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I glared at him. “You don’t know how I feel,” I replied snippily, fighting with him mostly on instinct and also because this conversation was scary. Sure, I was married to the man, living with him, and pregnant with his baby, but telling him I loved him seemed like a leap of faith I wasn’t sure I was capable of.
He kissed me, then shrugged. “You don’t want to say it now. I can wait. I’ve got forever, after all.”
My knees almost buckled.
Kip stepped back, unaware of how tenuously I was staying upright. “Now, you want to eat some pies?”
I stared at this man. This muscled, gruff, cocky, sensitive man. My husband.
“Yeah,” I whispered. “Let’s eat some pies.”
* * *
“Mum,” I said, the title coming out as a sigh.
I’d been dodging her calls. Not that there were many to dodge. The woman rarely kept in touch. Sometimes she sent me articles on Facebook, which were mostly wild conspiracy theories about the New World Order and population control, though in the past few years they’d been veering toward holistic remedies and a reminder to ‘ground myself’ every day.
“Darling,” she sang into the phone, her voice light and cheerful.
I frowned at my own phone screen, bringing up the world clock to double-check the time in Australia.
Yep, it was barely seven in the morning.
My mother was not a morning person. She rarely woke to see them, usually lumbering out of her bedroom around lunchtime. I had distinct memories of making my own breakfast since I was about five years old. How she kept me alive before then was anyone’s guess.
Then again, my father hadn’t left her the first time by that point, and I had come to understand—from various relatives who I no longer spoke to—that she’d been somewhat normal before then. Normal being a subjective term. Mum was always the ‘wacky’ one.
From what I’d come to understand throughout these years of more regular contact, of my mother’s care packages, she was no longer a ‘wacky’ wino. She was just plain ‘wacky’. She didn’t drink. Not even coffee. Just dandelion tea that she swore tasted exactly the same. I knew for a fact it didn’t, because she’d sent some over and it had smelled like hot ass.
I hadn’t trusted my mother’s transformation. I’d braced myself for a sudden end to the calls, the packages, the weird Facebook statuses. I’d braced myself to be abandoned by my mother. Except if I didn’t let her in then she couldn’t abandon me.
But she didn’t.
Relapse. Disappear.
It was working. The dandelion tea, the meditation, the crystals and howling at the moon. It kept my mum off the booze and turned her into the version of herself that had always lingered underneath the wine soaked exterior.
But I still didn’t let her in.
“Look, I’m really busy,” I lied. I wasn’t busy. I’d been sitting in the nursery watching the ocean while eating handfuls of M&Ms.
“Oh, I know,” she sang. “You’re over there in the USA living that fabulous life of yours. I’m so glad you’re over there. So proud of you.”
Something clenched in my stomach. Something vaguely resembling guilt. For dodging my mother’s calls, for never calling her on her birthday. Or Christmas.
She hadn’t exactly celebrated my birth as a kid. But the past decade she’d been making an effort. She did call me. She sent gifts—crystals and sound bowls, mostly. But she was quite obviously trying to make up for the past.
I’d stubbornly pushed back against all these attempts, my wounds too deep and my anger still hot after all these years.
Growing up and into my adulthood, I’d had visions of the person a ‘mother’ was. Someone who had it all together. Who knew what was best for her children, for herself. But now that I was almost a mother, I realized I was still the same person I was. Nothing had magically turned on in me. No maternal switch had been flipped. I was still me. The problems I had with myself before getting pregnant still remained. Some of them increased tenfold.
Lately I’d been thinking of my own mother and her problems. Getting pregnant too young, growing up in her own turbulent household, having no fucking clue what she was doing. It wasn’t an excuse, but she was also just a human being suddenly saddled with a baby to look after, keep alive.
I looked around the nursery. The one my baby’s grandmother had almost single-handedly designed. I thought about the daily deliveries I got from Deidre, from baby things to body creams for me. The vouchers for prenatal massages. She’d already been nurturing me and would likely spoil the crap out of her granddaughter.
My own mother didn’t even know she was going to be a grandmother. I thought I was at peace with that choice.
It turned out I wasn’t.
