submissive

“Wasn’t you pregnant?” She hollers across the street at me, narrowing her dark eyes a bit, focusing intently on my flattened stomach. A month ago, the bulge was bigger than the rest of me, a parasite that threatened to consume me. A month ago, I waddled under the weight of him. Now, I could leap hurdles if I wanted to. The renewed mobility is something I thought, a month ago, that I would immediately, intensely embrace. Now, I kind of hate it: just another stupid reminder.
“Yeah. Yeah, I was.” Sighing, I begin to cross the street to where she stands holding up the trunk of her peeling teal ’92 Ford Escort as she lifts a bag of discounted groceries from inside. My seven year-old tags behind me, chortling slightly at the inquiry.
“Well, where he at? I never seen him. I never heard him crying. Where that baby?” She shifts her steady gaze from my midsection to my eyes, stares me down, demanding, wondering. Her own daughters, nearly my age, shift nervously from their places on the stoop, simultaneously plaiting her granddaughter’s hair. Eyes averted, they pretend not to be involved in the first conversation I’ve ever had with my neighbor. Despite their feigned lack of interest, I know they’re listening. Like everyone else in the neighborhood, they’re dying to know what happened to that baby. Only their mother has had the guts to ask.
“He wasn’t…he’s not…he’s gone…he’s not…” my daughter sputters from behind me.
“He’s not my baby.” I finish for her, sucking my teeth and waiting for my neighbor’s astonished response. For the past three months, I’ve been answering with the long, detailed version when complete strangers have stared at my daughter, assessing her age, then at me, assessing my age, then at my naked hand, assessing my marital status, then at my belly, assessing my obviously promiscuous leisure activities, and finally at my eyes, pretending not to be judging me, pretending to be genuinely interested in the fact that I’m having a baby. I’d been starting from the beginning, providing so much information that there was no chance for them to respond, no chance for negative appraisals. At some point, the grocery store, playground, schoolyard, restaurant scenarios became repetitious and tedious, and I just stopped, truncated my explanation, offered only the basics. I didn’t owe anyone a lofty explanation. Not my baby, pure and simple.
“Oh, for real? How that happen?” She gazed intently at me, genuinely interested.
Silly, hasty me.
Her daughters are about my age, and their daughters are about my daughter’s age. They were about fifteen when they were pregnant. This woman isn’t judging me for being pregnant again. She is happy to baby-sit her granddaughter daily for free because her daughter is raising her child all alone. This woman only asked about the baby because she was truly interested in the baby. She wanted to know where he was and what he looked like; she didn’t want my life story so she could slap generalized judgment on it while she pretended not to be disgusted with me. But I was too ready, too defensive.
Last October, I was implanted with an embryo that would grow into a child for my best friend and her husband. Last October, I thought it would be easy not to get attached, just as long as I maintained the knowledge that no part of the baby was mine.
In spite of myself, I fell in love with the baby who began to kick and squirm and respond to my proddings as he grew too big for my belly. When he was born and his parents were preparing to take him home, I shocked myself with the incredible sense of loss I had when I leaned close to his tiny, velvety head and whispered that I wouldn’t be taking care of him anymore. I couldn’t figure out when I had grown so attached, or how.
It took me awhile to accept the fact that there wasn’t anything intellectual that could explain my penetrating love for this baby who wasn’t mine and the enduring emptiness I feel even now, two months after giving birth. The love I have for that baby boy mirrors the love I have for my daughter, and in many more ways than the obvious: that they both grew inside me for nine months and emerged from me following intense and overwhelming labors. My daughter was my teammate and my motivation when I was fifteen and pregnant in rural Montana. In my mind, the power of her birth and the beauty and wonder of her person would instantaneously eradicate the social garbage I trudged through for the entirety of her gestation. What I didn’t realize was that, more than that, she had been in utero and would be in the world my partner in a perpetual struggle to prove to the universe that I was more than my teenage pregnancy and single motherhood suggested. She, too, would have to prove that she was more than her absent father and young mother suggested. As with my daughter, the baby boy I nurtured and let go shares a struggle that will cement our bond for eternity. While I was and am now confronted with awkward questions about my pregnancy, he will be the one scrounging for answers later in life. If not for other people, he will seek answers for himself. Hopefully, his questions will be like my neighbor’s, the products of genuine interest, and his answers will be much less defensive because they have been consistently received with an open mind.
My boyfriend fucks me now and sometimes it hurts physically because everything has changed in my belly and between my legs. Sometimes it hurts mentally because everything has changed in my mind. In my mind, I create the son we’ll someday have and try to project every ounce of love I have for not-my-baby onto our fantasy baby, the boy I’ll someday hold and cuddle and snuggle. The milk still flows from my breasts, utterly wasted, nourishing only my boyfriend, who will never manage to suck hard enough to sate my need to have someone lapping at my nipple. His stubble always prickles, always brings me crashing down hard to reality. There is no fantasy baby and there is no one who really needs my nourishment. My daughter toys with her independence, relishes the power she has discovered she possesses by simple virtue of her chromosomes. Boys submit to her whims. She is pretty, powerful, provocative. Only seven and she’s already discovered all the power she ever need. She doesn’t need me.
I need a baby boy uncircumcised the way I would have left him, if he were mine, nuzzling my darkly swollen nipples. I need someone, something to need me, which makes me paradoxically needier. My boyfriend bears the brunt. Weekly, I try to pressure him into marrying me. Daily, I test his boundaries, pushing and pushing to see just how far he’ll let me go before he decides to disappear forever into the gauziness of my Once. Once my daughter had a dad, but he ran frantically away. Once I bore a little boy, but I gave him willingly away. Once my pussy was so tight no man could slip inside without immediately fighting the urge to come, but two heads rubbed and shoved and spread it away. Once I was passionately and madly in love with the man I wanted desperately to marry, but I pushed and pushed and pushed him away.
My daughter laughs loudly in the kitchen, he flips through the paper and teases her from his seat. Miles away, I know he sleeps, gurgles, dreams. In the now, despite my desperation, he dwells quietly inside me, draining baby bits of nourishment from my heart, while she stretches her cord farther and farther from me and he lingers, sucks me nightly in the dark.