge to wipe down the countertop. A dusting of flour. Tim must have been baking.

Our house was a cozy and quaint Cape Cod, one of a few small houses nestled among grander ones in our northwest
DC neighborhood, one of the few houses that was actually occupied by a warm body in the middle of the day. Most of our neighbors were workaholics: lawyers, lobbyists, councilmen, doctors at the various hospitals, Capitol Hill staffers. Professionals who left early and returned late to their brick Colonials, faux chateaus, and Tudors. Breeders who popped out children like gumballs and then hired a staff of nannies to raise them.

Claire, who was never short on opinions, occasionally commented on how someday Tim and I would “trade up,” once the restaurant became profitable. But I was happy in our fifteen-hundred-square-foot home, and Tim was too busy to care. The last thing I needed was more square footage to ramble around in.

Claire had Maura, my three-year-old niece, an exceedingly adorable brunette: cuddly, loving, accessible, and warm. Kryptonite for a seemingly barren woman like me. The type of child who brought me to my knees with her peachy little-girl skin and watermelon kisses.

Claire was an excellent mother, the type who always had a clean tissue in her pocket, a Band-Aid in her purse, and a bag of Goldfish crackers in the glove box. She’d been perfecting her mom skills for over two decades, the result of having responsibility heaped on her at the early age of twenty, when our mother died and she became guardian to me, a defiant fourteen-year-old.

I poured myself a mug of coffee and peeled three Tums from their foil wrappers. The artificially flavored orange chalk mixed with the strong French roast actually tasted good, like a hazelnut-and-Grand Marnier torte that I used to make—and Tim’s current pastry chef, Margot, sometimes still did.