When I had you, Baby

Abstract

When I had you, Baby Terese Marie Mailhot (bio) You want to open his large mouth. Even now with your little feet in stirrups. You feel like an abomination—and spectacle. The labor room is full of doubt and prodding. There's no easy way to examine a cervix. After surgery, you said to the father, "I named him after you so maybe you won't leave." You can't recant those thoughts—you can't even remember saying them. It's the man you had a baby with who remembers and tells you, like you should be ashamed. You're never ashamed about thinking men leave: that's what they do. It's okay to be cynical and scared at this point, after so many years of hope. You want his large mouth like you want his baby—and you have it all like you have his baby: there and beyond you both. What does it mean they cut you open and told you not to do this again—that maybe it's impossible to ever do this again. How many c-sections can a stomach have. Maybe you want to open his large mouth, wide, so he can know the pain of being torn. He visited you in the hospital when you were crazy. He stopped calling you crazy because you started writing about it. How many Indian women have survived mistreatment from hospitals and men. You want him to say you're doing a good job, even when you're both watching crime stories on the television welded to the wall. He doesn't ever look at you—the way he did when you were his student. Holding back tears is something you never used to do. Your best friend is already booking flights. The day you went into labor, you were workshopped. Sherman Alexie pointed out to the class that Indigenous identity is hard to pin. "Look at Terese. She could be Middle-Eastern." [End Page 65] He said you were too self-congratulatory, which was ironically the problem with him. You're still thankful that he saw you. You're still so thankful for this baby, even though he's not born in perfect love, even though your eyes follow your husband as he leaves a room, worried he won't come back. Sometimes he doesn't, until you call to beg. And, instead of thinking, I'm a beggar, you consider the baby. You love the light weight of the baby and how he needs you. How he kicked, every night, at eleven pm sharp. Sometimes drank root beer to rile him up. "This boy will be serious. This baby will be lightning," you told the father. When the baby is born, it's the father who does skin to skin. You can't. You're too tired. The drugs, the way you were sewn up, the way your intestines don't exactly go back inside exactly right, it hurts. There are weeks of bleeding and cleaning the wound. To impress your husband, you try to work. You teach a week postpartum. The one time you call it in, and try to rest on the couch, he asks you what you're doing. At first you laugh, but then you cry the colder he stares. He stands while you curl up on a couch, saying it's just too hard. "What if you lose your job?" he says. "Then I do." My baby, some things are too hard. It's okay to be soft with yourself. My baby, every time you couldn't sleep and had a fever or your throat needed clearing, I was in the tub holding you, soaked but happy I had a baby to protect. I would do anything to love you as I've not been loved. Is it selfish to explore this love? I think about it. How many Indian women have had to carve new measures, new actions, new languages for our love. What does it mean you've inherited my history of genocide, of struggle and survival. Don't let it make you desperate for love or humanity. Those are things we all deserve, even the...