The Motherhood Affidavits by Laura Jean Baker

Author:Laura Jean Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: The Experiment

I tried to distinguish Ryan’s boyish freckles from the scabs he gouged into his face. He’d given up on regular shaving, instead digging whiskers out with his fingernails. It would have been easy to blame Ryan for his lack of coping skills and his clients for their misery. All doped up on the hedonistic pleasures of motherhood, I didn’t imagine indicting myself. But hadn’t I been almost entirely self-invested, pushing four babies, back-to-back, without offering Ryan any kind of veto power? And although we had agreed on four children, Ryan had imagined two children, followed by a long recovery break, and then two more—sets of offspring with money-saving room in between.

As a child of divorced parents, I needed to grow into marriage. Throughout the first decade of our betrothed lives, I’d threaten divorce whenever frustrated, relying on dissolution as my model for long-term romance. Parenting further complicated my conflict-management skill set. Our fights became compound chain reactions. My intimacy with our children was so intense, I’d cut Ryan out unknowingly; he’d long to rekindle our physical affection, but in vying for my attention, he’d stifle the kids. Overcome with fierce protectiveness, I’d tug them closer to my apron strings, shooing Ryan to some remote circle, far from the life-sustaining pulse of our mother-child nexus.

“Mom, you love Dad,” Irie or Fern would say. We didn’t need to dial 911 to solve our domestic disputes as Ryan’s clients did. Our children, causing and resolving our fights, were the crux of meaning. They exacerbated Ryan’s poor health but inspired him to live longer; they alleviated my depression but crazed me with love and greed. Sometimes I found myself longing for men who yelled less, but I’d created the man Ryan had become, and I could not return him into the world so broken. He’d gone on damaging himself to make my wishes come true.

As I breastfed through each pregnancy, I’d sleep mostly in our children’s beds, their bodies like warm loaves of bread, fragrant and yeasty, a nighttime aphrodisiac. Engrossed in the nocturnal static of tending to their needs, I was not dismayed by my separateness from Ryan, but when a friend equated husbands sleeping on couches with the inevitability of divorce, I grew defensive and scared. I had forgotten about my husband, adopting a unilateral attachment philosophy—parent-to-child and rarely parent-to-parent. I squandered all my love on our children. Maybe I was drunk on power too. On rare evenings, I’d stand at the top of our staircase and call out, “Ryan?” This was our signal. How could any man resist the call of affection after spending days or weeks alone in a house filled with people for whom he longed? On some level, I was just a trickster, testing his willingness to continue the baby-making process.

One summer night, as I lay in our only air-conditioned room, on a sheet on the floor, Francis and Fern were both begging for “milky.” I could not nurse them simultaneously, and they took turns crying out in the dark.

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