Mothering Through the Darkness by Stephanie Sprenger & Stephanie Sprenger

Author:Stephanie Sprenger & Stephanie Sprenger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

MY FACE IN THE DARKNESS

Denise Emanuel Clemen

We didn’t want children.

My husband had once envisioned life as a Catholic priest or a Benedictine monk, until I’d lured him away from all that. Parenthood had never been in the cards for him. I was blunt with anyone who asked me about starting a family. “Nope,” I’d say. “I don’t want kids,” while silently, I’d make the correction: Any more kids. I had relinquished a son for adoption after a secret pregnancy when I was seventeen. I didn’t deserve another shot at motherhood.

But like all good plans, our idyllic vision of just the two of us went awry. On our regular Saturday morning walk, we found a toddler wandering the streets of our neighborhood. His sodden diaper probably doubled his weight; still, I didn’t mind holding him. As we walked up the porch steps of the nearest house, I was already hoping he didn’t belong there. And he didn’t. But the woman who answered the door knew where he’d come from. “One of theirs,” she said, pointing at the house across the street and clucking her tongue.

It took some time for the woman at the next house to answer the door. It was chaos inside. Kids everywhere. She barely glanced at the baby on my hip before grabbing him and slinging him across one of her own. There wasn’t even a thank you before the door slammed in our faces. You could do a better job than that, said a little voice inside my head.

Sometime after that, our only set of friends with a baby asked us if we’d take care of him for a week so they could step out of the world of parenting and back into the kingdom of coupledom—in Hawaii. We said yes. The kid was eighteen months old, and his round brown eyes were a match for my own. Everywhere we went people said he looked just like me. The kid liked bacon, and the second morning that I cooked him some he called me Mama. At the end of the week when we went to the airport to greet his parents, the little bacon-eater clung to me and screamed. It wasn’t until the five of us settled into our friends’ living room that he’d even look at his parents.

You’d know better than to leave your child with friends for a week, said the voice inside my head. Your kid won’t be calling anyone else Mama. The next thing I knew I was off the Pill and we were in Paris, where we conceived a daughter we’d name Colette.

My pregnancy brought benefits. My acne vanished. My mood stabilized. I could indulge in the occasional chocolate malt because I was eating for two instead of worrying that a casting director might think I could lose a few pounds. The labor and delivery were straightforward too. Sent home from the hospital after a breakfast of steak and eggs the next morning, I couldn’t wait for some new family cocooning.

The crying started the moment we stepped out of the air-conditioned hospital and into the heat.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.