• The Hopeful Event

J was working nine-to-six and I was working the infant lunatic fringe, rapidly losing perspective. We had no outside support, even though my mother lived an hour’s drive away and commuted to our city five days a week. She existed as a disembodied voice on the phone, as the occasional ghostly visitor. In photographs from the days immediately following C’s birth, she shows as a faint vaporous outline; his swaddled form levitates in a cloud of mist.

The gravitational pull of her sometimes boyfriend, a heroin addict named Bobby, was stronger than blood. When I imagined going to her house, pictured Bobby and his friends lounging on the floor, obscured by clouds of cigarette smoke, the unspoken tension between my mother and me disguised behind polite, clipped conversation, I held C a little tighter. I wanted to protect him from this manufactured squalor, shield him from the pain of rejection, of never feeling good enough to love. We didn’t visit.

Our apartment was suffocating, the smell of diapers and spit-up intermingling with the sour odor of rotting take-out containers. Weeks of sleep deprivation were sucking away my sanity. And the past was fusing with the present in my shrinking skull, the isolation and rejection of then intermingling with now. My scar thickened and tensed. I had to find support against internal instability. When C was two months old, I paid to join a new mothers group.

Each week for eight weeks, C and I joined nine bleary-eyed women and their mewling offspring for monitored bonding time at the local JCC. The moderator brought up the week’s topic, some variation on How Having a Baby Has Changed My Life, and the confessions began, sad tales of post-partum depression, milk supply struggles, and changed sex lives, stories of baby illusions forever broken.

My turn came, and I would mumble something about sleep while the real story caught in my throat. What would they think of me if they knew the truth, if I could articulate it? What would happen if I exposed my scar? “Hi! I’m Jennifer and this is C, ten weeks. I am still recovering from the shame of a teen pregnancy, the shame of feeling responsible for my baby’s death and for my own neglect. No one helped me then and no one is helping me now. And maybe I don’t deserve it anyway.”

I pictured a room of silent, staring faces, women who couldn’t identify, but who might judge. My scar, gaining in strength and on high alert, quivered, told me we didn’t fit here. These women with their post-partum bellies and leaking breasts, with their tears and exhaustion, didn’t look threatening. But better safe than sorry.