Covert Mom: Strawberry girl

By Mariah Mottley

 

Billie June, my middle child, is concerned about her birthday. I enjoy giving her a hard time; I pretend that I can’t really remember which day it is, or exactly how old she is going to be.
According to her, being the middle child is unfair. She is crammed in by an older sister who gets to do everything first, and a little brother who is too large and too loud and always up in her business. I can never answer her questions about what she was like as a toddler in the detail that she would like.

“There was a lot going on,” I shrug when she asks. “Are you excited to be turning 10 this year?”

“Eleven, Mom.” She glares at me. She wants to be taller, older, different.

I was 27 when she was born, her big sister had just turned 2-years-old. Her due date was the summer solstice, 2007. I was worried about how I would love another one as much as the first. The date came and went; I lost all my bearings.

I woke every three hours, certain that things were starting to happen, that the Braxton Hicks contractions I was constantly feeling would settle into the deep rhythm of labor that I remembered from the first time. I walked the fields behind our house just before dawn and doubted every aspect of the future.

I saw the midwife, explained that my body was broken; that my success with the first baby was merely an aberration. I was washed up.

“Soon,” she said, after examining me. “You’re doing the work ahead of time is all.” She gave me some herbs, said second labors could go quick. I didn’t believe her. My father asked if I was sure it wasn’t a novel I was carrying. I wished fervently for him to die, then ate the rest of his meatball sub when he wasn’t looking.

Later that night, husband and toddler asleep, I settled down with some M&Ms in front of the television.

Billie speaks softly, but she carries a big stick in our family. She is always nice to everyone yet somehow we all do her bidding. Her father skipped this year’s solstice party to put her bunk bed together. I have been ordering Percy Jackson books from Amazon and sneaking out to Bed and Bath Beyond to procure her birthday requests. She’s powerful.

I had a mouthful of M&M’s in my mouth when it felt like a thunderbolt hit the house, a loud cracking. Except it was in my pelvis. I stood up, confused, but unimpressed, eyes still on the screen, chocolate melting in my mouth. It happened again, and I heard my teeth click together.

I had to stop twice on the steps, dropped almost to my knees each time, too stubborn to make any noise. Flopped down in bed next to Sean.

“I think something might be happening,” I was just able to mutter. Asleep, he laid a hand on my hip. Patted it. Snored. Another contraction.

“UNNNNGH,” I said, holding onto to the bedposts, impressed. Noise was no longer optional. Another, on the heels of the first, no warning, no break.

I watched the veins pop out on my knuckles, the noise pouring out of me. Sean sat up and turned on the light, now wide awake. He called the midwife. “Something might be happening,” he told her.

“UNNNGGGGGGHH.” I concurred.

I got back down the stairs; found a comfy spot dangling from the doorjamb to what is now Billie’s bedroom. The midwife arrived. She and Sean stood around, watching me. It felt like my underwear was falling down inside my pants, about to fall off my hips onto the floor. I wasn’t wearing pants; none fit. But something was slipping down.

“Oh,” I said, the thought finally bubbling to the surface of my brain. That wasn’t my underwear. Those were my bones. They were moving. And they felt hot.

The contractions came in doubles and triples. The textbook Cadillac labor I had experienced two years before, which had taken all night, was now compressed into a 48-minute extravaganza of brutal efficiency and raw power that I had not known I possessed.

I couldn’t get oriented, couldn’t find the rhythm, because there was none. It was chaos. The smell of the summer night came in through the window, the air thick and scented. Homebirth can be many things, peaceful, woman-centered, private. Later, I would compare this one to the scene at the beginning of “Jaws.” The pain and smells all got mixed up together in my memory.

 

Strawberry season, every year, the daylilies crawling out of the ditches, and I remember that night. The speed of it, the slowness of my mind. Billie. Born in an under an hour.

A beautiful baby girl with brown eyes. Lashes like paintbrushes. Different from the alabaster child with gray eyes who had arrived before. She looked like mine.

“She’s so perfect,” I told the midwife.

“Second babies always are,” she observed. “They know they have to be.”

Billie sleeps in the room she was born in and will be 11 tomorrow. She can’t possibly understand the bond we share. So, I pretend that I don’t know who Rick Riordan is, and forget to return her library book. Later, she will glare at me with my own eyebrows.