Free Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo by Boris Fishman Page B

out of her. She came closer to this reckless action—that desk corner, this shelf—than anyone knew. Maya had gotten the one child in the universe who slept solidly through the night at twelve weeks. (Raisa rubbed a cognac-touched pinky across the boy’s gums before bed for insurance.) And he had gotten the one mother who wished he would wake, bawl, drive her mad. She wanted to roll her eyes in the supermarket with the other young mothers (though her contemporaries were now on their second and even third children). She wanted to clasp her head because she couldn’t remember the last time she had slept a full night, make jokes about how people in her condition shouldn’t operate machinery or make important decisions. But Maya had received the blessing of remaining clear-minded through her son’s flawless adjustment to her home. It was she who was failing to adjust to him. She felt like a nurse, not a mother, and even as such was only moderately needed.
    She learned that babies processed breast milk faster than formula and therefore awoke more frequently from hunger, and actually spent an afternoon on the Internet researching surgery to stimulate artificial production of breast milk. She read the testimonies of early mothers like a draft dodger reading the weary but proud reminiscences of war heroes. Officially, it was awful, just awful, but when the milk finally let down, and all those hormones swarmed through the bloodstream—the young Internet mothers had not felt that kind of elevation since high school acid. And their breasts—it was just awful what it did to their breasts. They swelled like melons, like grapefruit, like coconuts, like pumpkins, likesquash—the Internet mothers were georgic metaphorists. Maya wanted her breasts to swell, to be strained by their weight. She wanted to whine to Alex about their soreness. Apparently, she had adopted a child to remind herself of all the ways she wasn’t a real woman.
    Then six months arrived, it was time for more solid foods, and the breast milk predicament was concluded. Maya wondered if this, now, would mean intimacy and attachment; it meant inconceivable boredom. She actually longed to squeeze tits at the hospital. Eugene and Alex had insisted on prolonging Maya’s permitted maternity leave, and she resented them for it. A howling emptiness from eight to six—she could not wait for Alex’s stories of import battles with Customs—mitigated only by the appearance of Raisa around nine in the morning. Maya’s social circle had somehow signed up a mute newborn and a logorrheic mother-in-law, and thrown out what few others it had. Maya imagined that she was slowly becoming Raisa. She was becoming the woman who bustles. She stared at the older woman and asked: What distinguishes me from this woman? We both live in this home, more or less; we both spend the day in the kitchen; we both watch Alex Rubin for signs of distress.
    She tried to read books, but it was impossible to focus with Raisa addressing her at five-minute intervals. (The undeclared price for Raisa’s helping was full-time interaction.) So Maya researched boredom. The Internet (Raisa was slightly fearful of the Internet and hesitated to disrupt Maya’s work at it) recommended the Eastern solution, which was the opposite of the Russian solution. Go deeper into the boredom. Maya could hardly understand what that meant. She sat with her eyes closed and tried to “go deeper into the boredom.” Invariably, she imagined boredom as a dreary, wet wine cellar and she just had to keep going deeper into it. Not much came of all this.
    Did all adoptive mothers feel this punishment, to remain alooffrom their children in some unnameable but undeniable way all because they had not birthed them? If so, how did they bear it? Did they close their eyes to this truth, or persuade themselves out of it? Or maybe this was Maya’s affliction alone? Maya could not