Mother Pulse

My body throbs from the weight of it all. New blood is thundering through my veins, as if trying to find an exit. My swelling stomach is tight and heavy. My first daughter lifts up the inside of her wrist, pointing to her veins, “What’s this?” she asks.

“It’s your blood, I say (it was my blood once).

She studies her veins, and asks me to wipe them away. “It’s your blood,” I tell her. Will you one day wonder at your birth, and at the origin of all things--will it be a miracle or simply an explosion of life?

She studies her faint blue veins, and asks me again to wipe them away. I bend to smell her skin. Her hand is pressed against my pregnant belly, for warmth, for comfort. Will you bend for your sister when I move on, when life changes again?

I bend down and breathe in her toddler head, her hand is pressed against my soft, shrunken stomach. My second daughter lifts up her wrist, “Mama, what are these?”

Will you bend for each other when I move on?

My body throbs from the weight of it all.

***

I am standing by the window over the kitchen sink, and he is putting her to bed.  I hear them through the monitor. They are upstairs in Lilah’s three-year-old bedroom, getting ready to sing their nighttime song.

“Sons and Daughters, Papa.”

“Alright,” he says, “You first, then me.”

I lean in to hear her small voice float out: “When weee arriiive, sons and daughters, we'll make our lives on the waaater. We'll build our walls, alumi-NUMMM. We'll fill our mouths with cinna-MONNN…”

He helps her some with the words, then sings this same refrain from the Decemberists' song again, in a warm as bathwater voice. I know he is leaning down close to her face and she is grinning wide, so proud that she learned this song from him, sung like a secret traded between them.

Outside the kitchen window, it is dark with only moony patches of snow glowing bluish. But a light rises in my throat; I swallow it back down and close my eyes to better taste its warmth.

***

After Zoë’s bedtime nursing I creep downstairs while he reads to her about moons and great green rooms. I pour my wine and take the glass out to the back porch – it’s mid-October and our days of outside evening air are numbered.

Through the kitchen window I see him fix a drink, and I wait for him to find me. Tonight, I hope he will look. Moments pass and I sip wine and roll my shoulders trying to purge acid from aching muscles. I wonder if I look as old to him as I feel.

I hear his feet scuff on the porch floor. “Oh, there you are,” he says, “I thought the Rapture happened,” and he smiles at our longtime, only half serious joke. He is still standing.

I stare at him. My pulse thrums. One heartbeat, two. “You thought it happened, and you got left behind and I went?”

“Yes,” he replies, sitting down next to me, “You are a mother, you are good; you would go.”

I look away, and take a sip of dark wine. His words follow down my throat: absolution.