On the Whole by Ona Gritz

Author:Ona Gritz [Gritz, Ona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2014-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

4.

I’m nursing when my mom arrives, so I may as well be in traction. From Ethan’s room, I hear the squeak of the apartment door followed by her familiar bustling steps.

“I’ll just get these dishes done,” she calls to me in place of a greeting.

“Shit,” I mutter, flushing at my thoughtlessness. My seventy-six-year-old mother has come from Long Island—a two-hour, two-train commute—to bathe Ethan in the sink, and I haven’t managed to empty it for her. I could blame the dirty dishes on Richard. He’s the one who has the time and coordination to eat these days. But it’s me who’s here all day “taking care of things at home.”

“Sorry, I meant to do that,” I call, but my voice is lost in the rush of running water, the clattering of plates onto the rack.

After she finishes the dishes, she lingers in the kitchen straightening up. I hear her pushing the chairs in toward the table and neatening piles.

“Mom, come visit. Come see the baby.”

“In a minute,” she promises, sounding just as she had when she hurried around the spotless house of my childhood, dustrag in hand. “I’m almost done in here.”

All this time, Ethan nurses industriously. I wonder if he’s aware of his grandma scurrying in the kitchen, completing all the little tasks I’d hoped to accomplish before she crossed the threshold.

“Someone’s here to see you,” I sing.

He stares up at me with the widest, bluest eyes.

When she finally makes it to the nursery, she pauses in the doorway.

“I’m tired already,” she sighs.

It’s a reproach I know I deserve, which may be why I follow it up by showing her the botched job I’d done on Ethan’s fingernails the night before. I’d clipped them so low blood pearled at the corners. Yet I kept going, insisting to myself that the next one would be easy, that I’d master the delicate task if I simply adjusted the way I held his finger, or changed the angle of the clipper, or worked in better light.

“Look what I did to the poor guy,” I confess because I’m mad at myself, but also so she’ll tell me it’s okay, that all new moms find that particularly exacting job impossible at first.

Instead, she examines Ethan’s dimpled hands and frowns.

“I’m not letting you cut his nails anymore,” she says, and it’s done. I’m a three-year-old caught scissoring the hair off a baby doll.

“Maaa!” I whine. “What do you mean you won’t let me? I’m his mother!”

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